Kristin's Cookbook Project

Sometimes I'm craving a bit of seafood, so I found a recipe for panko crusted cod with a salad in a Norwegian cookbook titled "Karlas kjøkken - hverdagsmat på menyen" (roughly translated as Karlas Kitchen - Weekday Food On The Menu). Both the fish and the salad was easy enough to make, but I didn't bother making the remoulade as I had some sour cream in the fridge I wanted to use up before it expired. Also, I made some homemade mashed potatoes to make the dish a little bit more filling. Overall I dare say it was a nice meal. Not the most spicy by any means, but it was good nontheless.

Sometimes it's nice to change things up a bit, so recently I made cauliflower casserole with cheese from a cookbook titled From Dill to Dracula: A Romanian Food & Folklore Cookbook by A. M. Ruggirello. It was a fairly easy recipe to follow and all that and it tasted okay so I can't complain, but I'm unsure if I'll make it again though. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt eating veggies from time to time.

As I was craving something with a little bit of a kick to it, I decided to make chicken enchiladas with tomato and chili salsa for dinner recently. I found the recipe in the Norwegian cookbook called Trines Mat by Trine Sandberg, and I think it was fairly easy to make. Okay, so we might need to focus a little bit once the tortillas are filled up and needed to be "transported" into the baking dish so it (the tortilla) doesn't fall apart, but that's not a big issue really. I did find the enchiladas both tasty and filling, which is a good thing, and I think the chicken enchiladas could easily be made for Taco Tuesday, or for that matter, the Norwegian "tradition" of Taco Friday.

As it's autumn, I wanted to try something from one of my more autumnal cookbooks, so I recently made BBQ beef sandwiches from the cookbook called Slow-Cooker Fall Favorites, published by Gooseberry Patch. One of the good things about using a slowcooker is that it does the work for you. Fair enough, the beef turned so tender it was easy to pull apart and all that, but for me, these BBQ beef sandwiches was a bit too boring/bland for me, even as I added some lettuce and used some no-knead ciabatta rolls. So for me, it wasn't really worth it, but I'm sure someone else might enjoy them more than what I did.

Alright, I do have a weak spot for something so simple as a good chocolate cake. So when I was craving said chocolate cake, I pulled out the I Heart Soul Food cookbook by Rosie Mayes and made buttermilk chocolate cake. As we don't have what Americans would call buttermilk, I had to substitute it with what we Norwegians would call "skummet kulturmelk", which has the closest consistency to buttermilk, but fortunately it went well, especially as there's cakes here in Norway that's made with "kulturmelk" anyway. I'm by no means a skilled cake decorator, so I was worried for a second when it came to the frosting, but thankfully I pulled that one off okay I think. Overall it was a good and flavourful chocolate cake (added bonus with the coffee in the batter AND frosting), and it wasn't one of those dry cakes either. It's honestly no fun eating a cake that's dryer than Sahara.