Easy food presentation #1

Easy food presentation #2

Now go and make some tasty and good looking meals!

Fårikål (image from wikipedia, I was too hungry to take a picture)

Today I bring you a traditional Norwegian dish. In fact, it is the Norwegian national dish. And it is so tasty and simple to make!

Fårikål literally means mutton in cabbage, and that is exactly what it is. The secret is the way you cook it.

Ingredients (per person)

250g mutton meat with bone
250g cabbage
Spices: Whole black pepper and salt
1-3 potatoes

Recipe

Cut a cabbage in roughly 1/8 parts. Add mutton meat and cut cabbage in layers, the thickest meat at the bottom, with the fat down.

spice with lots of whole black pepper and salt for each layer. End with a cabbage layer. Cover with water. Heat until it boils, and let it cook at low heat for at least two hours. Serve with boiled potatoes.

Stage 1

Did you love my potato gratin, or maybe you haven’t tried it yet? Here is another gratin, which is a full dinner in itself. I made this dish myself, so I would love you to try it and give feedback. It tasted great in my opinion.

Ingredients (for two)

• 2 dinner sausages
• 2 potatoes
• 4-6 dl milk
• 1 egg
• 1 shallot
• 1 garlic clove
• spice (salt, pepper and oregano)
• Sliced cheese to cover
• part of a broccoli
• part of a cauliflower

Finished sausage gratin

Recipe

Slice the potatoes in 1cm slices. Cover the bottom of a casserole dish with a single layer of potato slices. Slice the dinner sausages in half and put them on top of the potatoes. Add the rest of the potatoes around the sausages.

Mix egg, milk, chopped shallot, chopped garlic and spices in a bowl. Pour the mix into the casserole dish until it nearly covers the potatoes and sausages (see first picture). Put it in a preheated oven at 200C for 15-20 minutes.

Take the casserole dish out of the oven and add slices of cauliflower and broccoli. Add a layer of sliced cheese on top. Put back in the oven for 20 more minutes.

Enjoy.

Creamy Potato Gratin

Time for food again. This is one of my favorite ways to cook potatoes. It tastes delicious, and it is really easy. It takes a bit of time though, almost an hour from start to finish. But it is worth it.

Ingredients:
- At least two small/medium potatoes per person
- Milk
- Whipping cream
- Garlic and/or onion
- Spices (pepper, salt, whatever else you feel like)
- Grated cheese

Recipe:
Peel the potatoes and cut them into slices (about 1/2 cm). Ad a layer of potatoes into a casserole dish, then ad spices and finely chopped garlic and/or onion.

Pour milk and whipping cream (about 50/50 mix, more milk if you are afraid of fat) until you cover the potatoes. Continue adding layers of potatoes, spices and milk/cream until you are out of potatoes.

Let it cook in the oven at 200C for about half an hour. Take it out, ad a decent layer of grated cheese, and put it back for another 15 minutes. Serve with any kind of meat. Great together with beef or pork chops.

Warning: This may very well become the main dish of your meal, so remember to make enough!

Ingredients

• Red pepper
• Onion
• Hot dog sausage
• Ham
• Milk
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Cheese
• Lettuce

Recipe

Cut a hot dog sausage, a slice of red pepper, a slice of onion and ham into tiny pieces. Fry them in a pan in oil or butter while you mix two eggs with salt, pepper and about 1dl milk. Add grated cheese to the mix.

When the pieces in the pan are starting to look ready (light brown on the sausage, blank onion), pour in the egg mix. Let it fry until the top is firm. Turn the omelette, and let it fry for 1-2 minutes on the other side. Serve with lettuce.

This is a really fast meal, probably took me under 20 minutes to make. Tastes great. As with any other meal I make, feel free to change ingredients.

Tasty

Today I had an unexpected guest for dinner. I was in town shopping when a friend met me. After finishing shopping some flowers to my girlfriend, we went home to my place. My girlfriend arrived shortly after, and we decided to invite him to stay for dinner.

We was having pork steak again, and had enough steak for him also. But we didn’t have enough fries, so I decided to use the leftovers from my salad also. Still that didn’t seem enough, so I cooked some vegetables that everybody should have in their home: Potatoes, carrots, cauliflower and broccoli.

All this is cheap stuff that you can keep around for a while. It took a while to make, again mainly because of the fries and vegetables. 30-45 minutes.

Ingredients

• Pork steaks (1 or 2 per person, depending on the size)
• Vegetables (I used potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli)
• French fries
• Salad (I used lettuce, maize, onion and garlic dressing. You can ad for example cucumber, red pepper or anything else you like)

Recipe
Start with heating the oven (if you use French fries that you make in the oven) and boil up some water in a pot. While they heat up, prepare the fries and wash the vegetables. Put the fries in the oven and the vegetables in the pot when the oven is hot and the water boils. Start with the potatoes, as they need to boil longer than the other vegetables. If you use the same vegetables as me, the other vegetables are added just a few minutes at the end (while you finish frying the steak).

Cut the ingredients of the salad. When you have about 10-15 minutes left before the fries are done, start frying the steaks. Remember to spice (salt and black pepper is fine). When everything is done, just serve it. I didn’t ad the garlic dressing to the salad, as some prefer to eat the salad without dressing. I put the dressing, some ketchup and spices at the table together with the rest of the food.

Enjoy.

As always I am happy to get comments and suggestions to my recipes.

I bought a large pack of frozen pork steaks (cheaper than fresh ones), and picked out a couple of them. The French fries was also of the cheaper sort, and we used half a package. The salad was leftovers from Monday, when we ate taco. Really simple and tasty. Took about 40 minutes to make, mostly because of the fries.

If you wonder what I ate from Monday to yesterday, I was in Trondheim picking up the rest of my stuff, and ate with my family.

Today’s meal: Chicken wraps

Chicken wrap

This was also a fast, cheap and easy meal. I still had leftovers from the taco, so I just bought some ground chicken meat. I used the taco wraps, lettuce, pepper, maize, garlic dressing and cheese I already had. Short recipe:

Ingredients

• Ground chicken meat
• Iceberg lettuce
• Onion
• Red pepper
• Maize
• Garlic dressing
• Taco wraps
• Cheese

Fry the ground chicken meat until it is brown. While you fry the chicken, lay the wraps on plates, and cut the vegetables and distribute evenly on the wraps. Add some garlic dressing and cheese topping on top. When the chicken meat is ready, just ad it to the wraps, wrap them and eat.

Of course you can add or remove ingredients at will. Cucumber and carrots are great options.

Estimated time: 15-20 minutes.

Comments
I know this is not the cheapest meal you can make, but if you have lots of vegetable leftovers, this is a great way to use it. The ground chicken meat was really cheap, and I used only 1/3 of a 400g package for 1 person. The rest i froze for later. It is also easy and fast to make, and it tastes good. I would love to get comments and suggestions on the recipe.

Tomorrow I will probably make something out of only leftovers, but next week I will try to get some more meals up here. Maybe something with fish or other seafood.