Snow Scenes

This past weekend it snowed a lot and Woodley captured some lovely photos of the snowy scenes around our house. Today it warmed up though - maybe as high as 45 degrees F and a lot of the beautiful snow melted. Since I'm not sure how much longer the snow will stick around for, I thought I'd better post these photos right away while we are still living in snowy Oslo. : ) 

Above is the view of the soccer stadium from our front corner window. Mary and I sit on the floor by this window for awhile every day and watch the T-bane trains go by. 

Above you can see the snow piling up on the picnic table outside on our porch. The birthday banner is still up from my birthday earlier this month. We thought about taking it down, but it makes the living room so much more festive. Mary is enjoying her box. 

Here is a house that we look down on from our living room windows.

Yay falling snowflakes!

And below is a view out of my kitchen windows. I love looking at that house. It is so classic and timeless with its white picket fence and blue trim!

Up next is my favorite photo of the snow. So pillowy and soft looking! I think I want to print this one out and put it up on my wall! 

And last of all, here are some photos taken on our way home from a fun dinner and games night with Stephan and Liv. I have to admit, when I dreamed about being a mother, I never imagined pushing my baby through the streets of Oslo around midnight, dodging drunk pedestrians (really, just one very drunk pedestrian) in the middle of a heavy snowfall. 

Thankfully we made it home safely and Mary was a little angel. (I do hope that one very unsteady man was able to find a taxi or something to take him home - or at least made it across the road. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind to venture out into the crosswalk when we went by, but he didn't seem to be able to make up his mind to actually try it.) 

Mary seemed so happy to have finally arrived back at her own comfy bed. She didn't cry a bit as I changed her diaper and put her back to sleep. Instead, she couldn't stop smiling as she settled down to go back to sleep. She seemed to say, "I'm so happy to finally be home. I love you mommy." I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful flexible girl! 

Ahhh beautiful snow! I think I'm going to miss it when it all melts, but I'll enjoy not having to bundle Mary up so much to go out and about. 

~ElizabethRose~

Woodley's New Favorite Dessert

Based on the ingredients below, do you have any ideas guesses as to what I might be making?

Chocolate chip cookies! (Or, rather, chocolate piece cookies.) It was interesting going to the grocery store for the first time and trying to make sure I got the right ingredients despite my bad/non-existent Norwegian. It may be fairly obvious, but moving from top to bottom, left to right we have eggs, butter, salt, flour, sugar, brown sugar, chocolate, vanilla, and baking powder. I was trying to find baking soda but it turns out that it isn't actually sold in boxes in most grocery stores here. A new American friend showed me a little packet of what appears to be baking soda. But I didn't have it yet when I took this photo. Very interesting. I wonder what they use to keep their refrigerators smelling fresh. Arm&Hammer has an untapped market. Also, there were no chocolate chips to be had. A bar of chocolate was the closest thing I could find.

Let's take a closer look at that block of butter. What's that I see? Could it be an emoticon? Looks like one to me.

I never thought I'd see a winking smiley on a butter container.

Chocolate chip cookies are one of Woodley's favorite desserts/snacks so I knew I had to find a way to make them here in Oslo and it was the first real baking experimentation I did. I made my first batch last month but haven't gotten a chance to blog about it until now.

I don't have a specific chocolate chip cookie recipe that I use, instead I keep trying new versions always hoping to find the best recipe ever. I think I prefer a cookie that is less crisp and more cakey but gooey is ok. I'm still searching for the perfect one. This time I tried out "My Big, Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies" by Tyler Florence which I discovered using my Food Network iPad app. Only, I had to use baking powder instead of baking soda (I used a bit less than the called for amount) and I made smaller cookies than the recipe recommended - just 12 cookies for a whole recipe didn't seem like quite enough.  

They turned out pretty well but weren't the best cookies I had ever had. The first batch flattened out quite a bit and were crisper than I wanted so I added a bit more flour. Later I discovered that I really do need to measure out the butter by weighing it since dividing the 0.5 kg block of butter into 4 pieces and using them as I would a block of butter in the states means that I consistently add a little bit too much butter. Hence, the need for more flour. But, I do have a handy scale and I have worked out that a Tablespoon of butter should be 0.5 once so it is pretty easy to get the right amount now. I think my recipes are turning out better since I made that change. 

Above you can see the cookies on the "cookie sheet" which is actually an oven rack. When we first got here one of my "must find" items that didn't appear to have come with our furnished rental house was a cookie sheet. We searched at Ikea, the local grocery store, and then another cooking store but there were no cookie sheets to be had. I mentioned this to our friend Stephan and he told me that over here people use their oven racks as baking sheets. Amazing! I had never thought to try that, although I did wonder why the oven racks were solid sheets of metal. So I guess that's why they don't sell cookie sheets here. It felt quite odd to pull out an oven rack, grease it, and plop cookie dough down onto it but the oven racks worked surprisingly well as baking sheets. I suppose I shouldn't really be surprised by that since that's what they were designed to do. And it is nice not having to store separate baking sheets. 

For Valentine's Day I thought about baking Woodley a heart shaped cake but since I didn't have a cake pan I decided to fall back on something I already knew worked - the chocolate chip cookies. To make them a bit more special I decided to turn them into ice cream sandwiches, something I had never tried before. I looked up some directions online and was surprised by how easy it was. I simply put a piece of cling wrap in a bowl, put a cookie on top, added some soft ice cream, topped it off with one more cookie which I smooshed down a bit, and then pulled up the cling wrap to cover the ice cream sandwich. I smoothed it down around the sides and did a bit of sculpting to give it a smoother look before tossing it into the freezer. A few hours later we had a gorgeous dessert which reminded us of the Moowiches we always get at The Northwest Washington Fair. 

Woodley was in heaven and has declared that this is his new favorite dessert and that I must always have homemade moowiches in the freezer from now on. I haven't quite managed that, but I am looking forward to making some more - maybe some tiny ones would be good. The only problem now is the price of Häagen-Dazs here in Norway. I had bought some as a special treat for Valentine's Day without realizing how expensive it was. After I got home and investigated the receipt I was shocked to find out it costs, gulp, about $12 usd for one pint! So, no more Häagen-Dazs for us. We'll have to test out the local variety of ice cream.

~ElizabethRose~

Learning to Eat is a Messy Business

One of my new least favorite chores is cleaning up Mary's splat mat after she is done "eating" a meal. At this point she's still mostly just playing with the food and enjoying learning about the different flavors and textures. Since not much is making it into her a lot of her meal ends up on the floor. I love the mat, but I don't much enjoy wiping it clean after every meal. I do feel like a good old-fashioned housewife as I bend on hands and knees scrubbing at the floor though. :)

Sometimes I'm tempted not to offer her any food at a particular meal because I'm not looking forward to the clean up but she enjoys it so much and is so sad if she doesn't get to sit up with us. And I'm really not hard to convince when she pulls out that adorable lower lip. I can't seem to find a good example of the exact face I'm thinking of, but this one is fairly close:

Dinner Tonight:
Reindeer Burgers - (Mary's first taste of a burger, I'm now wondering what she will think at Christmas time a few years from now after she learns to love eating reindeer here in Norway. It's a fairly common meat here and I believe it is farmed in northern Norway. Sadly, the burgers also had some beef and pork mixed in so Woodley wouldn't eat them)
Leftover Chicken - for Woodley
Broccoli with olive oil and white wine vinegar
Bread with butter and jam
Leftover Rice
Green Salad with slices of Brown Norwegian Cheese on the side

I need to re-charge the iPad so I can go back to browsing my favorite cooking websites when Mary wakes up in the night. I've found that's the best way to find new recipes to try and helps make the 5 to 7 nightly wakings much more endurable. Thankfully she has started sleeping for some 2 - 3 hour stretches. I'm really hoping they increase!

~ElizabethRose~

Biggest. Twix. Ever.

Woodley returned from the electronics shop the other day with the biggest package of Twix I had ever seen! Unfortunately, it's not one gigantic Twix, instead there are 10 individually wrapped pairs, so 20 bars altogether. I'm guessing these will last less than a week. Woodley really loves his Twix and I think these ones have less sugar than the American version so I'm enjoying them too - I don't like super sweet things these days. Yum!

Dinner Tonight:
Rotisserie Chicken (cheating a bit, but super easy)
Mashed Yams
Steamed Broccoli with olive oil and lemon juice
Basmati Rice
Green Salad
Mixed Berry Pie (Yum!)

~ElizabethRose~

(Woodley showed me how to find the tilde!)

Summer Cars?

On our outing today we noticed several cars that we assumed must be used mainly in the summer months. Or at least they haven't been used for a few weeks now and the owners have some serious digging to do.

And the worst by far...

I wonder if they will just wait for the snow to melt or if they will try to dig out their cars before April or May. Personally, I think that if I had a car I'd definitely want to use it in the cold snowy weather when I don't enjoy walking around outside as much.

Hmmmm. I'm using our new Norwegian keyboard which allows me to make special Norwegian letters, but it's hard to find some of the normal American keys. Perhaps my new signature will be:

±ElizabethRose±

(but I'm not sure I like how that looks)

Saturday Moment

Since I'd like to blog more regularly but don't have much spare time, I thought I would at least try to post a photo of a favorite moment from each day and list what I cooked for dinner/plan to cook for dinner. That is, if I don't have time to do a longer entry on a specific topic. 

So here goes, my favorite moment of today was watching Mary learn how to eat berry pie filling with her crepes for brunch. Let's just say she headed off to the bath directly after brunch and Woodley couldn't bare to look at her for much of the meal.

In other news, we went on a family shopping expedition today hoping to find a bike pump to fill up the air in Mary's stroller tires - no luck there. Apparently the tires require the type of pump that is used to fill up car tires. What we did find was the following:

Looks a lot like an iPhone! But instead, it is kitchen magnets. They don't really go with my vintage blue/green kitchen theme but I've been longing to put some photos up on our refrigerator and these were handy and amusing.

On the menu for dinner tonight:
Chicken Enchiladas - we'll see how those turn out. They are in the oven now but had to be made with "taco sauce" aka salsa instead of enchilada sauce, strange reconstituted corn that was soaked in water and wrapped in plastic, Italian canned tomatoes with basil, cheddar cheese, flour tortillas and taco seasoning since that's all Woodley could find for me at the store. Poor guy, he searched forever to find just what I had asked for. Interestingly, a company called TexMex appears to have taken over the Mexican food product market here. This doesn't inspire much confidence in the quality of the Mexican food I'll try to make... we'll see.
Refried Beans
Basmati Rice - the only kind I had in the kitchen
Green Salad
Sliced Tomatoes

Wishing you a wonderful Saturday!

~ElizabethRose~

Tran

Yesterday my precious baby girl turned 6 months old! Yes, 6 months... Where did all of those days and nights go? It seems like it was only yesterday I held her for the first time and marveled at the fact that, after dreaming about it all my life, I was finally a mommy. And now it seems to be going by so quickly!

She's just so grown up now! And so adorable!

So today we went to our local Health Station to meet with the friendly Health Sister (nurse) to find out about Mary's vaccines and to check her weight and height. She is now 16 lbs. 13 oz. and 26.75 inches tall!

It turns out it will be harder than we expected to continue on with our planned schedule of vaccines because they use different versions over here. I think we will need to try to order the continuation of the series she has already started.

In addition to talking about vaccines and Mary's general developmental milestones (she's sitting like a pro now!) The Health Sister gave me a bottle of Tran, or cod liver oil as it is know in English.

(According to Google Translate the message on the bottle says, "To help you stay healthy" and "Is important for optimal development.")

All Norwegian mommies give their babies a spoonful every evening so the Health Station provides bottles for free if you need them. My mother fed me cod liver oil as a child and I'm pretty healthy today so it seems like a good idea to me. Plus, with the lack of sunlight here I'm sure Mary could use some extra Vitamin D. I took a spoonful today to try it out and memories of my childhood came flooding back... not necessarily the most positive ones though. It did taste fishier than I remembered.

Unfortunately Mary fell asleep tonight before I remembered to give her her first spoonful of Tran. She seems to enjoy eating fish so hopefully this will be viewed as a tasty addition to her daily ration. We'll try it tomorrow.

I love this image on the front of the bottle. It appears the child is asking the fish to please give it some delicious liver oil! Yum!

I'll have to report back about Mary's response to her first taste!

~ElizabethRose~

The Cutest Shoes Ever!

Following my previous post, I wanted to share photos of my new favorite shoes! They are my super special birthday shoes that Woodley bought for me at my most favorite clothing store in Oslo.

The shop is called Noa Noa and is a Danish brand that isn't available in the states. I discovered Noa Noa after a day of wandering around the Karls Johans Gate shopping district in downtown Oslo back in December of 2009. Woodley was busy checking out the PhD program so I had the day to myself and I was on a mission to find the perfect brown dress to wear as the maid of honor at my best friend Nicola's wedding which was to take place right after we got home. I spent several days scouring all of the shops I could walk to from our hotel in Oslo searching for brown dresses. I found 2 total and neither of them were very nice. Apparently, brown wasn't in style in Oslo that winter (I ended up ordering several brown dresses online and eventually settled on one from J. Crew that worked very well - the others all got returned).

But, what I did discover after my days of shopping was Noa Noa! As soon as I walked in the door I knew I had found my new favorite clothing store - a sweet, whimsical mix of fun colors with a vintage flair.

After so much disappointment in the brown dress department I felt I really ought to pick out a couple of things I loved to take home with me - to make me feel better about not finding a brown dress of course. : ) It turned out to be pretty easy to find things I loved there and I came away with several more skirts than I should have - but I figured, who knew when I would be back to Norway!

Three weeks later, back in California, I found out I was pregnant... So, I only got to wear my lovely new skirts for a few months before I got too big to wear them. And now I wonder if my tummy will ever be small enough to squeeze back into them. (Silly baggy post-baby skin!) But I guess that means I'll have an excuse to buy some more lovely Noa Noa skirts since we are back in Oslo with easy access to them!

But back to the shoes! They are such a lovely color. I think this mint green is currently my favorite color. It is the theme shade of my kitchen back in Bellingham - well, this green as well as a clear sky blue and a light grass green. I didn't expect to find such cute, old-fashioned looking shoes in it though!

In truth, they aren't a very practical pair of shoes for me - although they are super comfortable. It will be several months before I can think of retiring my winter snow boots and I don't want to wear them to much around the house because I'm usually carrying Mary and going up and down the stairs with her scares me enough as it is, without adding in 2 inch heels. Sigh... At least I can look at them and try them on for a few minutes every few days around the kitchen.

Wait... But what's that you ask? Why do they look scuffed already if you haven't even been able to wear them out of the house? Actually, they come that way. I was shocked when the helpful lady at the store told me that the shoes come pre-scuffed and that the pair I was trying on weren't just dirty because they were the sample that everyone had tried on.

Apparently some designer thought it would be a great idea to pre-scuff them so that they look truly vintage. Hmmmm... I think I'd rather do my own scuffing. I mean, shoes get beat up enough as it is - at least mine do. I almost didn't buy them because of the scuffs, but the color won me over. I wasn't sure if I'd ever find such cute vintagey shoes in this shade again. It did remind Woodley and me of an article we read a few years ago about the rage for worn out jeans. Apparently some company sold very expensive jeans that were previously used by "real cowboys" from somewhere in the southwest. They were reported to be very trendy. I never thought pre-worn out jeans were a good idea and I'm not a fan of the new pre-scuffed shoes look - designers, please take note! : ) But you can't deny, they are super super cute!

~ElizabethRose~

The Cutest Cupcake Liners Ever!

Earlier this week Mary and I went on a fun shopping trip in downtown Oslo. It was our first time traveling there by ourselves (without Woodley's guidance) so I was a little bit nervous but we were able to find our way there and back without any trouble. Did I mention I love, love, love the T-bane system? (Oslo's subway) Riding it reminds me of my first two years of college when I lived in Boston and rode the T quite often. Although back then it cost just $1 for a fare token and here it costs $4.40 per ticket (based on the type of tickets we have been buying). But then, everything is much more expensive here...

Anyhow, on our outing Mary and I visited a fun housewares shop that was full of all sorts of fun useful items for the home. I found some pink and purple dish towels and dishcloths (Woodley wasn't there to insist that I get blue or green so I went for the girliest colors, I'm still not entirely sure what came over me, but I have to admit, I love them!) I also found what I believe are the most adorable cupcake/muffin liners ever! Actually, I think I'll have to use them for some very special cupcakes, I think they might be wasted on simple muffins. What do you think?

I loved them as soon as I saw them and I knew they would be coming home with me, despite the fact that I don't yet have a muffin tin here in Oslo. (Back at home I believe I have at least 6 muffin tins in 4 different sizes, but the topic of my overabundance of kitchen gadgets back at home is something for another day...)

I have my special cupcake liners sitting on my kitchen counter and they make me smile every time I look at them. I'm now dreaming about what would be an appropriate occasion to break them open and use them. Perhaps Mary's 1st birthday. Maybe I'll have to go back and buy another set because I enjoy looking at them so much that I'm not sure I could bear to use them up!

I guess I do have these photos now though. : )

~ElizabethRose~

Birthday Tulips

My birthday was last Thursday, February 10th and I turned 28. Hmmm I suppose it's time to update my blog bio. Mary and I had a nice quiet day at home while Woodley was off at the office. Remembering back to a delicious birthday dinner my mother made me years and years ago, I decided to make a special dinner of chicken stew with biscuits. I didn't get around to taking any photos of the food but it turned out really well and I'll definitely be making that recipe again. Dinner was extra special because Woodley brought home a big beautiful chocolate cake!

Woodley's advisor Stephan and his wife and daughter (Liv and Tordis) joined us for the birthday dinner and brought along a beautiful bunch of pale purple tulips that they gave me as a birthday present. I love, love, love tulips and this was a particularly beautiful bunch. They are the perfect spring flower but I'm not able to grow very many of them back at home due to the malicious deer who consider tulips a delicacy. Thankfully I don't have to worry about the deer here.

Ahhh lovely tulips! Perhaps Spring will come someday. However, for now our yard looks like this: 

~ElizabethRose~

More Photos of Our House

Finally, here are some more pictures from around our house! This is our house from the outside. Mary is sitting in her stroller by the front steps (although it is hard to see her). We don't actually use the garage. The windows in the front left corner look into the kitchen. Although it looks like it is only one story from this view, the house is built onto the side of a hill and is actually three stories.

This is our entry way - looking back towards the door. There is a handy closet to hang our winter gear and a chair to sit in and take off our shoes. Mary's car seat is by the window but it doesn't get too much use these days since we don't have a car.

When you walk in the front hallway you come to the railing for the stairs and off to the left you can look into the dining area. (Sorry the photo is so blurry, I took it while holding Mary and it was hard to keep my arm still.) If you walk towards the dining room, the kitchen will be off to your left and the living room to the right.

Here's the kitchen, along with my favorite little helper!

And the living room. The black thing on the right side of the photo is a fireplace. It has wood but we haven't actually gotten around to trying it out yet. The window on the left is actually part of a big sliding door that goes out onto a porch/deck overlooking the back yard. 

Here's a (sadly blurry) photo of the deck. I think it will be really fun to play on the slide and swingset with Mary when the weather gets better!

We've been able to see some very lovely sunsets from the porch and it is so nice to have the evening sun. Sunsets these days have been around 4pm so we appreciate getting as much light as we can. 

Here you can see a little bit of our view looking out towards the soccer stadium. We walk in that direction to go to the larger of our two local grocery stores. 

And last but not least, here is another shot of our beautiful piano! Woodley plays it some each day and it is so nice to be able to have family music times.

Sadly we'll only be able to rent this house until the end of June when the owners return from their sabbatical year abroad. We really love this neighborhood though so hopefully we'll be able to find another rental close by.

I hope you've enjoyed this quick tour around our house. I'll have to take some photos of the downstiars area soon so that I can take you down there as well. And now, I'd better do some cleaning before Mary wakes up from her nap!

~ElizabethRose~