Next on our trip was Norway’s highest train station Finse, which sits at 1,222m above sea level. The Oslo-Bergen railway cuts across Norway’s impressive and sparesly populated landscape and Finse is a beautiful tiny hamlet along its route. Here we were relying on the full-board of the tourist lodge and the food was basic but interesting to compare with the British version.

Breakfast comprised a buffet of foods from which you could also make lunch in advance of a day’s walking. It included cold meats, cheeses, porridge, jams and spreads, bread, buns and waffles. The Norzola cheese was okay and I learnt that Jarlesberg I a Norwegian cheese. Another ‘interesting’ cheese was the Undredal, a crumbly brown goat’s cheese which had a bitter caramel taste. Not very nice. The explanation comes from the cheese’s production. In the 18th century, there was an economic downturn (as we call it these days) and a goat farmer decided to make use of the usually-discarded whey. It is boiled down and concentrated for 6 hours to make the cheese. Not one I’d recommend, unless you need a solution to an economic crisis.

The dinners were probably our first glimpse of traditional Norwegian food. First we had a red vegetable soup with half a just-hard boiled egg in, followed by slices of warm ham served with boiled carrot, potato and swede; the sauce was a vinegary yellow concoction which was not unpleasant. Second night, we had a very nice smooth cauliflower soup with a few bits of whole cauliflower in, followed by salted, smoked lamb, which had been boiled with dumplings and potatoes and carrot and swede. The dumplings were surprisingly disgusting, while the vegetables were undercooked and pretty uncomfortable for several hours afterward.

Once again, breakfast was the clear winner.

Norway isn’t well known for it’s culinary exports and my conversations with various people during my holiday here so far agreed to a large extent that it doesn’t have a lot to offer.

We started in Oslo and were surprised to find that despite being a captal city, it had limited options for eating out. This was highlighted by the fact that the most prominent restaurants were either Hard Rock Café Oslo, Pizza-hut-esque pizza houses or places reminiscant of those god-awful steak houses you see lurking around London, just waiting to shock and dissapoint some poor unsuspecting tourist.

After three nights in Oslo, we still had no idea what Norwegian food was. I heard somewhere that Norway’s national dish is a frozen pizza from a supermarket. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

The lack of variety seems to be down to the fact that eating out had historically been the luxury of the well-off and the majority of Norwegians ate at home. This still seems to be largely the case. Another legacy of this historical trend is the cost of food.

Trying to find affordable food (by the London standard of £15-a-head can get you something decent and £25 something good) is nearly impossible; there’s certainly no competition in termsf variety. To put it into perspective, a McDonalds (yes, we resorted one night) will set you back 95.00 Krones, about £9.50. That’s about 50% more than in London. A steak at one of the better-looking restaurants will be between 250 and 400 (£25-£40) and a burger will start at about 160 (£16).

But there were a few good spots. Neither of them traditional Norwegian.

Two places that our lovely B&B hosts Melanie, Alex and Maya recommended were Curry & Ketchup and Mucho Mas.

Curry and Ketchup was a surprisingly good curry priced a reasonable £15-a-head and had a fascinating decor of trinkets and paraphanalia. Mucho Mas was a Mexican place, which would provide a hearty portion of burrito, quesadillas or nachos with lots of sour cream, cheese, salsa and guacamole. Too bad that on our second visit we were neglected for almost 10 minutes and didn’t get so much of sniff of a lager. That’s when we resorted to the aforementioned McDonalds out of pure frustration.

It wasn’t all bad though. Breakfast – and most of all coffee – was the culinary highlight. There were a great selection of bakeries to choose from, although we just found one recommeded by the Lonely Planet and stuck to it. Apents Bakery had great coffee and tasty croissants and other pastries. The bluberry brioches were particularly yum. The bakeries tend to have home-made jam on tap too, making breakfast a bit of a daily treat. Better to make breakfast your main meal of the day in Oslo, if you get my meaning.

And so to the coffee! The best bit. Norwegians drink more coffee per capita than anyone else in the world according to the Lonely Planet. We happened across Stockfleths (also recommended by L.P.) which served probably the best coffee I’ve had. Something which showed how routinely seriously they take their coffee was that each time they took their time to make it and each time they asked me to indicate how much water I’d like in my double americano. It really put even the coffee at better UK chains to utter shame and changed my expectations completely.

So, onto Finse by rail next, which is 1,222m above sea level and home to just a rail station, post office, shop and tourist lodge, where we are staying.

I’ve not written about wine previously, mainly because I feel slightly intimidated by the knowledge of those who regularly take an interest in it. I came across a great wine in the last week that was particularly memorable, so thought I’d start keeping tabs on those bottles that have caught my interest.

The staff at my local Wine Rack in Pitshanger Lane are always extremely friendly and helpful. Last weekend I asked for a good wine for afternoon drinking and/or a barbeque and I was recommended The ‘Crux’ New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which was on for half price at £5.98 from £11.99 (an offer that lasts until 09/06/2009).

It came highly recommended on personal experience by the staff and Wine Rack staff always seem to be highly knowledgeable. The taste was very fruity and citrus and it was very drinkable. The citrus seemed to work particularly well with the lemon I used to dress the barbequed asparagus. Definitely one I’ll be drinking more often!

The best lamb dishes, I think, are ones cooked slowly: slow roasts, kleftico, stews, tagines and the like. Second (a close second, if done well) are dishes where it’s cooked quite rare with good quality cuts – like with a rack of lamb or with chops. A current favourite of mine is lamb chops cooked with mint and lemon a la Nigel Slater, while I haven’t actually had the courage to try cooking with an expensive rack of lamb yet.

So when someone asked me earlier my opinion on what to do with some cubed lamb I was a bit unsure what to recommend. There’s a very delicate balance to be reached in cooking it gently enough that it stays moist and not too long that it seizes up. If going for a quick dish, it’s not going to have long enough to fully relax.

Having had a look for some quick reccomendations, the below is what I’ve come up with. Not all strictly ‘quick’ as some require forward planning, but they’re certainly quicker than a roast or other slow-cooked dish.

1. Souvlaki – this is a grilled Greek skewer that you can eat in a wrap with some salad and tzatziki (also quick to make). It does ask to be marinated overnight, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world to leave it to marinate while doing something else
2. Sweet n sour stir fry – this is a quick stir fry which could also be served in a wrap or with rice. It would likely come out with a nice rich asian blend of flavours
3. Tandoori lamb wrap – this is another marinate overnight-job, but would be well worth it. If you plan ahead properly then you could definitely benefit from some great flavours. I’ve tried a number of Anjum Anand’s recipes and they’re very tasty
4. Lamb rogan josh – this recipe takes a few hours to cook, but as it uses caserole meat, if you exchange that for some lean cuts or chop it smaller you might get away with a slightly shorter cooking time. Must be careful to test the lamb though, or risk serving it chewy
5. Greek lamb stew – a nice simple dish that cooks the lamb gently. You’d have to be careful not to overdo the lamb again, but since the recipe suggests taking the lamb out before combining the majority of the ingredients, adding it back in a bit later could help you keep in the safe side

Last Friday I discovered a fantastic new pizza bar near work. It was one of those great finds, where you realise that the people who know about it, probably keep it to themselves for a reason. I don’t feel bad for broadcasting about it and here’s why.

Simple formula: friendly service, authentic product and good value. To top that – and this may seem like a rather basic analysis – any independent Italian restaurant where I hear what are clearly regular Italian customers visiting, strikes a chord with me.

What made it such a great a tea find was that it was spontaneous. The other half ‘n’ me met for a glass of rouge at The Bung Hole on High Holborn and fancying a bit of pizza, got involved with a bit of iPhone Urbanspoon. It came up with Sfizio, which had five strong recommendations (and now a sixth).

On arrival, it looked packed and more like a bar than a restaurant, that’s why I describe it as a pizza bar. It’s evidently a honey trap for local workers out for a Friday night beer. Handy, since it becomes more bar than restaurant and you can eat pizza with your Friday beers. A clear benefit over getting hungry and/or drunk after a tiring week at work. A cold and/or hangover is not a great way to start the weekend.

I was convinced there’d be nowhere to sit, but I thought I’d ask when they normally have tables available for future reference. The very friendly waiter – who may have been the manager, given his assertive and prompt service – quickly offered to find us a table. In the midst of the merry beer drinkers, a table appeared as if from nowhere and we were soon furnished with beer and pizza. At about 6-7 quid per pizza, it was easy to stick to about £10 a head including beer and feel happy enough to leave significantly more than 10% for the excellent service.

My only complaint would be the noise levels, which were very high due to the lack of any soft furnishings. I doubt you’d have the same issue if visiting at a different time. But a bit of atmosphere is surely what one wants on a Friday night.

Morthers’ Day presentes a good opportunity for some full-on cooking and this year’s was a relative success. I’m a big fan of Morrocan food, courtesy of some very enjoyable trips to the cafe at MoMo near Regent Street. This year I decided to try a recipe from a Jamie Oliver book for ‘Mad Morrocan Lamb’ which I’d describe as a spicy lamb bake. Ultimately it’s a fantastic collection of Morrocan flavours captured in an attractive-looking dish.

First you bake a shoulder of lamb after scoring it deeply (criss-cross) and rubbing it in a powder of cumin, corriander, dried chillis, fennel, black peppercorns and salt; and pushing in some rosemary leaves in the grooves. After two hours in a hot oven you get a very deep golden brown-looking lump of meat a bit like this:

Roast Shoulder of Lamb

Now I could happily munch my way through that, but in the interests of maintaining family peace, I decided to complete the recipe and let everyone else have some. To complete the dish, you prepare a goodly sized portion of cous cous, using dried fruit and vegetable stock and some chick peas, cooked with red onion and fresh thyme and reduced down with some water and balsamic vinegar. I used a 24cm caserole with high sides, but really you’ll need something wider. You line the caserole with some couscouse, then pour in the chick peas, then place the roast joint on top. The rest of the cous cous turns it into the ‘bake’ and some lemon halves are also put in to ‘jammify’, as Oliver puts it. It’s covered and baked for an hour, eventually looking something like this:

Mad Morrocan Lamb

The lemon juice is then stirred into some natural yoghurt, to be served with the dish, which is also garnished with corriander and slivers of medium-hot chilli.

Another story that caught my eye this week was one from the Observer, in which Rebecca Seal reported on figures that suggest a significant move away from prepackaged food. Some very interesting stats include:

• The sale of convenience food rose by 300% in the past decade… Asda says sales of economy white potatoes have risen by an astonishing 3,017% in a year
• At Morrisons, sales of the ingredients for Sunday roasts are up 44% on the year
• At Asda, beef kidney sales are up 74% and pork shoulder 58%
• When Sainsbury’s featured basic beef chunks on an in-store recipe card, purchases rose by 2,000%.

Seal attributes this to the efforts of celebrity chefs creating more interest in cooking; this may well be the case. However at this stage the trend could go two ways. Either cost pressures will dissuade many consumers from experimenting with new foods and cooking as a result of job pressure or being unemployed, or people will seek budget relief by attempting to cook more. The issue lies in whether people percieve cooking as cheaper than prepared meals and how far health affects the purchasing decision.

There will also no doubt be a strong reaction from the packaged food industry which will target marketing efforts at this very trend towards healthier food, particularly in the credit crunch. FMCG companies frequently up their marketing at times of slowdown in an attempt to drive market share, so this could well affect the balance of power.

I for one, will keep trying to find cheap ways of preparing my own food.

It’s been eleven or so months since I started blogging about food. Aside from the ‘numbers game’, I’d quite like to know how I’m doing in terms of what I’m chatting about and how I’m presenting it.  If you have any comments, you know what to do.

I recently updated the layout of the blog so the delicious bookmarks and twitter gets more real estate. I update these much more than the blog posts, so they could do with a little emphasis.

A friend also whipped up a quick Wordle of the site to-date, which is another good qualitative measure of what type of language I’m using. Wordle creates a cloud of words (like a tag cloud) using all the words on the blog. Click on the image below to see how mine came up.

It’s interesting to see what words come up.  Some are slightly unexpected but I think it’s a good representation.

Click to goto the Wordle

The FT reports today that M&S is to continue and expand its use of non M&S branded products. It’s food business seems to have been a large part of its sucess in recent years, almost imposing itself on the rest of the business and expanding into clothing real estate. The store in Ealing for one has adapted and been totally remodelled to cater for the bulging food section.

I hadn’t realised they’d started selling products like Tetley tea and Hellman’s mayo (probably because it was a limited trial), but this is going to increasingly be part of their offering. This will bring them more into direct competition with Waitrose, which is the only supermarket in the same part of the market as M&S, price/quality wise.

You have to wonder what this’ll do to M&S’ existing suppliers and how their mix of imports vs. local suppliers will change. I have to say I do like Waitrose’s approach in trying to convince people that as many of it’s products as possible, are local. And I hope M&S go down the same road and not just in terms of how they position it.

However, I still prefer to beat the drum about using local shops though – I barely seem to use supermarkets at the moment and I’ve gone so far as to scope out the local shops in locations I’m planning to move to. If only there were more local shops to chose from.

Stir fry is dead easy and one of my favourite meals, so here’s a nice simple chicken stir fry recipe that I regularly use. Can’t remember where this was adapted from, but it works pretty well.

Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 onion
• 1/2 red pepper, sliced
• 1 tbsp fresh chopped ginger
• 2 chicken breasts, sliced
• 1 chopped chilli
• 2-3 shitake mushrooms
• pinch chilli flakes
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• Lime, juice only
• 1 pak choi, sliced
• 1 tbsp cornflour, mixed with water
• 110g/4oz egg noodles, cooked
• sesame seeds, to serve

To cook it:

1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok. Sauté the shallot, pepper and chicken slices for a few minutes, until the chicken is browned.
2. Stir in the chilli flakes, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, and lime juice. Stir-fry for a few minutes.
3. Add the pak choi and pour in the cornflour and water mixture. Heat gently for another 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is cooked.
4. Add the noodles and warm through.
5. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with sesame seeds to serve.