Hi everyone! This is a blog/diary about my food and drink experiences. Both everyday food and party food. I am a trained Graphic and UI designer. It is not easy to get into this profession, so in the meantime I have to find other things to pass my time with. I love cooking and challenging myself in the kitchen. So that is why I want to share my experiences and joys from the kitchen with others. I will also post short promotional videos for cookbooks that I like to use as advertising for myself. Besides this, I live in beautiful but cold Trondheim, with my fiancé and our three cats and a dog. I have not always liked cooking, this came with age. But now that the interest is there, I make everything from pasta bolognese to duck. My mother is Hungarian so I have grown up with Norwegian / Hungarian Fusion food. This has been both fun and good. But I must admit that Hungarian food is closer to my heart. I think it's because of all the flavors and spices they use, they're not afraid to use spices and heat in their food.

Like many others, I have tried to lose weight several times in my life. Tried many different diets and trained like a horse, without any of this having worked. Finally, my fiancé and I decided to try the Intermediate Diet. This worked, except that we were not that hungry on the one fasting day we had, so we quickly switched to the 16/8 diet, which became 24/1 instead. This means that we only eat once a day, and then we usually stay under 800kcal. Exercise is still a big part of my life even though we are on a diet. I think diet and exercise are a good combination. You see results much faster, and you are more motivated to keep going.

SUNDAY BAKING

I never usually bake, as I'm not good at it, or have any particular interest in it. But this summer my IBS flared up like crazy, so I had to stick to gluten-free things. So my kind mother found a website that sells bread mixes that are suitable for us with IBS, they are LOW-FUDMAP approved. I mixed the contents of the bag and followed the recipe on the back, 3 eggs and 2 dl water, then put it in the oven for 55 minutes. This was so easy to make that even my non-baking self managed to do it! The result was a slightly flat loaf, probably because the pan I used was too long for the amount of dough. But the taste is absolutely fantastic! So I can finally eat some bread for breakfast again!

HOLIDAY AND FOOD

As many of you probably know, I'm from Hungary. About two years ago, my mother and I decided to drive down to Hungary, along with our dogs. We started our trip in Molde where my family lives. Then we went to Sweden and then on the StenaLine ferry to Kiel, also further down through Germany, the Czech Republic and then Budapest. This is a long journey by car, but there will also be a lot of stops with lots of good food in the different countries. I don't remember exactly what we ate at the different places, but here are two of the dishes we ate at the Golf Hotel Praha (a hotel I recommend to everyone). I had Gnocchi while my mother had Wiener Schnitzel with a variation of French salad.

Gnocchi with cheese sauce

Wiener Schnitzel with French Salad

We have some very good friends of ours who live in the neighborhood of Tahi, which is a small village outside Budapest, where we have a summer cottage. We usually invite everyone over for food every time. I didn't get to take pictures of everything that was made on these visits, but I did get to take a picture of this one arrangement that the niece made! She had made a table full of small tapas dishes. There were salads, dips and potato chips. This tray that I took a picture of is a salad with figs from her own garden, and feta cheese and spinach. There was a dip there that contained tuna, it was absolutely delicious!

Tapas tray

My mother and I ate out a lot in Hungary. There are several reasons for that, the main reason was that it was so hot that we couldn't stand in one kitchen to cook. Here are two of the best lunches we had this summer. This is from a small bar/restaurant down by the Dunau in Leányfalú, a small village you reach before Tahim where our cabin is. I had a Pannini with meat and cheese with a small salad, while my husband ordered a broccoli soup.

Panini with salad

Creamy Broccoli Soup

My dear fiancé also took a trip to Hungary and visited us. Then there were a lot of restaurant visits. We stopped by one of Budapest's oldest restaurants, called 100 Éves Éterem. This was an expensive experience, but absolutely fantastic. The atmosphere there was something of its own, almost impossible to describe, something that everyone who takes a trip to Budapest should experience! There was also live gypsy music there, which I loved. My dear ordered turkey, while I ordered chicken pörkölt with nokedli (dumplings). I must honestly admit that I should have ordered the same as my fiancé, that dish was just absolutely heavenly.

Turkey with red cabbage and mashed potatoes

Chicken Pörkölt With Nokedli

We have a favorite restaurant in Budapest, this restaurant has an atmosphere that is so calming. It is Moorish, eclectic and just amazing! It has an incredibly cute name, Csiga, which means snail. Here they have their own menu until 4 pm and after that it is the "weekday" food that is available. My fiancé and I are also very happy with this restaurant, and it is a tradition to go at least once. He ordered pork medallions with hash browns and root puree. I ordered the Caesar salad with grilled chicken in parmesan.

Pork Medallions With Hash Browns And Root Puree

Caesar Salad With Grilled Chicken In Parmesan

Then we come to our last favorite restaurant, which is located on the Corvin Square in Budapest. This is an Italian restaurant we discovered just after we bought our apartment. Here they only serve Italian food, but not just pizza and pasta, all sorts of other dishes too. But we come for their pizza and pasta. Here my wife ordered a Pasta Carbonara while I ordered a papardelle pasta with salmon in rose sauce.

Pasta Carbonara

Papardelle Pasta With Salmon In Rose Sauce

On one of our last days in Budapest, we went to eat at an Asian restaurant. My mother and I had wanted to go eat Asian food the whole vacation, but never had time to do so, until the very end when it was just the two of us left alone. We really wanted to try Korean dishes, but it turned out to be more complicated to get to those restaurants (considering that we had dogs with us), so we settled for another restaurant. The food was very good here too!

Pad Thai

On our long way home from vacation we stopped at a roadside inn in Germany. We had big plans to eat something good in the town where we were going to spend the night. But we were pretty hungry when we got to the roadside inn, so we decided to have a bite to eat here. My mother ordered chickpea curry with falafel, I ordered wiener schnitzel in strips on salad.

Chickpea Curry With Falafel

Wiener Schnitzel In Strips On Salad

NEW WEEK NEW SALAD OPPORTUNITIES

Then it was another week of food again, or rather new salads! We started the week with a Couscous salad with feta cheese and chickpeas. This salad was absolutely fantastic! Maybe it was also because I was so hungry when we finally sat down to eat. I served bread with butter with this salad, to increase the feeling of satiety. We have now been on a diet for 4 months, and I basically see no difference, which makes me a little irritated and frustrated. I exercise every day, go for walks with the dog and eat healthy. I can't help but exercise, even though I have read that you can easily lose weight without exercising too. Oh well, as long as others see that I am losing weight, then it will last for now.

Couscous salad with feta cheese and chickpeas

Then we continue our salad trend! Are you tired of only seeing salads on our menu? I think some others are too. But I think salads are really fun to make and not least to eat. There are so many different salads out there. I found at least 65 new salad recipes yesterday, so we won't be getting rid of salad from our meal plan anytime soon. Yesterday we had a fantastic Caesar salad, the only problem was that the portion was too small. This resulted in us eating dinner, which we NEVER normally do. But once in a while, it must be okay, right?

Caesar salad

Today, Wednesday, I'm going to make Pesto Pasta Salad. This is the salad I've been looking forward to the most this week, and mostly because there's both pasta and lots of tomato in the dish! Yummy tomato! Pasta is something we don't make much of anymore, because I tend to overdo it with the portion. I love pasta, so this is an easier way to control the amount. I hope I can inspire some of you to make and try more salads. You don't have to eat salad for dinner, but as a fresh and nice lunch it's an alternative. There will be more recipes for our dinners soon, we just have to eat something that actually requires a recipe and a little more cooking.

Pesto Pasta Salad

MOM'S FOOD AND MY BROTHER'S 30TH BIRTHDAY

This weekend we were at home in Molde. We were celebrating my brother's 30th birthday. When we arrived on Friday evening, my mother was waiting for us with Hungarian Gulyás soup and homemade savory cookies, which are very common with soups in Hungary. We drank GT with this, not that they go together at all, but it was fresh and good. Bordeaux wine is suitable for this type of soup, as well as Cabernet Sauvignon.

Hungarian Gulyás soup

Then came the day we were going to celebrate my brother's 30th birthday. We rushed around many stores to get everything we needed for both the food and the last thing missing for the birthday presents. I was going to make the appetizers and the starter. The appetizers were small crackers with ham, Philadelphia cheese, grated cheese rolled up and cut into small slices, then placed on the crackers. I didn't expect these to be eaten, since we made about 24 pieces. The guests must have been hungry! To this, champagne was served.

For the appetizer, I repeated the success from my fiancé's birthday, scallops on avocado cream with arugula, spring onions, chevre and walnut salad. Everyone loved the dish this time too! I have to say that I am starting to love making this dish, this is going to be my signature appetizer. If you have leftover avocado cream, it is absolutely fantastic to put on toast for breakfast the next day, with tomatoes. My mother cooked the other half of the dinner. My brother had "ordered" a dish called Vadas, which means game. It is a game stew, with long-cooked pieces of meat, in a pureed vegetable sauce with sour cream in it. Hungarians are very fond of sour cream and dried paprika, but there is no dried paprika in this dish. As a child, I was not very fond of this dish, because there was one instance where my mother had too many carrots in the dish, so everything turned out too sweet. So be careful not to cook too many carrots for this dish, if you want to try making it. This is served with potato balls, this potato ball is not the same as you get here in Norway, I can't say what the difference is, since I don't remember what the difference is. This was served with a red wine called Rolet Arbois Rouge Tradition 1986. This has a strange light brick red color. It doesn't taste particularly good on its own. This wine must be drunk with the food, then it was absolutely fantastic. The reason why many of the pictures were made in AI is because I didn't have the opportunity to take pictures at the table while we ate. I made the appetizer in the kitchen, so that's why I had the opportunity to take one picture right before serving!

Scallop appetizer made by me & AI photos of the dinner and red wine

For dessert, my brother wanted a dish called Aranygaluska. Directly translated, this dish is called golden dumpling in Norwegian. This is a yeast pastry, I have never made it or been involved in making it. I just saw my mother making some large buns that she placed in circles on top of each other inside a cake pan. This is served with a homemade apricot sauce and a homemade vanilla sauce with rum. There are also nuts in this dish. The original recipe also contains raisins, but no one in the family likes raisins, so they were omitted from the dessert. Tokaji was served with this. This is a Hungarian sweet wine, or dessert wine.

Ham and Cheese Roll Ups & Champagne

Hungarian Aranygaluska & Hungarian Tokaji.

Now it's back to salads, all the way until the weekend when we'll be enjoying ourselves again! Then we'll be serving Bolognese, Charcuterie board and Dominos Pizza on Sunday, because by then we'll have been on a diet for 4 months. I can't wait to show you my new tasty salads! Stay tuned!

GOOD GIRL WEEK

This week we have also eaten salads. We are going to Molde to celebrate my brother's birthday, so we have to eat "nicely" here at home, so that we can eat all the good food that is served in Molde. We started the week with a simple, light salad with breaded chicken that was fried in the Airfryer. We are very happy with this machine. You can put whatever you want in it and get a very good and healthier result. Since we have been eating salad all week, or from Monday to Thursday, I don't have much to write about. I haven't had any culinary adventures, until now. They will come this weekend! On Friday we will eat at mom's house. I can't wait to eat her food again (and not have to cook).

Breaded chicken fried in Airfyer

I love feta cheese in my salad, but I have to be careful not to overdo it, as it is not healthy and has a lot of calories. Radishes are also something I love in salads, they are a bit spicy and have a lot of flavor, while also adding crunch to the salad. I also grew up eating a lot of radishes, I used to get radishes on toast with butter, it was one of my favorite breakfasts!

Pasta salad

I'm getting old, I don't remember what we had for dinner on Tuesday, if I remember correctly we made pasta salad. I didn't have time to take a picture of this dish, we were too hungry to remember to take a picture of the dish before we stuffed it into our stomachs. This is an AI reconstruction of the dinner we had. By the way, the AI pictures look much nicer than what I managed to take.

Tortellini salad

On Wednesday I was invited to a birthday party. When I go out, or to a party, I usually eat something with more fat, to avoid getting hungry too quickly. I also wanted to eat salad, so we put tortellini in the pasta. This is tortellini with ricotta cheese, so it went really well with the salad.

Charcuterie board and cocktails

Charcuterie was served, if anyone doesn't know this name, it's the fancy word for cheese and ham platter. I love such platters, I can eat myself very spoiled on this type of food. I also love cheese, all kinds of cheese, there are of course some cheeses I stay away from. Old cheese is not a type of cheese that piques my interest. When it comes to sausages and hams, I eat most of them. It was the birthday boy's boyfriend who was getting the drinks. He is very good at mixing drinks. I would dare to say that his signature drink is a Geisha Martini. It is absolutely delicious, and can kill you in the end, if you drink too many of them. Now we are cleaning the apartment and getting ready to drive all the way home to Molde.

FINALLY WEEKEND

As I have already mentioned, we made Taco Gratin and Boeuf Bourguignon for dinner this weekend. Taco Gratin is a favorite with us, it is light and easy to eat. You can eat it with tortilla chips, or with tortilla lefse. We have not tried it with lefse, but I assume it will be like eating tacos in lefse? I usually put a lot of lettuce or arugula and tomato on top of the gratin before serving, unfortunately we ran out of both arugula and lettuce, since we had eaten salads all week. You can put whatever you want in the gratin, we keep it quite simple, with ground beef, taco seasoning, beans, corn and salsa. There was a time when we put Mutti chopped tomatoes in too, but recently we have dropped it because the gratin becomes so soft and the flavors disappear a bit. We also mix together sour cream and grated cheese and pour this on the gratin, a strip down the middle.

Taco gratin

And as always we had an appetizer! This Friday I was inspired by The Pastaqueen's recipe. We have all tried Bruschetta with tomatoes, basil and garlic. I wanted to make something new that we had not tried before, so I looked through her recipes on Instagram, and came across this recipe, Whipped Ricotta Pesto Crostini. It tasted absolutely amazing! This is something you all HAVE to try making. It is as easy as the title suggests. Just put a tablespoon of pesto in the Ricotta and stir around. The tomatoes and garlic are heated in a pan and pressed a little flat with a fork, so that the juices in the tomato come out a little. We put this on Greek country bread, you can put this on the bread of your choice, but I recommend using a good bread!

Whipped Ricotta Pesto Crostini

Then came Saturday, and the dinner we had been looking forward to all week, Boeuf Bourguignon. We had made this dish once before, and it had been about a year since we last made it. It was very good the first time we made it, so we were a little pressured to make it just as good. It is a really long and complicated process that you have to go through before the pot is supposed to simmer for at least 3 hours. Meat goes in the pot, then the meat comes out of the pot, so you have to sauté the onions and carrots together, and then you can put the meat back in the pot. The recipe we used said that there should be 3 cups of wine in the food, this is equivalent to 7dl, or a bottle of wine. We didn't pour that much wine into the food, we ended up pouring half of the wine in and adding water until it covered the meat. Then, as I said, this was supposed to simmer for 3 hours. After the simmering was finished, we added the mashed potatoes. This one was a little too soft, since we didn't have cream, just milk. But the flavors made up for it.

Boeuf Bourguignon

We also had an appetizer while we waited for the Boeuf Bourguignon. Don't think it was forgotten just because we were exhausted from preparing dinner. We couldn't have a big appetizer, because then we wouldn't have had the capacity to finish dinner, which we struggled with anyway! For the appetizer, I made small wrapped canapes. If you're wondering what a wrapped canape is, it's serrano ham spread with Philadelphia cheese, sprinkled with chives, then sprinkled with grated cheese on top again and then wrapped and cut into small pieces, which are placed on crackers of your choice, we used Ritz. These were absolutely amazing! Very easy to make and serve before a party.

Ham and Cheese Roll Ups

Something we almost never have after a weekend dinner is dessert. We are not particularly fond of dessert, this is because we want to eat our fill of the main course, and therefore do not have space or desire for dessert. So this weekend was one of the few, where we had dessert. We ate Daimkake with strawberries. Even though it is not strawberry season yet I managed to buy a package of strawberries that tasted very good. The Daimkake was also unfortunately very good. Now we are looking forward to a healthy week with lots of salads again! We need to lose weight, this weekend was not good for the waistline!

Daim cake with strawberries

SOON WEEKEND

It's almost the weekend again! We look forward to Friday every time it gets closer. We always make a menu list for what we're going to eat every day of the week, so that we can look forward to the weekend, and so that we don't have to buy food all the time and save some money. One dish we've grown to really like is Taco Gratin. We had a period where we were really tired of the usual taco, so we tried to come up with something similar, but that didn't require as much. Then we found taco gratin. We're also going to make Boeuf Bourguignon this weekend, we've only made this dish once before, then it was so good that we just have to try it again! We also make Hungarian Pörkölt very often, these dishes are similar to each other. Both need to simmer in a pot for several hours to become tender and delicious. I won't reveal more! I can't wait to make the food and share it with you!

PÖRKÖLT, HUNGARIAN STEW

Today's dinner was a tasty Greek dish, Greek Meatballs with Tzatziki and Greek Salad. This dish is a favorite in our house, when we want to eat something low in calories but high in flavor. Greek food is the cuisine of Greece and the Greek diaspora. In common with many other Mediterranean cuisines, it is based on the triad of wheat, olive oil and wine. It uses vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish and meat, including pork, poultry, veal and beef, lamb, rabbit and goat. Other important ingredients include pasta (such as hilopites), cheeses, herbs, lemon juice, olives and olive oil and yogurt. Now we are looking forward to the weekend dinners, with all the trimmings that go with the weekend!

Greek Meatballs with Tzatziki and Greek Salad

TRAINING ON WEEKDAYS AND WEEKENDS

I am a very routine person. If I don't train for a day, I feel that my body becomes tense and I can become irritable. I have a series of exercises that I have to go through everyday, and preferably twice a day. The training can last up to an hour, depending on how fast or slow I am. I train with weights, since it is said that you see results much faster than if you don't use them. It also doesn't help that I have a watch that shows steps and how many calories I have burned. The goal is 100% everyday, I usually end up at 150%, 9000 steps and 2000kcal burned. If I reach this, I have had a good day! I am fully aware that this is not healthy. I am also a very routine person when it comes to the time we are going to eat dinner, I don't really like eating dinner after 6:00 PM on weekdays. I think it comes from the feeling that you put on weight faster if you do that. On the weekends I try to get at least one workout in. Fridays are usually the hardest to get in, I'm tired and just want to sit on the couch, if I'm "lucky" I manage to force myself to workout between appetizer and dinner. Now you're probably thinking I'm a bit of a nut, and that might be true.

ARE SALADS THAT HEALTHY?

Everyone has heard or learned that salad is so healthy to eat, you can lose weight faster if you eat salad. Is this true? To a certain extent this is true, if you put pasta, bacon, cheese in the salad, for example, it is suddenly not so healthy anymore. But you get really confused when you search for "Healthy Salads" on Pinterest to get help. Here you see lots of pasta salad, salad that contains tortellini, when did it become healthy? And if there is one thing you really have to watch out for when making salad, it is the dressing. I heard in a program once about a person who had eaten salad, which was all well and good, but he had added about 1000kcal in just salad dressing, it suddenly became not so healthy anymore. Don't buy ready-made dressings, if you turn them over and read the back you will quickly find out that these contain a lot of calories and sugar. In that case I recommend buying the little bags from Knorr. They come in four different flavors, Greek, French, Italian and one called Urete, these should be mixed with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of water. But the absolute best is just a little olive oil, lemon salt and pepper, then the salad will be very fresh and tasty.

BURGER BOWL WITH CHICKEN

We made a salad for dinner today! A salad that is actually called Burger Bowl, which makes me doubt whether it is really that healthy. But I replaced the minced meat (mostly because I had been itching to buy it) with chicken. Fried 200g of chicken with a little salt and pepper on it, ended up with a little over 100g (where did the rest go)? I put this on the vegetables I had cut up while I was there. Made a little dressing of Greek Yogurt 64kcal per 100g, salt, pepper, garlic and a pinch of chili flakes, and sprinkled some cheese on top. The result was very good, but perhaps a little small considering that this was our only meal today, oh well, lose weight faster then.

What are we going to have for dinner today? Well, we'll continue with salad, today it's Chinese Chicken Salad! I found this salad recipe on Pinterest. It has some strange accessories, including Crispy Wonton Strips, which we choose to skip, there are several reasons for that, the main reason is that we don't live near an Asian market. I could of course take the bus down to the city center, but I don't have the energy to go all the way down to the city center to get something we're not sure if we'll like. So we replaced it with regular noodles that contain 76kcal per 100g.

CHINESE CHICKEN SALAD

If anyone is wondering what I do as an unemployed and lazy person, I spend a large part of my day watching cooking shows and cooking on Instagram. One of my favorite shows is 4 Stjerners middan. It's fun to see how others cook or don't cook. I also get a lot of inspiration for dinners from here and there. Other shows I also watch are James May OH COOK! You can find this show on Prime Video. You can also buy his cookbook from this show, which I of course did! I also really enjoyed watching MasterChef Australia for a long time, until they changed the hosts. I also spend a lot of time making videos and advertisements about and for myself that I can use on my NEW Instagram page.

DINNER FOR FORMULA 1

As everyone knows, Sundays are a bit of a boring day, so you have to spice up the day a bit. Luckily, we discovered Fromel 1 6 years ago. We are not particularly interested in sports in this house. But if there is one thing we have become addicted to watching, it is Formula 1. We started watching it in 2018 and still have a tradition that we watch every Sunday broadcast. Now in recent years, we have also started to cook something really good for the broadcasts. It is fun to have something good to eat and drink when you watch something you are really committed to. For a very long time, we ordered something good from the food supplier Foodora, but now that we are on a diet, it is not so easy to order food, so now we always find a new dish we want to make. This Sunday it was Tortilla Rolls With Chicken Stir-Fry With Sweet Chili Sauce, from the cookbook Kalori Smart. We used to make Enchiladas before, something very similar to this dish, but instead of chicken, it's ground beef with taco seasoning and salsa, this was very similar, but much healthier.

CHICKEN SAUCE TORTILLA WITH SWEET CHILI SAUCE

For the Formula 1 broadcasts we usually drink beer & cider, and we did this time too. But in addition we had a fresh and tasty apricot drink. I really like this drink, because it is fresh and a little sour. I don't like sweet drinks, then I get nauseous quickly. I recommend this if you don't want or have the energy to mix a drink yourself. This drink is also very suitable as a welcome drink for a party.

TROPICA COCKTAIL

SOLO DATE NIGHT

When I'm alone and want to cook dinner, I usually make a simple pasta dish. Pasta is usually my go-to food. I've loved pasta in all its forms and shapes my whole life, and have even been called the pasta queen. But I don't use that name for myself, after I discovered that there is actually a Pasta Queen out there. I first discovered her on Instagram when I was looking for inspiration for new pasta dishes. She is fiery and full of energy and commitment to cooking, and this rubs off on those who follow her. I also discovered that she has a small series on PrimeVideo, which I recommend you watch! I also really want to buy her cookbook. But I haven't gotten that far yet. Besides, I don't have room for any more cookbooks in my kitchen.

PASTA WITH FETA CHEESE & TOMATO

I ended up making a simple pasta dish for dinner, a simple cream-based sauce with lots of spices and garlic, a little feta cheese and, as always, tomato. To this I drank a very good mild Domaine des Tourelles wine from Lebanon. This wine goes well with game, beef and pork. We are very happy to have wine from other countries in the wine department of the liquor store, here you can find a lot of strange, but also good wines. I can also recommend wines from Georgia, they are absolutely fantastic. I usually end up watching the same movies when I have a solo date night, the Bridget Jones series, Eat Pray Love, Ratatouille and Julie & Julia, among many titles. This Saturday I saw Julie & Julia, it is about cooking, more specifically the cookbook by Julia Child. It is a sweet movie, which I recommend to anyone who wants to see a sweet and cozy movie about cooking, and to those who may want to be inspired in the kitchen.

DOMAINE DES TOURELLES FRA LEBANON

Hearty Pesto With Feta Cheese

DATE NIGHT

When you go on a diet, you usually look forward to the one day where you can eat a little more and a little "unhealthy". We try to stick to the diet on the weekends too, but allow ourselves to eat more calories, this in the form of usually having an appetizer. We have a date night every Friday, with comfort food, wine and drinks. As I have already written, I love making appetizers and small dishes, this is where creativity can run wild. Today like every other Friday I have made small appetizers. Today I couldn't stick to just one thing, I found two recipes that I wanted to try. The first was a simple caprese, but instead of making a salad that everyone is familiar with, these are on cocktail sticks. A small, delicate mouthful. Easy to make, fresh and good to eat. I love tomatoes, and try to have tomatoes in most of my dishes. The second small dish I made was Asian crab salad Croustades. I replaced crab with shrimp, since I couldn't get hold of crab meat. I buy the croustades ready-made at Meny. I sometimes make my own from filo dough.

For Friday night dinner we made a dish called Satisfying Pesto with Feta Cheese, this recipe is taken from the Kalori Smart cookbook. It says that this pesto cream is just as good on bread as on pasta, we chose to put it on pasta since it was for dinner and date night. We really like Pesto Pasta with Halloumi cheese, we often make this dish with "regular" pesto when we want to indulge a little extra. We buy ready-made pesto from either Barilla or Eldorado, since it is neither cheaper nor better to make it yourself (we have tried).

FOOD WITH TASTE

Another cookbook we have used a lot is Vidar Bergum's cookbooks, Hummus & Pomegranate and Aubergine & Tahini. These cookbooks are very suitable for everyday use and parties. We have had friends over for dishes from these cookbooks, with great success. There is a lot of flavor and spices that are not commonly used in Norwegian cuisine, which I think is very delicious. As a Hungarian I am used to food with a lot of flavor and a lot of spice. We are not afraid of food with strength either, but of course in moderation. What is fun about these cookbooks is that it is designed so that you can make many small dishes that can be served together, this is called Meze. Meze is a series of small dishes that are served together, and are made to be shared. Meze is a traditional way of eating in many countries in the Mediterranean region, including Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and Iran.

The word "meze" comes from the Turkish word "meze" which means "appetizer". However, meze is more than just appetizers. It is a way of eating that is social and enjoyable. Meze is often part of a party or social gathering.

Meze dishes can be meat dishes, vegetable dishes, salads and soups.

KALORI SMART - Cookbook

My new favorite cookbook. This book shows you how to count calories without sacrificing taste or satiety. There are some interesting recipes in the book, but I don't judge these recipes until they have been tested. I would recommend this book to those who want to lose weight but are struggling with it, the book shows the amount of kcal, fat, protein, etc. in the meal you are going to make. Of course, it is also possible to reduce the kcal even further if you want, or simply replace certain foods, but that is the case with most cookbooks.

APPETIZERS

Let's start a little cautiously. I love making appetizers, this is where my creative abilities are allowed to flow freely. I make appetizers every Friday and some Saturdays for me and my fiancé. It has become a tradition that I surprise him with an appetizer and a drink when he comes home from work. As an unemployed person, I have to come up with something to brighten up my everyday life. I also love seeing my partner's face when he sees a nicely laid table with something good when he comes home from a long day/week at work. The drinks I make for these appetizers are usually nothing big or fancy. Very often it is a GT or Three Monkyes Sparkling Whine With Taste Of Raspberry & Peach. This has become a house favorite, it is fresh and good, but really a summer wine. In these pictures I have made a pink GT, and a Mimosa.

Parma ham with Brie, arugula & plum tomato

Scallops with Avocado Cream and Chevre and Walnut Salad

Crustini with cream cheese