Friends over for dinner

We had company over today, vegan dinner for 4, lots of small dishes Almost entirely made from scratch (I didn’t make the loaf for the garlic bread from scratch but that was about it).

1. Roast potatoes and cauliflower, in curry
2. Spinach and mushrooms
3. Onion, tomato and pepper stew
4. A bean thing my sweetie made
5. Garlic bread
6. Salad

And muffins for desert.
It was fun cooking, no pictures were taken off the food as we ate it before I remembered the camera.
Now, a couple of hours later, I’m completely stuffed still, I might just watch a few episodes of a TV show or something before going to bed.

It always feels strange to have visitors over for food, because the food we eat is different from what most people do, we use fresh vegetables, and usually there’s no “main” dish. About a month ago we had my family over for something similar, but pasta as well. They reacted strangely to the food, not like they didn’t like it, but more like they didn’t really know how to eat like that.
Most dishes in Norwegian cooking is centered around one piece of meat, or with my family, fish. Suddenly there were lots of small things. People get confused and… well, it’s strange to watch, they act as if they were in a foreign land, trying out the native cuisine for the first time.
They ask what kind of “tradition” our food is made in, and we laugh, it’s just food, an experiment we pulled out of a cookbook and changed stuff on, it’s the kind of food we eat every day.
When it comes to food I feel like a foreigner in my own land, with a differently culture than most. I like it this way, the typical Norwegian way of eating never appealed to me in the first place.

Tags: cooking