Rice-porridge Pancakes, or ‘rislapper’ in Norwegian, is a traditional ‘left overs’ recipe of day old rice porridge mixed with pancake batter.  The batter is fried in a pan just like pancakes and eaten with jam.  These pancakes are softer and a little more moist than regular pancakes but they are still lovely and fluffy.

Farmor has a great little strawberry patch in the front yard and this year I’ve assigned myself to make sure we get as many strawberries as possible.  The season hasn’t been very good to us – cold and cloudy – so the berries would likely be few and small but I thought I’d give it my best shot to get as many as we can.

I wasn’t too happy when I discovered lots of unripe berries half-eaten.  This was war!  On went the bird net and into action went the ‘ripening scouting plan’.

Every second day I scout out strawberries to see when to pick.  Normally it is best to wait for the strawberries to be ripe enough that they pop off the stem easily but I don’t have that luxury.  Sometimes I pick the nearly-perfect ones but there are many I have to agonizingly leave behind for another day.

At the moment with each picking day I get two container loads of strawberries.  The strawberries are sweet and have a lovely strong strawberry flavour.  It is the cooler climate that makes Norwegian strawberries so wonderful.  It helps the sugars in the fruit to create a delicious rich flavour.  The strawberries have good texture, very robust – even though they melt in your mouth you still need to take a good bite out of them.

But there are always some causalities.  Sometimes waiting too long allows the critters to get to them first.  The thing that bugs me is that they never eat the whole thing.  I’m sure they leave half-eaten strawberries just to taunt me.

Meet The Jets! – Jumbo Jet, Ink Jet and Brid-jet.  They are two weeks old in the pictures and only Jumbo has her eyes open.  Here their ears are still kinked back and they are covered with their mum’s (ripped out) fur.  Yesterday they turned three weeks and are very happy running around their pen.  They look like regular bunnies now and their personalities are definitely coming through.  (Our fourth kit died after two days as she wasn’t eating.  We tried to help her by holding the mother Black Betty on our lap so she could freely feed without competing with her siblings but she just wasn’t interested.  We have read and been told that bunnies can just go for no reason at all but it is still hard to see one go.)

It is amazing how quickly rabbits grow.  These little kits are very sociable and have no qualms chasing their mother around the pen for milk.  They are so demanding that we are now ‘on-the-shelf’ feeding the kits so Black Betty can have a rest.  This means that Black Betty can spend her days outside in her own pen in the sun and grazing on fresh grass and at dawn and dusk we take her into her kits for feeding.  I was a little worried to do this at first but Black Betty really needed a break.  However, the kits have adapted so well to this with there strong temperaments that I think this method of feeding kits is excellent for this breed of rabbit.

I’m quite amazed at how great rabbits are as pets.  I thought they would be like guinea pigs or hamsters that don’t really care if you are there or not but rabbits, at least Trønder rabbits, seem more like dogs.  They jump up on their pen when you come walking by for a little pat or scratch, they have crazy-play and then sleep long in the sun, and they even like to lick your fingers!  We are very happy to be able to help conserve this Norwegian rare breed.

We have registered our new Trønders with the conservation authority who were very excited that we had started breeding.  They were looking for another breeding pool in case something goes wrong (like a genetic defect) with their own.  This responibility has made us more committed to breeding this rare breed.  It is now official that by far we are the most northern breeders of Trønder rabbits in the world (the second is in Trønderlag in the middle of Norway).  But when you live where we do, being the “most northern” isn’t such a big deal as nearly everything can claim that title.

The days are so sunny and bright, green and vibrant, awake.  It is hard to imagine that this landscape was once covered by a meter of snow.  Winter is a distant memory, almost forgotten.  It is only when I browse through my photos that I remember that life will change again very soon and all things will go to sleep.

Last year in Tromsø I dismally failed at growing basil.  In fact, only the sprouting leaves came up.  This year I’ve had a little more luck.  Even though Alta is at nearly the same height on the globe as Tromsø (a little higher actually), Alta has a much better growing climate.  This is because Alta is more inland and the weather is more stable and warmer during the Summer.  (However, the Winters are also colder.)

Thank goodness my last failed growing attempted wasn’t because of me!

Now we have been able to enjoy beautiful fresh basil all Summer.  The basil sits on my window sill.  I usually make fresh pesto with it but quite often I just rustle the leaves to make its beautiful smell fill the air.

Who ever said you can’t grow basil in the arctic?

Norwegian Hamburgers are a little different than the norm.  You still have a beef patty on a sesame seed bun but it is the other stuff the makes the Norwegian hamburger unique.

The first thing you’ll notice when biting into a burger is the sauce.  Usually you’ll have your ketchup on top with the meat but on the bottom is the salad and a bucket-load of hamburger dressing – a cheap Thousand Island dressing (named after the thousands of islands in Sweden) – which is an apricot coloured  mayo sauce with lots of gherkin flavour.  The salad is either shredded lettuce or quite often shredded chinese cabbage for extra crunch.  The meat is usually placed on top, I guess to weigh everything down.  Burgers can have extra cheese or bacon (for an extra fee).  The burger above is from Alta and has a special home-made tyttebær (cowberry) dressing.

It is easy to make these burgers at home.  The first tip is to never use fresh meat – that is un-Norwegian.  It takes too long to make patties from scratch and only a frozen patty can give you that real Norwegian hamburger taste.  Load it up with chinese cabbage and gherkin mayo and you just about have the real deal.  I made my first Norwegian hamburger upside down (I guess coz I’m an Aussie).  But not to worry, I just flipped it over and ‘Sven was my uncle’.

My worst nightmare! (Nearly)

Coming up from the bottom field we noticed that Black Betty, the female Trønder rabbit,  was carrying around a stack of straw in her mouth.  Moose had no idea but I guessed she might want to build a nest but it was a tad early.  She was only mated yesterday with Bam-ah-lam, the male Trønder.  I looked up on the net and yep, sure enough she was pregnant.  However, she was a lot further along than expected.  Rabbits build nests close to the end of pregnancy.

Moose got to making a nesting box for Black Betty’s new cage (at 10pm at night).  I was netting the strawberries to keep the birds away from the ripening fruit.  It sounded like Black Betty and Bam-ah-lam were having a fight so I ran over to see what was going on.  Black Betty was obviously sick of getting mounted.  There was blood all over the cage and Bam-ah-lam too.  I grabbed him to see where he was hurt but it was Black Betty that needed help.  In the corner of the cage I saw a little black wriggly thing.  It was at kit!  I whistled to Moose up at the barn (a talent most Australians have to grab the attention of someone down the street).  The next two minutes Moose ran around trying to get the new cage sorted and hayed while I protected Black Betty and the kit from Bam-ah-lam.  With each 30 seconds a new kit was born.  Black Betty travelled round to each corner of the cage to deliver.  With Bam-ah-lam in one hand I had to touch each kit to stimulate breathing.  I was a little freaked (being a city girl) but held it together for Black Betty, of course.  She was finally put in the new cage and we put the kits inside the nest box.  I went back on the computer to find out what to do next. [Read more...]

Trønder Rabbis are a very rare breed of Norwegian rabbit that is on the brink of extinction.  They were developed between 1916 and 1918 by T. Hannemo in Trøndelag.  The rabbits were bred for fur, a black coat with evenly distributed white hairs, which earnt them the nickname Norwegian Silver-fox rabbit.  During and after WWII the rabbits were bred for meat.  However, in the 70s the demand for rabbit meat had plummeted and there was no longer interest for the fur.  As these rabbits had an independent temperament, they were not favoured as pets.  Only a few farmers kept the breed alive and in the 90s conservation efforts started to preserve this Norwegian breed.  Øya and Jønsberg Landbruksskoler (agricultural high schools) are now the official conservation breeders for the Trønder rabbit.

As we feel passionate about Norwegian heritage breeds we decided to participate in the efforts to help conserve these rabbits.  We were very lucky to find two certified Norwegian Standard Trønder rabbits – one male, one female, no relation in their pedigree, for four generations at least.  Both of them have high scores from rabbit shows and are registered as official Trønder breed rabbits.  So off Moose flew to Trøndelag to pick up our new additions to the farm. [Read more...]

These are (just a small pick) of the first cloudberries of the season from our farm.  This year the weather has been sluggish – wet and cloudy – so crops and the vegetation are producing a small yield late in the Summer.  But we should still mange to get at least a few buckets from our own cloudberry field.  Not many Norwegian farmers can beat that!

I’ve never had rabbits before.  In Australia rabbits are considered vermin as they plague the Australian landscape.  They were introduced via a Victorian governor who brought a male and female over from England for his nieces.  They escaped, of course, and Australia has been riddled by rabbits ever since.  So naturally I’ve felt a heavy responsibility in keeping rabbits as I don’t want them to escape and plague Norway too.  But the answer I got to this was ‘If they escape, don’t worry, they won’t survive the Winter’.

Oh.  Well, my focus has shifted now.  Instead of protecting Norway from the rabbits, I’m now protecting the rabbits from Norway.

“Kanin” is the word for rabbit in Norwegian.  Caramel and Chocolate, just two months old, were collected from a small breeder in Lakselv, (a good two hour drive from Alta).  The breeder was a teenage girl who bred the rabbits for a bit of pocket money.  The rabbits don’t have any special breeding but they were the only ones on offer in all of Finnmark so we thought we’d get these for practice and fun.

They are both female (we think) so no chance of breeding but the practice will be primarily for me to get to know the character of rabbits.  At first I thought that they would be a great play animal for the kids but the little bunnies are way too delicate for clumsy hands.  So when the kids are tucked in bed at night, Moose and I let loose the bunnies in the living room to romp around and get ’socialized’. [Read more...]