baking bread

I'm at home in my new house, baking tea bread just like my mama taught me when I was a kid. The bananas from the last rousing highland trip didn't all get eaten and were too brown for museli consumption so I did the merciful thing and mashed them for baking. It's the recipe from the New York Times cookbook my mom got as a newlywed in 1968. I found the same edition for 3 dollars at a used bookstore in an alley in Boston, and she went through hers and copied in every single handwritten note she'd added over the years of use.

Her book is no longer really a book- the spine went years ago, and it's jammed with bookmarks made of drawings one of us made. Me and my three brothers, the baking helpers sifting flour in our vintage flour sifter that makes a wonderful swishing sound or measuring the walnuts to make this bread that was always the fate of forgotten bananas.

I've added notes to my book since she wrote hers in, converting temperatures to celsius, adding notes on Icelandic substitutes for the ingredients, made comments on friends who used a certain recipe themselves and liked it. This particular bread was made by my Norwegian friend T, who hand mashed the bananas so they came out with a new kind of texture, now noted in the crammed margin around this simple recipe, pressed up against my mom's handwriting.

But tonight I made mine straight, just like my mama always made, and as I did I heard her voice teaching me all the steps that I do now so involuntarily- lining the bottom of the bread pans with greased brown paper so the bottoms didn't stick, smoothing the batter off the sides of the pan so it didn't burn.

It's like this when I do the things my dad taught me too- remembering when he taught me to sharpen my kitchen knives properly (long smooth strokes, watch the angle, and check your progress against the light), sitting together around the kitchen table that once was pink, now white, and still always referred to as "the pink table". The lesson was repeated at the summerhouse on the vast table there so that I'd take it with me wherever I go.

Living here means I'm geographically distant from my family, and no matter how many ways of communicating there are, this fact remains. And yet, as the smell of the baking rises from the oven in my little tree house of a home, I realize that I'm never so very far away because these pieces of them are so embedded in me.

for those who asked

I finally uploaded photos of my recent trips to the US (starting here, scrolling forward) and to Estonia/Finland, and finally a bit of more locally available highland charm (scroll forward).

Hopefully that saying about a picture being worth a thousand words will hold in this case since my time is currently devoted to putting things in various satchels and portmanteaus as I prepare for a trio of trips. More on those thrills as they unfold.

northern summer

Once again in my second home in Norway, it's been a week of the most perfect weather I could imagine. A balmy 75f/25c has made everyone relaxed with positivity, from the security and check-in people at the airport to the waitresses at all the restaurants I ate at this week. There may not be a lot of incredibly hot weather here but it does seem that everyone enjoys it tremendously. The sidewalks have bloomed with women in colorful dresses and little open sandals, while men go bold and shorten their trousers to knee-length.

It made working inside very difficult, but every chance I had after hours, I was outside. I walked along the river in the village where I'm staying, following a bike path that twined through the carefully mown riverbank and ended in one of the tidiest neighborhoods I have seen. Norwegians seem to know how to do organized quite well.

For dinner, my options for exploration were slightly more restricted, as I was staying in the in-between town of Lilleström, known for two things: being at the halfway point between Oslo and the Gardermoen airport, and for the largest conference center in Norway. The latter reason has generated a cluster of gassy conference-goer steakhouse type restaurants, but just beyond that, amidst the ubiquitous kebab and hamburger shops that crowd Norway, there's a delightful little restaurant that I first went to at coworker M's suggestion to try the moose steak. The Swedish waiter was incredibly friendly during that first visit, and since the restaurant was nearly completely empty I got extra-nice service. I went back on Wednesday for a leisurely dinner where the same waiter greeted me and remembered the strange toasted vegetable that I loved so much at my last meal there three months ago. When he brought my salad he brought a bowlful of the peculiar specialty as an extra side. The food at this place is not complicated and the menu is short, but when it's enjoyed with crisp white wine in a haze of sunshine, what more in life does one need?

And now I am at the airport, with my usual pre-flight pasta salad lunch, experience a new kind of sensation- being in a large public building that appears to have no air conditioning. Sure, it's a bit hot, but in the euro-traveler appropriate summer dress, I feel perfectly comfortable. It's summer. There's no need to freeze us all with overefficient AC.

Norway does not feel like it will ever be my home, but at least it's a place where I'm finding some element of happiness and balance. I do feel privileged that it's been part of my working life, that I've basically experienced this place for free, as a requirement of my job. Up next week, Leeds, England!

(does anyone know about Leeds?)

cat town

France has its dogs, Iceland has its cats. People aren't dressing them up in little jackets and bringing them to cafés here, but walk down any side street and you'll see them shadowing into cracked-open windows, crouching under cars, curled on windowsills inside, and skulking through the gardens on nearly every street. At night the yowls of their battles drift through the windows.

On sunny days like the past week, their expansive mood can make for slow going, since I always have to stop and greet them all, and like Icelandic people, they get foolish and slightly sun-drunk when the weather's benevolent. In some of the older neighborhoods, they will lie in wait on the wide concrete walls, and follow your progress down the street, Give them one scratch on the cheek and they will follow you along the wall for blocks, hopping between fences and yards, looking hopeful.

Some are more aloof and will only watch warily from beneath cars or up in trees, but there's always one somewhere. Each stretch of sidewalk I have lived along in the past 2 years has had its own particular cat staking out the territory- the sprightly orange tabby that did the midnight rounds last year, the enormous black and white one that hefted its bulk through the fence to inspect your ankles this spring, and now my new place is loaded with them. There's the small white one that suns on the stump in the back yard, the tuxedo cat that lurks in the grass in the front yard, and all of them seem to be more than willing to twine around my legs and welcome me to their little corner of summertime Iceland.