Mrs J Adventures

Have you ever heard about pomato? Or tomtato? Guess what, it's a plant with tomatoes on top and potatoes in the soil. How is it even possible? Well, tomatoes and potatoes come from the same plant family. They're both nightshades or solanaceae in latin. The pomato or the tomtato is not a natural plant. Human hands make an opening in the stem of both tomato and potato plants and put them together so they can grow together. I've never seen such a plant before but I would like to try to make a pomato plant. That's only if I have a garden...

But there's also a house to keep clean. I was quite satisfied with what I did today: washed the clothing, did the dishes that were piled up in and next to the kitchen sink - I need to do it myself since we don't owe a dishwasher -, cooked dinner, with some help of my husband of course. Cooking means more things in the sink. Let's do it later. Oh wait, let my husband do it. 

After our dinner, my husband went searching for his memory card he lost while we were at church. I still had some egg-white that I didn't use so I decided to get up from the comfortable sofa and make something: Meringue. It would be easy they said... Well at least I tried. It took a looooong time before it even started to look like something that maybe could be meringue. After trying different styles of mixing the ingredients together, I finally decided to put it all in a small long bowl since I didn't make any progress with the bigger ones. I was in my own world, just looking and waiting and trying to get what the recipe was saying. I got bored of holding the bowl and I let go. Too late! Half of the liquid was spattered all over the place: the cupboards, the wall, the floor, my sewing machine, a flatscreen, our new carpet, me and my dress. Glory!
The first thing I did was trying to take of my dress, wich I had to pull over my head since there's no zipper on it. Luckily I didn't get it in my hair. My arms, hands and feet were all sticky. Mission nr. 2: Clean our new carpet! I only bought it for 25€ in Belgium but that doesn't mean I can just spill anything on it. After all the cleaning up there still was half of the bowl filled with liquid and another big pile of dishes in the sink. I decided to wait on my husband. Shortly after, he arrived. He just looked at me with his big blue eyes and smiled when I told him all about the spilled liquid. He decided to mix the liquid that was left until I could use it to make meringues. He also helped doing dishes. After showering all the stickiness of, we tried our first homemade meringues. It was a succes!

Servings: 2

Ingredients:

 - 6 carrots

 - 1 orange

 - 1 grapefruit
Instructions:

Isn’t it nice to get a call from someone?  Well, we got a call from my husband’s aunt. She lives in the same city as we do. She asked  if I’d like to join her and two other ladies from church to go on a tour. Not just some kind of tour, a blueberry picking tour. My heart just melted. Me? I love blueberries!

I prepared myself for the next day. I gathered some plastic bags for the “hunt”. I never really went on a blueberry picking tour. I picked some last year when we were at the cabin, but we only did it for some minutes. So I was pretty excited. The only thing I thought was a little stupid was that I left my climbing shoes at my parents’ house. What could be so bad with going with my flip-flops I got the other day?

They picked me up and took a quick shot in our small tiny house. Then suddenly all eyes were pointed at my feet.
“Don’t you have any other shoes?”
“Well, I left my climbing shoes in Belgium…”
“Do you have any long socks or stockings?”
Thoughts going through my mind: What?? Socks? It’s summer! I’m already melting…
“Well, I do have  a pair of flat red shoes that I usually wear to church…”
“That’s better than flip-flops or nothing. There could be snakes in the high grass!” was the response.  Oops, snakes? Here in Norway?
But where were my socks? My husband found me some: blue knee socks with holes… Jeej!
I felt enormously pretty with those blue socks combined with my red shoes. Not!
I forgot about the socks and the shoes. I just went out of the car. I got to loan a berry picker rake. A red one. I love red. It’s my favorite colour. I just followed the others. First we had to walk over a small unstable ‘bridge’ that was built from two small tree trunks. I just knew I was in Norway. Just to hear the sound of the crippling water in the creek, the wind blowing through the trees, the smell of nature… We just went a little up the mountain and on our way we found the blackberries. It went quite fast with the blueberry picker rake even though I thought I was the slowest of the four of us. The higher we got, the more insects came. Annoying buzzing flies and wasps. I didn’t want to get wasp stings. Neither did I want a snakebite. The whole thing of a snake coming unseen through the high grass just kept going through my mind. I just got goosebumps. I tried to keep my mind on the blueberries but then the annoying flies and wasps came back. Just in time they asked me if I was hungry. I was starving.

They say everything tastes better in nature. I thought it was just some joke or bragging about how good this land was, but I have to admit: food does taste better in the mountains. I ate my two slices of bread with –believe it or not – ham and strawberry jam. It sounds weird but I love the combination of sweet and salt taste. You should try it some time.

I was done picking berries. I sorted the leaves and small twigs from the blueberries in the camping chair my husband’s aunt took with her. I was done for today. I came home with almost 4 kg blueberries. Sounds fair to me!

Sit down & take a sip of your coffee...

As a housewife, I now need to fulfill some tasks I didn’t do when I still lived at my parent’s house. The average day contains cleaning, vacuuming, washing clothes, cooking, ironing… Not that I never helped at home, but it’s different. This is my own home now – It still does sound weird I must say. And It’s quite silent over here. I’m used to three brothers joking around, laughing and teasing. But I have to admit, I actually miss it, even tough I thought it was extremely annoying. Actually I hope they’ll soon pay me a visit.

As promised I would start writing this blog. At first I just didn’t know about what. I just decided to start writing, I’ll see what comes up in my mind and what the new lifestyle brings. I hope you’ll keep on reading as I just started my journey in this far away country.

Have a nice & sunny day!

Lore