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Dear Mrs. Riggs and her second grade class,

In our last letter we promised to tell you some about Norwegian food, because it is very different in many ways from American food, and also because everyone likes to EAT! Also, we wanted to send the class some Norwegian sweets to try -- Norwegians have one thing in common with Americans, and that is that they like their candy. All the grocery stores have a complete aisle that's devoted to candy. But the candies are different too -- almost all are small candies in bags, like gummy bears or hard candies. Norwegians especially seem to like chewy candies, and they love black licorice in particular. Every store has bins full of different flavored and shaped soft chewy candies that you can scoop into a bag and purchase by weight. There are even chewy candies shaped like little tiny fried eggs and hamburgers. They are funny to look at, although they all seem to taste mostly the same, so they're not so exciting to eat.

One of the most popular candies here is a slightly sour fruit candy in the shape of cars. The candies are called (not surprisingly) "Biler," which translates as "cars." But what's funny is that the picture on the front of the bag shows the candies, but they are drawn to look a little like hippopotamuses. One of Molly and Zoe's favorite candies is called "Bamse Mums," which translates roughly as "Sweet Teddy Bears." These are teddy bear-shaped marshmallow candies dipped in chocolate - yum.

But what about the healthy food, we can hear Mrs. Riggs ask. We eat that too, but it is pretty different from the United States. For example, there is almost no breakfast cereal sold here -- only a few types, not the whole aisles full of cereals as you find in the United States. You can get Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and three-grain Cheerios, and a few other sweetened cereals like Sugar Smacks, but most of the cereal sold is what's called muesli, a European version of granola. The main difference between muesli and granola is that the rolled oats used in granola are toasted in the oven and are a bit crunchy, whereas muesli is just straight rolled oats with dried fruits mixed in to give it a bit of sweetness. We eat muesli and yogurt quite a bit for breakfast; it's probably the most popular breakfast in the Bazilchuk/Strimbeck household. We're different from most Norwegians in that way: breakfast for most Norwegians is almost always sliced whole-wheat bread that's been buttered (but almost never toasted) and then topped with a whole variety of different toppings, called pålegg (pronounced "poe leg" -- which means literally, "lie on top of,") and actually ends up being sliced cheese, and preserved meats like ham or salami. There is actually an aisle in the supermarket with the label "pålegg" on it as a category, and that's where you'll find all the non-refrigerated bread toppings like jams, honey, and chocolate/hazelnut butter toppings like Nutella. As for meat toppings, I have never seen so many different types of salami and other preserved meats anywhere else. You can even get salami made from reindeer meat.

Sometimes Norwegians eat bread topped with very thin slices of slightly sweet, creamy brown goat cheese, called geitøst (pronounced "yaiy toast") and sometimes they put jam (called syltetøy, pronounced "sil-ta-toy") on their bread. If they eat eggs at all they eat soft-boiled eggs out of little egg cups, or sometimes they'll have hard-boiled eggs, sliced thin and arranged on their pieces of buttered bread, then topped with codfish eggs, called caviar. This caviar is bright pink, and very salty and sweet at the same time, and it comes in a big tube, like an oversized toothpaste tube. Zoe likes it quite a bit. She doesn't think of it as fish eggs and she enjoys the taste a lot (as do I). What you can't find are things like bagels, English muffins or breakfast sausages or hash. You can sometimes find muffins for breakfast, but they are not so common.

The combination of buttered bread and toppings is the normal offering for breakfast -- they even serve it in fancy hotels, usually on a buffet table -- and it's also typical of what Norwegians eat for lunch. They pack their lunches up in brown paper and the lunches are called "matpakka (mat-pack-ah). It is very rare for people to buy sandwiches from sandwich shops -- you can go to a restaurant and get them, of course, but it's not as popular as it is in the United States -- and it's a good deal more expensive. It's not unusual for a "cheap" fast-food hamburger and french fries to cost $7 to $10. But EVERYTHING in Norway is very expensive, so I suppose hamburgers are no exception.

Dinner is also almost always a meat-and-potatoes affair. This is a tough country to be a vegetarian in. Vegetables are few and relatively expensive. You can easily get fresh carrots, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, rutabagas, zucchinis, tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes. Norwegians eat TONS of potatoes, almost always boiled with the skins peeled off. But other vegetables, especially hard squashes, like butternut squash or acorn squash, are impossible to find. And it's hard to find beets and parsnips, two vegetables we like. I found butternut squash the other day by accident when I wandered into a small speciality foods market that offered lots of Asian foods for sale. I found a few small hard squashes and bought the best of them. You can also buy iceberg lettuce, but it's more difficult to find other types of lettuces and greens.

As for meats, the cheapest is, not surprisingly, FISH. Remember fishing is important for Norway's economy -- just look at that big long coastline. Whole fresh salmon is for sale everywhere and it's probably the cheapest dinner meat around. You can also buy other fish very reasonably, and shellfish, shrimps and crabs are far more affordable than in the United States, at least in Vermont, which is far from the sea. Beef is pretty expensive, but people do eat it. They eat big meatballs covered with sauce, called kjøttboller (pronounced "shoot-ballah"). The meatballs taste very different than ones you might get in the United States because they are made with potato flour, instead of bread crumbs as is common in the US. The most expensive type of meat here is chicken and turkey. It is about three to four times more expensive here than in the US, costing almost $12 a pound. The result is that we don't eat much chicken and we eat a lot of pasta and fish. We still haven't figured out what we will do for Thanksgiving dinner.

Norwegians eat dinner early (they call it middag, pronounced, "mid-dawg"), between 4:30 and 5 p.m. We never ate much earlier than 6 p.m. in the US and so it is hard for us to adjust to the difference. But many after-school activities are designed to work with this early dinner schedule -- for example, Zoe, who is playing clarinet now with the school band, has her music practice at 5:30 p.m. and all the kids have eaten before they go. She also has swimming lessons at 5:30 p.m. and it's the same thing. We usually wait -- habits are hard to break. And dessert -- well, it's not the same as in the US. Norwegians like their sweet candies to snack on or for hiking, but they're not big dessert eaters. They might have chocolate pudding topped with vanilla sauce, or ice cream (no Ben and Jerry's however.) or maybe a chocolate cake or a carrot cake. But that's about it. You can buy cookies here, but they don't have much of a variety, and they don't sell chocolate chips in the stores, making it hard for American mothers to bake their children chocolate chip cookies.

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