FRUIT & VEG

Bored Big Mama

Oh, what a boring day! I woke up this morning to bright sunshine and melting snow - very rested after more than eight hours sleep (I was a wreck after my mini-cruise escapades) - but knowing that I have days ahead of me of clearing out our office. We're supposed to be out by the end of the first week of March, and my husband is going on a golf trip on the 1st, so I guess that means he's leaving most of it to me!

Fed up Big Mama

Yes, my husband and I have worked together for as long as I can remember, and we had an office together with desks facing each other - well, since 1992 anyway. After Sophie was born, we decided not to go back to our old jobs - he a sales manager, me a foreign exchange analyst. They were both hectic jobs, with long hours and a lot of representation, and I for one didn't know how to face it with three kids of 7, 4 and 1. So we decided to start our own business to give ourselves some more freedom. Did I say freedom? For the next fifteen years we built up and ran our business concept, first a fruit/vegetable/gourmet-shop, then after a few years of doing that we started another company simultaneously. And in 2008 we started yet another one, which we are still heavily involved in.

Exasperated Big Mama

When you run your own business you're actually never really free - you take your work everywhere, in the car, home, on holiday. In addition we were a married couple working together, but I made a point of NOT talking shop at home, much to my husband's frustration sometimes. I needed the time-out though! The premises that we got hold of were in walking distance from our house, so we did actually feel a bit more liberated than before, being able as we were to work alternate shifts and one of us walking home to feed the kids and help with homework.

Running a gourmet shop in Oslo in the early nineties meant educating your customers. There hadn't yet been a "food" revolution, and you couldn't even buy olive oil in ordinary supermarkets! Let alone things that we take for granted today, like Basmati rice, tapenades, marinated olives, eggs from free range hens, more than one type of tomato, balsamico vinegar. I used to hand out recipes to our customers, and many are the people in our neighbourhood who still pickle gherkins my way!

French sea salt from the Camargue, extra virgin olive oil and duck paté

During the years that we ran our gourmet shop I felt great satisfaction in "teaching" people about good and healthy food, but we were educated too! Our customers were eager to swap recipes with us, to tell us about novelties they'd snapped up abroad and to generally share good food experiences. We had a lot of celebrity customers as well, among them Norway's most famous actress and diva Wenche Foss. But if I was behind the counter when she came in she just looked past me and chanted: "Where is that lovely man who's usually here? I want HIM to help me!" So I called to my husband in the office behind me: "Your girlfriend is here!"

Handpicked goodies from a Bulgarian garden

Serge Gainsbourg has joined the veg - "l'homme à la tête de chou"