MIRA & MIMMI

Most Tuesdays I pick up my youngest granddaughter Mira from school and she comes home with me to have dinner and to do her homework and watch TV and do stuff on her iPad. We all chipped in and gave her an iPad for Christmas - the best gift she's ever got, I think. While waiting for dinner tonight she listened to music on it - fortunately with earphones on - because she told me she had watched three different versions of Gagnam Style on YouTube.... or was it the same version three times....

My granddaughters call me Mimmi, which is a nickname for "Mormor", which means grandmother in Norwegian ("mother's mother" to be precise). I think it's nice, because Mimmi or Mimi can also be a first name, and it makes me feel that I'm not a total dinosaur. 

Leafing through a magazine while visiting my daughter Sophie at work today I found this soup recipe that I cooked for dinner:

200 grams white beans

200 grams frozen peas

0.6 litres vegetable stock

5 spring onions

a fistful of baby spinach

0.3 litres soy milk or ordinary milk

sea salt and ground pepper

fresh basil

Mix, boil and blend! This serves 4.

Of course I can never leave a recipe alone, so I added garlic and jerusalem artichokes and substituted the milk with cream, and then I fried some meatballs and thin slices of bacon all crispy to go on top, and I more than tripled the amounts. It was absolutely delicious! And very easy to make - what takes the longest time is to wait for everything to get soft boiled so that it is easy to blend with a hand blender.

Bean and pea soup with spinach (and some other yummy things)

Jerusalem artichokes (what a marvellous name!) is not a vegetable I've used for a long time because it's been difficult to get hold of here in Norway, but lately I've found it in most grocery stores. I've bought it in France, where it's got an equally fabulous name - "topinambour"! Or how about "earth apple"? In Norwegian it's called "jordskokk", which isn't too bad either.

Jerusalem artichoke or topinambour or earth apple or jordskokk or even sunroot!

While eating Mira & Mimmi discussed the fact that Mira does not want to be called a baby any more - only two months before her eighth birthday she feels she's entitled to the adjective "big". I tried to explain to her that the youngest member of the family will always be the baby, just as my 22-year old daughter Sophie still is. I think she's fed up with it too, whereas Mimmi LIKES being called a baby!