Cookin'

Me cooking in the kitchen!

Yes, I’m currently back in the USA, but I still wanted to share what I did in Norway! Ok, back to me serving in Ålesund. I have to say they run a pretty tight ship in the kitchen, the meal plan is organized in advance, the menu is international just like the students at the base. They have a different main dish recipe every night and try not to repeat meals throughout the DTS year.  Rice however, seems to be popular, seriously I think I made rice everyday one of the weeks I’ve was cooking.  The students enjoy Chinese, Norwegian, Italian, Mexican, French, American cuisines.  

YWAM students dishing up

One of the responsibilities I took on was doing the dinners at the base each night. Dinner is ready and on the serving table by 4pm.  There were two of my favorite recipes that made it on the weekly menu (in place of others), chicken cacciatore and ribollita soup.  Meals are served buffet style. When the food is set out I got everyone’s attention, tell them about the meal, picked someone to pray and choose what table gets to be first dishing up their food. Mondays and Wednesdays I had students in the kitchen with me, helping prepare the dinner that night, which was a lot of fun.

Coffee cake for breakfast!

They helped me learn some Norwegian while in the kitchen together and it’s always fun just getting to know people and talking about food. This also provided the opportunity to teach them some new kitchen skills to tips too. One guy made the comment after I was explaining the “why” behind what I was doing, “that sounds like chef talk”. That question comes up a lot, are you a chef? Students who graduate culinary school don’t get the title, chef. Chef is something we used in school to refer to our instructors, which creates a lot of respect around the word for me. So I don’t call myself a chef, mostly for that reason. Kokk is the Norwegian word for cook, by the way :)  

Front entrance to the cafe

As far as breakfast, lunch and supper, the students normally take care of that themselves. I did two breakfasts for them just to switch up their routine and have something other than bread in the morning. Since it is a creative school and all I had fun with the coffee cake (recipe I got from Belize) and served it on colorful tray in coffee cups. The other breakfast I did was a big batch of scrambled eggs with different toppings for them to put on, cheese, tomatoes, fresh basil and green onions. The students weren’t expecting it so I think the breakfasts went over well with them :)

Food at Lyspunktet

Lyspunktet, what an awesome café (Christian owned and operated)! Everything from the atmosphere to the food, to the employees, to the standards upheld makes this place extremely successful in my eyes. And yet another testimony to God’s favor. Lyspunktet doesn’t serve alcohol and when it first opened the local pub and bar owners laughed at the concept of only coffee house/café. It has been around for several years now and has really become a well-known hot spot in Ålesund. Praise God! 

It worked out very well that they needed someone to cover a few shifts and I was there ready to serve so they put me on the schedule.  I did cooking, serving, clearing, washing dishes and closing. Probably the most crazy time was when there were 15 chocolate milkshakes ordered in a row and the blender over heated! I had to do them one by one with their old fashioned drink mixer. Little crazy, little messy but all good :) It was nice to see familiar faces there too, some of the students from YWAM help out at the café as well.  I pray for continued success for Lyspunktet and the students at the base!

God bless,