Norwegian Boller

Hello hello, friends!

Today’s recipe is extra special and close to my heart because it comes from my Norwegian heritage. I butter up a warm Norsk boller (straight out of the oven) and it brings forward allllllll the warm fuzzys that come with eating comfort food. Is there anything better than freshly baked bread?

I’m also sharing a great product to help you clean up all those sticky messes that come with eating this recipe! Read more about the recipe and Walmart Wet Naps below!

As most of you have never even heard of boller before, they are a slightly sweetened bun that is essentially  to Norwegians what the croissant is to the French. They are filled with cardamom (one of the most delicious — and sadly ignored — spices) and often have raisins in them if you make them in the traditional way. I personally adapted this recipe to include crasins instead of raisins since I like the extra bit of tartness and the subsitution really takes the recipe to the next level!

I don’t really talk about my heritage so much, so let’s take some time to chat about it! I’m a weird mix of half Japanese and half Norwegian and I was actually born in Norway and hold dual citizenship. While my mom grew up in the same hometown where I grew up (and am currently typing this blog post up from), my dad was raised on a rural family farm in the Norwegian countryside. Since my dad was the oldest son, he technically had first dibs on the farm, but was more of the academic type and chose to pass the farm over to his little brother and study to become an engineer. He went to UCSB on an exchange program and that’s where he met my mom!

My uncle, aunt, and cousins (4 enormously tall, blonde blue-eyed boys that make me look like a dwarf) still are at the farm and it should stay in the family for quite some time. Some of my fondest memories come from the trips we used take to Norway about every two years growing up. From climbing ladders to jump into huge containers of grain (spoiler: you just sink and get stuck) to picking the tiniest and sweetest wild jordbær (strawberries) at their remote lakeside cabin in the woods and riding in my uncle’s tractor, I loved it all. I don’t really have the city-girl gene in me and there is nothing better in the world than waking up in their huge (yet cozy) farmhouse and smelling the fresh country air.

Norwegian was my first language and I’m lucky in that I can still understand a good amount, though speaking provides challenges both in terms of putting together sentences and with the confidence that you need to speak a foreign language. I’m hoping that there will be a time when I can go to Norway for a half year or so and pick it up!

Another big part of my time spent in Norway is the food. Norwegian food can best be described as very rustic and homey. Breakfast consists of bread with a variety of meats, cheeses, jams, and other spreads and lunch and dinner almost always seem to involve some sort of meat and potatoes. Emphasis on the potatoes which, as some of you may know from several posts I’ve written before, are my dad’s favorite food. On the farm, they simply go into their vast backyard and pick up a few fresh ones from the earth and BOOM. Dinner is served! Boller has that same rustic and rural feel to it and, though it’s made with unassuming ingredients, is just one of the most delicious things when warmed up and eaten with butter and cheese or jam.

I made these just in time for lunch and ended up eating three of them in place of a normal midday meal. They came out steaming hot and I cut them open and smeared a generous helping of butter on each side and topped them with a tart cranberry jam and geitost, which is a Norwegian goat cheese with a sweet, oak-y taste (and it just happens to be my favorite cheese EVER). As with anytime you eat with your fingers and have sticky jam involved, I was an absolute mess by the end and was lucky to have a container of Citrus Wet Naps that I bought at Walmart that not only smell amazing, but also do an amazing job of cleaning up my messy foodie hands. They’re gentle on skin and tough on messes and kill 99.99% of germs. And the SMELL. My sister put it best when she took a whiff and said, “I want to eat those”. They smell like heaven.

 

So do yourself a favor and bake up a bit of my heritage on a lazy weekend and smother them with butter and jam. Then clean up the inevitable stickiness with a Wet-Nap or two and REPEATTTT. Cleaning up messes doesn’t get easier than this! *Available while supplies last

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This post is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign with Pollinate Media Group® and Wet-Nap®, but all my opinions are my own. #pmedia #ConquerTheMess http://my-disclosur.es/OBsstV