You find Scandinavia in northern Europe. Countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The history is a rich one – men like Leif Ericson and whatnot.

In our homeschooling over the last year and a half, we’ve studied a lot about many countries in Europe. Eating foods from places we learn about is one of the fun things we enjoy with our homeschool. Normally though, we do it during the day and on a smaller scale than these dinners.

This whole dinner thing has been most fun. I guess the people at Vox are enjoying it as well, since twice now I’ve made it on their culture front page. Thank you for the notice, Vox!! Talk about humbling and exciting all rolled into one!

I hope that means people are finding this all entertaining. My stomach is sure enjoying it all! The boys agree with me!

Tonight we chose Scandinavia and we polished off the last of our bag of potatoes. Dinner was a beef hash meal, which crosses many European countries.

Hash tends to be what I refer to as a “garbage meal”. If you have loads of left overs, this is a great meal. Grab some meat, some potatoes, some veggies, some herbs, and go to town. Whatever might be in your fridge!

In America we all know about Corned Beef and Hash in relation to St Patrick’s Day. The History Channel claims that Irish American immigrants would sub in corned beef for bacon.

Well our Scandinavian meal seems to fall in lines with the hash made in Denmark. It’s not as much like corned beef and hash from around here, but it’s kind of close.

Coach DS must think we love Europe, according to our little game, Europe is quickly changing colours to denote our “visits”.

First we gathered up all our supplies.

Now I just have to ask, have I mentioned lately how much I love the kitchen in my new house? Having the extra counter space to gather all my supplies is absolutely golden! Hopefully my good friends will not need to come barreling over at crack o’ dawn to save me from my own craziness! I just love having enough space to gather supplies, chop up stuff, etc. I knew I hated my last kitchen, but the sheer JOY of this kitchen really makes me realize how much I hated the last one!

My recipe called for round steak, but I had some ground beef which was an OK substitution. Coach DS even said so. I didn’t need to go to the store, I could use up something from my freezer, and mine was really a mixture of both ground turkey and beef which would make my husband happy and with the cut in cow meat I hoped for less digestive problems.

Joram graciously cut my onion while the potatoes boiled. The boys both peeled my potatoes and then Caramon chopped them up while I sauteed the onions. We then added in the onions and the potatoes, along with some various spices. I decided it needed a little pizazz so I threw in some garlic and oregano. What can I say, we like the flavours!

Doesn’t it look great? MMMMM!

After that, I dished it up on four plates and it was time for the egg for topping. Apparently it is supposed to be like fried eggs or over easy or whatever you want to call it. YUCK! My menfolk care for that, but NOT me!

It’s our meal, so I figured we could do up the eggs the way we liked. My guys like their eggs to be flipped, whatever that turns them into. (Sorry, I’m not an egg cooking connoisseur here! I’m never going to order eggs that way so, whatever.) Joram offered to do that for me since for whatever reason I can do a triple pirouette and leap around on stage but I can’t do a simple flip of something in a skillet. Guess he remembers the difficulty from the Tortilla?

While he was at it, he cooked up the two eggs I scrambled as well. Wasn’t that nice? We put our eggs on top of the hash the way the Coach DS told us, and we were ready for dinner!

Doesn’t that look great? Joram tried to cook my scrambled eggs almost omelet style so that it wouldn’t be broken up so it would maybe look somewhat right. Wasn’t that cute?

I inhaled mine. The boys agreed they enjoyed it! This meal was like breakfast (eggs) combined with dinner (meat and potatoes) which was kind of interesting. I suppose some would consider it a breakfast but I cannot see eating something this heavy first thing in the morning. But not only do I have cow meat digestive issues, I have morning eating issues – so maybe that’s just me?

All liked it, except for Sir Megabyte. He said the eggs and potatoes and onions were OK, but he grumped over the mix of cow/turkey meats. I decided to ignore it as I usually do, since I have such a hard time digesting cow products.

I fear we might be quickly running out of European countries to try out foods from! At least as far as Coach DS is concerned. There’s some great meals we’ve found from these various areas that we want to try, though, so we’ll probably be revisiting them.

After all, you can’t see everything in one day, can you? I bet there’s loads more that France, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Italy have to offer us! Not to mention the rest of the world!

–Lady O