Today we had a great time hanging out with some friends in Oslo who have a nice yard, with great fruit-producing plants everywhere.  There were raspberries (red and white), currant, gooseberries bordering the garden, while apple and pear trees provided nice shade.  This environment, when adding some young children to the mix who are running around enjoying the beautiful weather, lends itself perfectly to grilling hotdogs for lunch.  Apparently Norwegians love their hotdogs, which I think are called “pølse.”

The hotdogs here are long, so if you put one on a hotdog bun, it will go off both sides by a few inches.  It’s like that in Sweden too, like the buns stayed 1950’s size, while the hotdogs evolved to match our increasingly large appetites.  There was another option besides the bun: “lompe.”  

This is a potato flatbread that you can use for a lot of different things, including putting cheese in.  So, it’s kind of like a Norwegian tortilla.  Anyway, I learned you can wrap it around your hotdog, essentially making a hotdog burrito.  You put typical hotdog stuff that you would put on a bun, it’s just that now it’s wrapped in a tortilla-like structure.  For those of you who know “lefse”, the main difference between the two is lefse can be a little thicker, and you mainly put sugary stuff on lefse (like sugar and cinnamon, on top of butter).

One of my favorite Swedish street foods is the “tonnbrodsrulle”, which is a wheat flatbread filled with a sausage (or hotdog), mashed potatoes, ketchup, mustard, lettuce, and shrimp salad (if you are lucky).  So this is kind of similar, just without the extra bit that adds more life to it.  Lompe has a bit more subtle flavor that would probably disappear with too many conflicting flavors added – so let’s just say less is more with the lompe hotdog.