When we travel, both Glenn and I like to experience the local cuisine. We know that some countries offer a relatively modest set of local dishes and this is just fine. We do like to have a chance to taste them. So, on our first evening in Oslo, we started our quest for authentic Norwegian restaurants, and not just in tourist restaurants on wharfs. We looked, and looked, and looked more......all we could find were ethnic restaurants. We ended up eating Mediterranean cuisine the first night and Vietnamese cuisine the second night, both delicious. My mom had warned us...you will eat a lot of fish in Norway. I was excited about it. Fish can be cooked with delicious sauces and many different ways.
We were hopeful that the country side would offer more of the authentic Norwegian food. I had read in my guide that in Norway you can eat elk and reindeer! I was salivating at the idea of eating elk. I was feeling lukewarm about eating reindeer....could not help associating them with Santa Claus! What if someone had made the horrible mistake of killing Santa's reeindeers and I was eating them as hamburger?!! Imagine the international crisis at Christmas time. No reindeers....no presents delivered. Elk was more appealing altogether.
We kept looking and here is what we found. In small towns, you found good italian restaurants, and particularly good pizzas made by real italian expats :)) There are also some low key burger places, using beef and not elk or reindeer. As for the fish, it is possible to get fish and chips but not everywhere. I am forgetting that I did have a really good fish soup in Flam. May be our problem is that we are looking for "affordable" options/dishes. If we were allowing ourselves to spend more, we may find more easily what we are looking for.
We are going to the Lofoten Islands next so we will keep looking.
What do you do when you do not find Norwegian restaurants and you want to eat local food? Well, you go to the supermarket, buy some there, and you cook it yourself, each time you have access to a kitchen at the places you rent. We discovered the COOP supermarket, the most popular one. We also know SPAR and BunnPris. Believe me, the vegetable stand in these supermarkets look sad: cauliflowers suffer from dwarfism, tomatoes look anemic, zucchinis are wrapped individually which makes you wonder where they are coming from....nothing looks fresh. Where is Whole Foods in this country? The meat department is very small as well. One fish we could always find was fresh salmon, and we love fresh salmon, so we bough it each time we shopped. We also bough smoked salmon for breakfast and lunch. The Norwegian salmon is absolutely delicious, as yummy as the Scottish salmon...same origin. We have gorged on salmon.
One day, we were asking one of our Airbnb hosts which Norwegian dish he eats on a regular basis. He mentioned Bacalao. Wait a minute! Isn't bacalao the portugese national dish? Made with cod and potatoes, exactly what Norway has in abundance. Makes sense that Norway would be interested in it. Our host specified that they have different versions of it. We did find an already cooked bacalao in a plastic box in the store, so we bought it. It was quite delicious. We keep buying it. We became curious about fish cakes, extremely popular here. We bought some already prepared fish cakes. We just had to reheat them in a pan. The consistency is like french "quenelles" with a fish taste, quite good. One more thing we also bought: herrings in a glass jar. There were several choices and I knew I would prefer the "au naturel", meaning the non-sweet version (my IKEA experience!). After ample debate with myself, I picked the jar with pinkish color....and it was sweet!
So we now have our fix menu: green salad with anemic tomatoes, fish cakes, bacalao or fresh salmon, greek yogurt, peach or apple or strawberries or rasberries. Very nice dinner, too much food in fact. When we eat out, we try NOT to eat any of these items :))
All in all, not exactly what we were expecting but at the end we are quite satisfied with it.
Bravo for the salmon!
Nice experience in Sorvagen in the Lofoten islands: catch of the day....halibut. Directly on our plate with an orange sauce, yum. Also the cinnamon buns for breakfast from the special bakery in the village of A (yes A that's it).....to die for.
And today another good fish soup, documented this time :))
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