Norway: The (non) Culinary Experience

If you like fjords, waterfalls, tunnels and ferries, Norway is for you; if you are interested in a culinary experience, you may want to reconsider your destination :))

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 :))

Radoy and Toska Islands near Bergen

Yesterday, we drove from Alesund to Radoy island near Bergen. Long drive with two ferry crossings, We like ferries. The best feeling is when you get to the ferry and not only the ferry is on the dock but you go in instantly...after having paid your 103 krones for the crossing.
Beautiful scenery again until it started to rain. Went only worse as we drove towards Bergen. Surprisingly enough, with heavy rain, you would watch large quantity of water cascading  down the side of the rocks but miraculously, never any excess water on the road. Drainage is exceptional...Norwegians must have a secret to get rid of this water. Cuddos to them and more cuddos for generating green, renewable and clean hydraulic power from all this water! In California, two drops of rain and we witness the inevitable flooding.... and no hydraulic power from it :((

We had reserved this Airbnb  little studio on the Radoy island located North West of Bergen (see map below). Our host informed us that she would not be there and invited us to use her house in addition to the studio. What a treat! People in this world are KIND and TRUSTY. Here we are, in this really nice house belonging to a painter on an island overlooking a fjord. We can cook, do laundry, and enjoy the house. What more could we hope for? In the morning, taking pictures of the property, I surprised some kind of a bob cat or a lynx walking on the trail near the house. Could capture only his back and tail! Definitively not a cat, much bigger. It is wild around here.

We drove around the island this afternoon and took a hike on the neighboring island of Toska. The scenery reminded us of the North West of Scotland. No sheep though.
On a tortuous small road, we saw some llamas, yes llamas! No sheep but llamas. Enough to wonder for a second if we were already in Peru :)) Nope, we will have to wait until November to discover Peru. These llamas looked really curious, well fed too. By the way, DO NOT believe those who will tell you that your mama is a llama! In Norway, they believe in trolls and that is OK.

After  car ride and hike, we returned to our cozy home for dinner. Our host should come back this evening. We left everything spotless clean after dinner! Played Yahtzee, downloaded pictures, read the New York times....this is what we do in the evening.

Worth noting that we had not seen ONE mosquito in Norway until today. Who made tourists believe that  Norway is filled with gigantic mosquitoes?? Not one, not even a small one. We considered arriving in Norway with our hat equipped with a mosquito net hanging from the hat over our face. No joke, we did find such a hat at REI and considered buying it! Some other foreigners already seem to enjoy starring at both our hats (a straw hat and a African colonial looking hat). Cannot imagine what it would have been with the mosquito net...and no mosquitoes :)) All this to say that it is the first evening we do see mosquitoes, probably because we are close to the water and it has been relatively warm today. I don't like mosquitoes.

Alesund and the Godoya Island nearby

Alesund is a sea port, much smaller than Bergen with about 45,000 inhabitants. Its Art Nouveau architecture makes it particularly interesting. Although pretty and well located in between many islands, Alesund appeared to us quite dormant. Well, we arrived on a Sunday afternoon. EVERYTHING was closed, including restaurants. We had to work hard to find one restaurant that we liked. We had reserved an Airbnb room in an apartment with beautiful view on the water. Indeed, what a view we had! The bedroom was small but the view compensated for it. Our host went into her room and we had the living room for ourselves to watch the sunset (immortalized in the picture below). Quite nice! On an aside, our Airbnb experience has so far been more than excellent for the price we pay. No problem at all. People are nice, they review us, we review them, so everyone is on his/her best behavior. Places must be clean so people do not comment on it negatively in the review. Guests must clean up after themselves...for the same reason. It just works for hosts and guests, although it is not for everyone. Liking the sharing part  is key when it is not a private apartment or house.

The next day, we visited the Godoya island, located 1/2 hr from Alesund by car. We went at around 10 am and there was absolutely no one anywhere in Alnes, a small community at the end of the island. We walked to a beach, watched the waves for a long time (may want to call it meditative time), then we went to the light house for coffee and a delicious non-sweet pancake with brown cheese (a type of Gouda indeed brown). Then closely looked at the fisheman's cabins (rorbuers) that are well known in Norway. You will see them on the pictures, mostly painted red. This is where the fishermen clean the fish and freeze it. Some of these cabins are now rented to tourists. They are pretty along the water.
We drove back to Alesund, visited a couple of small museums dedicated to the history of the town, the influence of Art Nouveau after the fire destruction of the entire city in 1904. In 2011, there was  an international design competition for the future development of the city. Some buildings have been constructed based on this new plan. There is great emphasis on the use of light in the new design.
The people from Alesund want a lively city, realizing that there are currently something missing to this city and try to come up with new ideas. For us, just spending a day in Alesund as tourists, we found that there were very few places to sit in the streets or in the squares, and when they exist, they are awfully uncomfortable so no one feels like sitting for any length of time. There are few cafes or other places you can stop for a drink or a snack. There are no green spaces in the city center. There are few restaurants and most are quite unattractive. We had to go for fish and chips on our second evening, nothing else appealing at all....at least from what we saw as we walked through the streets. Also not many stores for shopping. Pretty city but not lively.

The Geiranger fjord on the way to Alesund

After a restful day in our farm house near Nordfjordeid, we got on the road to drive to Alesund via the Geiranger fjord. What a scenery along the way! It was a succession of valleys and mountains that we had to climb...with our rental car this time. Again snow at 1500m and many, many waterfalls....to the point that we do not bother photographing them anymore! The view of the Geiranger fjord from high up was spectacular. We drove down to Geiranger and had lunch. Then back on the road to face Trollstingen road, a succession of hairpins just above Geiranger with a beautiful view on the fjord. I was the driver so believe me, I could not look down. I had to pay attention to the driving. What do you do when you meet a luxury bus with tourists in an hairpin?? Quite stressful but we did it and it was really worth the stress. We had another view point of the fjord above Trollstingen. We reached Alesund at 4 pm. Another fun day with amazing scenery. This country is unreal.