New Orleans!

We haven’t done a lot of recreational travel recently, so this blog has been dominated by food. That changes with this entry – where we took a trip which had nothing to do with roller derby.

Which was dominated by…  well, food.

The impetus was that I was just short of Silver Medallion status on Delta, so I needed to drag myself over the line for the year without using up too much PTO.  Or any PTO.  So we flew out Friday afternoon, got back Sunday night, and spent the weekend in NOLA.

On arrival at Louis Armstrong International Airport, we discovered that getting to town was going to take a while – traffic flow at the terminal, which had opened less than a month prior, was incredibly poorly designed.  That, and Cher was playing at Smoothie King Center.

In other news, New Orleans has sold naming rights to a major arena to a business called “Smoothie King.”

Our preliminary research indicated that we were going to need to spend our 4 or so meals in the Big Easy at approximately 37 different restaurants, but we managed to narrow it down.  Our friend Dan insisted that we absolutely had to try Dat Dog. So once we finally reached town, since it was a block from our AirBnB on the eastern edge of the French Quarter, that’s where we started:

Leigh and some sausages overlooking Frenchman Street.

Leigh had a spicy andouille, and I had a crawfish sausage with crawfish etouffe.  Both were outstanding.  And we got to sit on a balcony overlooking Frenchman street, watching life’s rich paegant.  Not the REM album, although we could hear basically every other type of music from where we were sitting.

After we finished eating, it was time to wander around the French Quarter.  The architecture is just as unique and distinctive as it is always made out to be.  And a single block on Bourbon Street confirmed that we are both, in fact, too old for Bourbon Street.

The other thing you see walking around the French Quarter at night is ghost tours.  LOTS and LOTS of ghost tours.  At one point, we could actually count FIVE visible from where we were standing.  We did not do a ghost tour, because we are not credulous idiots. We did take some nice pictures, though:

Jackson Square at night.

A shadow cast on the back of St. Louis Cathedral

This picture’s not as good, but it shows a street band – one of a number we encountered while walking around.

Street musicians on Frenchman Street

Saturday’s highight was a bicycle food tour given by Confederacy of Cruisers.  If you’re in New Orleans, I cannot recommend this tour highly enough.  They did NOT just go to tourist spots, and the historical information was not even a little bit whitewashed.

We went to four places – Bennachin, an African restaurant in the French Quarter, St. Roche Market, a former fish market which has become an upscale food court, L’il Dizzy’s Cafe, a soul food restaurant in Treme, and Loretta’s bakery.  The food at each location was spectacular, and we learned a lot about the recent history of the city, as well as the origins.  Our tour guide was also a perennial 3rd place finisher in the “Salvador Dali” category in the national beard and mustache competition.  Make of that what you will.

African restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans

The outside of the African restaurant.

Dishes at the St. Roche Market

Shared plates at the St. Roche Market.

Beingets at Lorettas Bakery

Praline Beignets

One small detail from the tour: Earlier in the day, Leigh and I had made the obligatory stop at Cafe Du Monde for breakfast coffee and beignets, but our tour guide informed us that the pastries served there are not truly beignets.  Our final stop on our bike tour was at Loretta’s bakery for some true beignets.  Filled with pralines.  Magical.  (The ones at Cafe Du Monde may not be accurate, but they are ALSO pretty tasty.)

Selfie in front of the aquarium

After the tour was over, we walked around some more, and then met friends for drinks and dinner at Galliano’s, a midpriced seafood place in the warehouse district. And then it was time for taking part in the OTHER thing New Orleans is famous for – Music!  Leigh’s friend who recommended Dat Dog also suggested Tipitina’s as a great music venue, and since we only had one night available, we bought tickets for… well, whatever was playing.

We got lucky.

“Whatever was playing” turned out to be Dragon Smoke – an all star band made of musicians from different local groups who get together to turn up the juice once a year.  One of said leaders is also a Neville brother.  The concert was fantastic, although we didn’t quite make it to the end. (The headliner didn’t even START until midnight, and we’re old.)

Tipitinas stage prior to Dragon Smoke
Sunday was a day with not much planned other than brunch reservations.  We ended up joining a tour of St. Louis Cemetery #1, but had to leave early in order to make brunch.  The first half of the tour was still fascinating, and New Orleans cemetery construction is like nothing else in the country:

St Louis Cemetery #1

Statue used in Easy Rider

This statue, on the Italian Society Mausoleum, was featured in “Easy Rider.”

Amongst the famous tombs we did see were Marie Leveaux, Paul Morphy, Howard Plessy, and Nicolas Cage.

Yes, Nicolas Cage.  We’re aware he’s not actually dead yet:

Brunch was at a Vietnamese Creole fusion restaurant called Maypop.  We didn’t take any pictures, but the small plates were excellent – I especially recommend the Blue Crab and Head Cheese soup dumplings.

Finally, we took a streetcar to the approximate vicinity of Magazine Street, and just spent the afternoon people watching.  All in all, it was a fantastic little trip, and since there was no possible way to do everything in two days, we enjoyed not having the pressure to even try.  A+, would New Orleans again.

Streetcar in New Orleans

International Meals – Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso begins a run of a lot of African countries coming up – six of the next eight, including this one.  The variety of foods from the continent is stunning, but are we good enough researchers to make meaningful differentiations?  Probably not.

Fortunately, we’ll likely keep doing what we did for THIS meal, and just steal all the recipes from Cooked Earth. No shame in that, right?  We’re not pretending to be an amazing source of recipes for OTHER people, just documenting our own attempts for the three people that actually care.  (Hi mom!)

To be fair, I DID attempt to do some research on this one.  I discovered that Michigan State University has a cookbook collection, so I went to check out their one and only Burkinabe cookbook:

For starters – it’s in French.  This was a bit of a problem, as I don’t remember my two years of French from Ms. Carr’s class in 1988.  Second problem – as far as I can tell, this book is a SUPER colonialist attempt by a Canadian NGO to tell Burkinabe folks how to prepare their own traditional dishes in a way that’s more nutritional.  While that may or may not be a laudable goal, the whole thing comes across as horrifyingly patronizing.

And the third problem is the following:

Go ahead and Google translate “Chenilles” – I’ll wait.  Or you can just look at the picture.

*pause for Googling*

Even if I thought I could convince Leigh to eat caterpillars, I’m really not sure I can find a good local source of the edible kind.  And I’m not brave enough to just go out and scoop up wollybears and toss them into a pot.  You’d probably need to peel them or something.

So, back to Cooked Earth it was.  Fortunately, they had a set of very tasty looking recipes made with things we CAN find or order.

Starting with Zoom Koom, which is great fun to say.  Zoom Koom literally means “flour water” and is an extremely… hearty beverage served to start a meal.  It contains pineapple, ginger, tamarind extract, a pinch of hot pepper, and… (checks notes) a cup and a half of millet flour?  That’s pretty hearty, all right.

Zoom Koom ingredients. Not pictured – tamarind liquid.

We started by boiling whole tamarinds for a while to make tamarind liquid. We’ve used the paste before, but never the original fruits. They’re sticky and kind of a pain to work with, but the results are delicious. You strain out the solids, and then just mix all this stuff together. The final drink was very, very thick, but quite refreshing and tasty.

Our main course consisted of two dishes – a fried black eyed pea fritter called “boussan touba”, and a goat and rice stew.  For the fritters, we soaked and then boiled black eyed peas, mixed them with carrot and onion, and then fried them in peanut oil.  The recipe only called for one egg and no water as a binder, but they pretty much disintegrated like that, so we added some more water to get them to hold their shape.  Next time I might try another egg instead.

The main course was a basic stew – goat, carrot, cabbage, and onion simmered together for a long time, with the rice added at the end to cook in the liquid.  The new ingredient to us for this one was Carolina Gold rice, which is apparently significantly closer to the varietal found in West Africa than your basic supermarket long grain.  We ordered that on the internet, and it was definitely different – chewier and more flavorful, for sure.

Here’s some “in process” photos:

Upper right: black eyed peas. Upper left: goat stew. Lower right: tamarinds.

Fritters Cooking

The fritters also allowed us to use up the peanut oil we had purchased for Belgium, which was (checks notes)… even longer than last time ago.

With everything cooked up, it was time to eat!

Overall, a very tasty meal!  The goat stew was flavorful and delicious, the pea fritters were crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle, and the Zoom Koom was probably the highlight – what’s not to like about pineapple, ginger, and tamarind? It was, however, so thick that we actually had trouble drinking it around the ice cubes.

The next day, I made a peanut lime sauce to eat with the rest of the fritters.  Not authentic, but very tasty.

So Burkina Faso – we appreciate you!  Three dishes all suitable for preparation on a weeknight, and tasty leftovers for several days.  Next up, another African country – we finish up the “B”s with Burundi, and our first attempt at a meal that is both vegan and gluten free.  And not only free of vegans, but also safe for them to eat!

Recipes here:
Cooked Earth blog – Burkina Faso

International Meals – Bulgaria

We’re back in eastern Europe, which means it was time to once again consult my friend Walt.  He was a big help with Bosnia, and Croatia is on the horizon, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing from him again. (If you haven’t checked out his band’s page yet, you should!)

So, Bulgaria.  I had found a recipe or two, but Walt sold us on trying to put together a fairly substantial meal, consisting of a soup, two salads, bread, a main dish, and dessert.  The clock had also been started ticking by the fact that we found some Bulgarian style feta cheese at our local farmers’ market, and so had to use it while it was still fresh.

Bulgaria didn’t require a lot of exotic ingredients – no wacky chili peppers that take a month to arrive or cream that requires a drive to Detroit.  Lots of cucumbers, peppers, onions, and a pumpkin.  So without further ado, the dishes. (We didn’t take a lot of “in process” pictures this time.)

Bulgarian starters - red peppers, walnut soup, and salad.

Clockwise from top, Shopska Salata, Tarator, and roasted peppers.

To start the meal off, we had what I’ve seen repeatedly described as Bulgaria’s national dish – Shopska Salata… which turns out to be a pretty darn conventional salad.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, raw onion, and the Bulgarian feta.  The feta is what really makes it distinctively Bulgarian – it’s smoother and creamier than Greek feta, and made a nice starter for the meal. But it’s certainly not something that felt exotic.

On the other hand, the soup certainly was a little outside of our normal range – it was a cold yogurt soup with cucumbers and walnuts called tarator.  But not just any yogurt – Bulgarian yogurt!  OK, fine, Bulgarian style yogurt.  The good news is that you can find it at Whole Foods, and that really is good news, because the stuff is very tasty – smoother and tarter than Greek yogurt, it made a great soup when balanced with the crunchiness of the walnuts and the mildness of the cucumbers.

To complete our opening course, we roasted some sweet peppers on the gas range.  Shoving food directly into the fire is fun, but I needed to be a bit more aggressive about it – the pictures I looked at after the fact showed peppers that had been much more fully incinerated than ours had, which explains why the skins didn’t peel off as well.  Still, roasted peppers dressed simply with vinegar and oil were a good complement to the soup.

On to the main course, Gyuvetch. Literally, the word just describes a type of pot. Which, of course, we don’t actually have.  After Walt suggested this would be a good choice of main dish, I spent a lot of time trying to chase down a recipe that a) didn’t use beef, which I was assured wasn’t really authentic, and b) had quantities and cooking times.

I completely failed at b).

So, instead, I found a recipe from a tiny little EU government grant, accompanied by a video of a Bulgarian grandma saying things like “now put it in the oven until it’s done.” So we winged it.

The recipe also didn’t call for any meat at all, so I borrowed some guidance on pork from Walt and another recipe and tossed that in.  The final product consists of veg and pork that is first simmered on the stove until tender, and then topped with an egg and yogurt custard and baked.  It’s not quite a pie, and not quite a stew, but it’s very, very good.  We also made a nice loaf of bread to go with, although it did disintegrate a bit on removal from the oven.

Bulgarian main course - gyuvetch and bread.

Gyuvetch and bread. (Structural integrity optional)

Finally – dessert.  This was actually the FIRST dish Walt said we had to make, and he wasn’t wrong.  Tikvenik is what you’d get if you crossed pumpkin pie with baklava – a sweet, nutty, pumpkin filling rolled up in phylo dough. Yummy. It was so good we forgot to take a picture until we were boxing up the leftovers.

Tikvenik - Bulgarian Pumpkin Dessert

Tikvenik. Presentation by Rubbermaid

We ALSO forgot to take a picture of our dinner guest, but Laurie was nice enough to come over and share the experience with us, and bring a lovely Pinot Noir to go with.  These meals are always better with friends!

Next up, we have a whole run of African countries, starting with Burkina Faso.

Recipes:

    • Shopska Salata
    • Tarator
    • Roasted Peppers: Put peppers directly in the gas flame until they turn black all over. Let them sit in a paper bag for 15-30 minutes.  Peel, slice, and dress. Done.
    • Pogacha Bread
    • Gyuvetch (We added 1 lb of browned pork tenderloin to this otherwise vegetarian (but dear lord, not even remotely vegan) recipe.) Bulgarian grandma video here.
    • Tikvenik

 

International Meals – Brunei

I was nervous about this one.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to have had the idea to cook my way through the alphabet.  I follow several other blogs dedicated to the same project.  The most thorough of these is Cooked Earth – a site whose author is MUCH more rigorous than we are.  He won’t substitute ingredients, he does months of research, and his presentation is amazing.  Of course, he also lives in New York, and thus has access to a LOT more ethnic grocery stores than we do.

His opening sentence for his entry on Brunei was “Guys. This one almost broke me.”  He goes on to uses phrases like “fermented Durian.”

Needless to say, this did not inspire confidence.

But on we went.  Brunei is a very small country, so finding dishes which were uniquely Bruneian and not regional was a challenge, but there is one dish that everyone agreed was the national dish – ambuyat.  Ambuyat is boiled sago palm starch.  It’s apparently like nachos, in that there’s not much flavor to be had in the thing itself, but it serves as a vehicle for condiments. (Which can include the aforementioned fermented durian, but dear god, no.)

So, ambuyat it was, with a pair of dips.  In addition, I found a recipe for buttermilk chicken (which does not involve any buttermilk at all) which was described as the recipe that Bruneian college students abroad write home to ask their mothers to send them.

One thing that several sites made clear that sago is NOT the same thing as tapioca, so if we wanted the authentic experience, we needed to get sago, not tapioca.

I have no idea.

But we took the sago pearls and ground them up as fine as my battered old spice grinder would get them.  Meanwhile, Leigh was frying chicken:

We don’t do a lot of deep frying, but this seemed to work out OK.  We still had some peanut oil left over from Belgium, which was (checks notes)… oh dear ago.

Next, we assembled our two sambals. The first was a mango sambal which would traditionally have used a local variant, but we were assured was fine with any old mango we could find.  We mixed it with shallots, chiles, and garlic, for a very unfamiliar mix of flavors:

Colorful though, innit?

The other sambal involved shrimp paste, chiles, and calamansi lime juice. (An asian lime juice which is intensely sweetened.  This stuff is GREAT with tonic water – I recommend getting some if you can find it.) The intensly fishy, salty shrimp, combined with the hot chiles and sweet lime juice resulted a flavor which is probably one of the most… foreign to our palates so far in our trip.  It wasn’t bad, but it definitely had notes that my brain wasn’t used to processing as “this is food.”

Meanwhile, we finished the chicken and made the sauce. “Buttermilk Chicken” apparently actually means “Chicken with Butter and Milk.”  But that’s OK – we LIKE butter and milk.

Also chiles.  Because of course chiles.  Curry leaves as well, which is an ingredient I use all the time for Indian cooking.

Finally it was time to make the ambuyat, by pouring boiling water over the ground sago starch, and bring the whole thing to the table.

Clockwise from upper right: Buttermilk chicken, ambuyat, sambal belacan, sambal cacah, bog standard basmati rice.  (I don’t even know if basmati rice is reasonable for Brunei, but I had forgotten to soak the sticky rice that would probably have been more appropriate.)

The ambuat was.. fine.  The texture was a bit less smooth than it probably should have been but it reminded me of nothing so much as slightly stickier grits.  Dipped in the sauces, it provided a perfectly acceptable medium for moving sauce to our faces.

The buttermilk chicken, on the other hand, was delicious.  Would definitely eat again, if deep frying weren’t such a major pain.

So there you are – we survived Brunei, and it was much less terrifying than I thought it would be. Next time we’re back to Europe for Bulgaria.

Recipes:

International Meals – Brazil

Hold on to your eyeballs, folks, because we remembered to take LOTS of pictures this time.  This may or may not be a good thing.

Brazil is an enormous country, obviously.  Lots of people live there.  How many?  Like, a Brazillion people!

Sorry.

But the fact remains that this is one of the stops on our tour where any choice of dishes is obviously going to be absurdly reductive.  That said, there’s one dish that just about all my sources agreed would be a good choice for the national dish, and that is feijoada: a hearty stew of black beans and various forms of pig.  To accompany that, we would also make pao de queijo: a tasty cheese bread, farofa: toasted cassava flour, and sauteed collard greens.

So first, the stew.  This is for special occasions, so it uses many different kinds of pig, but it’s peasant food, so none of them are what you’d call fancy.  You would, however, call them hooves, ears, and tails.

In addition, we have some pork ribs, and two different kinds of honest-to-god Brazillian sausages.  Where the heck did we find those, you ask? At a store called “International Foods” in Sterling Heights, Michigan.  Despite sounding like a Mafia front, it is actually an amazing little grocery store, which will probably be seeing some return visits as we continue through the alphabet.

There’s also (just under the ear) a piece of what I’m fairly sure is NOT carne seca, despite what we thought when we bought it, but what the hell, into the pot it went.

I was a bit nervous when I read that the correct beans for this stew were “turtle beans”, but it turns out that just refers to the standard black beans that you can get anywhere in the US. So to start, let’s boil up some beans with an orange in the pot. Bay leaves added for some reason. (I’m not convinced they do anything in any recipe, frankly.)

Once they’ve cooked a bit, in go the pig parts:

And that is almost the entire preparation for the stew.  After 45 minutes or so, you pull out some beans, mash them up for texture, and throw them back in to cook some more. So while that cooks, let’s make some cheese bread.

The way we found International Foods in the first place was at the end of a long search for the appropriate type of cheese for the pao de queijo.  This cheese, called Queijo Minas Curado, is murderously hard to find online in English, and as was confirmed by our dinner guest, not even necessarily all that easy to find in Brazil outside of the Minas region where it is made. We had friends looking all over for this stuff, and then we found a store an hour away in Michigan that stocked it!  What are the odds?

I got about 20% of the way through grating the brick of cheese before I remembered we had a food processor:

Once you finish grating the cheese, you mix in egg, milk, some Parmesan, and two different kinds of cassava flour (thanks again, International Foods!) to make a gooey, sticky paste.

Said paste gets formed into balls and baked for a while. We’re now getting into the home stretch – just the farofa and the collards left. Both are trivially easy.  The farofa recipe is basically: cook bacon, cook flour in the bacon grease, then put scallions in the flour.

Which is Iron Chef level of complicated next to the traditional Brazilian preparation for collards: Slice into ribbons and sautee in oil for about three minutes.

With the pao out of the oven, the side dishes ready, and the stew smelling amazing, it was time to eat!

Sadly, this is where we UTTERLY FAILED in our documentation.  We had guests!  These meals are always better with guests, and our friends Alexis, Sandro, and Isla were delightful company.  They even brought dessert!  But did we take a picture with our friends?  We did not.  We didn’t even take a picture of the dessert until we had eaten half of it.

Sandro is himself Brazilian, and was able to confirm that we had gotten everything pretty close to right!  The stew was rich and porky, the toasty farofa soaked up the fattiness very well, the collards were a nice bit of actual greenery and the cheese bread… Oh man, the cheese bread.  The cassava flour gave it a much chewier texture than a standard American biscuit, and they were incredibly satisfying.

Here’s the desert they brought.  It’s called Manjar Branco, and it’s a coconut pudding made in a bundt pan, and usually accompanied by some kind of fruit.  It was so tasty we ate most of it before we even remembered to take a picture.

In summary, Brazil was definitely one of the better meals so far – all of the dishes were delicious, they worked well together, and the company was great.  You may notice that all of the recipes are from the same source on this one – I figure if this guy wants to do all my homework for me, why not let him?

Recipes: Cooked Earth – Federative Republic of Brazil.

Next up is Brunei, and I am vaguely terrified of this one…

International Meals – Botswana

We had been putting off Botswana, because everything I had read indicated that the national dish was extremely simple. Beef, water, salt.  Concerned that it might be a bit boring, I just hadn’t gotten around to making it.

And I was totally wrong.  This was definitely one of the simplest meals we’ve made, but was very tasty.  Complete ingredient list for all three dishes:

  • Beef
  • Water
  • Salt
  • Corn Meal
  • Spinach
  • Broth

And that’s it. You buy cheap beef, boil it for a few hours, then pound it down into individual muscle fibers. Throw it back in the drained pot to brown a bit, and you’re done.

It’s served with boiled cornmeal, which is basically grits. Fully traditional would have been amaranth greens as an accompaniment, but spinach was simple and tasty.

And there you are – simple, tasty, and filling. Nice job, Botswana!  Next up, Brazil!

Recipes:
Beef: Cooked Earth
Pap (Corn Meal Mush): Global Table Adventure
Spinach: OK seriously, you boil it in salted water for two minutes, then eat it.

International Meals – Bosnia and Herzegovina

I’ve been posting about our international food adventures on Facebook, but I’m going to start moving them here, because it’s easier to integrate pictures into the story, and we don’t actually go on vacation that much.  I’ll probably also start retroactively moving the prior meals on here too, which means this explanation will be in the middle of the narrative, and that will be confusing too.

But without further ado – Bosnia and Herzegovina!  I have an old friend who is a professional eastern European musician, so I contacted him for suggestions. Being that sort of person, he opened another chat window to the mayor of Hamtramck, just to make sure he had the right places to send me. (Follow that link, by the way. They’re really good.)

He nailed it, too – I walked into a nondescript grocery store and asked for Kajmak and the dude behind the counter enthusiastically told me “You can have this kind, which comes right from Bosnia, or THIS kind, which my grandmother made this morning.”

Naturally, I went with the grandma Kajmak.

But what IS Kajmak, you ask?  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The centerpiece of this meal was going to be cevapi, which should have a bunch more diacriticals on it, and comes from the same root word as “kebab.”  It’s an uncased beef and lamb sausage that has a very distinctive “springy” texture that you get from grinding the meat several times, and mixing in baking soda.

I had never used a meat grinder before, but fortunately our friends who were coming for dinner were able to loan us one. Meat ground, we tossed in parsley, garlic, and a packet of cevapi seasoning mix that was also provided by the Balkan grocery store. Into the fridge with the meat.

Cevapi is traditionally eaten on a fluffy flatbread called Lepinja – like pita but softer and airier. I came home early from work on the day we were having dinner so I could get the dough started.  The other accompaniments are ajvar, a roasted red pepper spread with eggplant, and kajmak.

Oh right, kajmak.  So kajmak is essentially clotted cream.  You can make it yourself, but it takes a while, so I went with the grandma version. It’s made by simmering milk and heavy cream forever and then skimming off the heart attack that forms on top.  It’s incredibly sweet and rich.

Our friends arrived, so we put on some Bosnian music, and put them to work making sausages, which we tossed onto the oven plate at the same time as we put the bread in the oven.

The bread really did turn out amazingly well for a first attempt.

Once the sausages were done (and the one smoke alarm I missed hurriedly disabled), it was time to feast! To cut the richness of the kajmak, ajvar, and cevapi, we added some raw onion, and served it all up with some Croatian beer brought by our friends.

For dessert, we made what my friend Walt described as “the only Bosnian dessert that isn’t  a variation of Baklava”, namely Tufahije – apples stuffed with honey and walnuts.  Apparently grandmas will actually come to blows over whether they should be made with sweet or sour apples.  We went with sour, and they were fantastic, especially because everything is better eaten with friends.

Next up, Botswana!

Recipes:
Cevapi, Ajvar, and Lepinja
Tufahije
Kajmak – ask grandma

UK / Iceland – Sunday: Reykjavik and Reykjanes

It’s taken me over three months to write this final post, so the memories are at this point a touch fuzzier.  (Don’t let the posted date fool you – that’s set to match the actual date of the trip.)

Sunday was our final day in Iceland, and we hadn’t yet spent all that much time in Reykjavik itself.  We spent the morning generally bonking around the city, looking at tourist sites and visiting the art museum. We also mocked statues, because that’s a thing you do:

The Reykjavik art museum had an exhibition about the less visited interior portions of the country, which was good, because we visited those parts less.

To finish our stay, we hopped back in our car and drove around the Reykjanes peninsula.  This is where the airport is, and therefore where Dan spent Thursday morning, but Leigh hadn’t seen any of it, and there’s a lot to see.  Driving around randomly looking for lunch brought us to a delightful little oceanside cafe in Grindavik that mainly just had lobster bisque, but that’s OK, because it was *good* lobster bisque.

We took a picture, but I’m not going to bother adding it, because it is seriously just a picture of a bowl of soup.

What IS worth staring at pictures of, however, is this:

The little boards sticking up are where the previous walkway was, before the vent moved and melted it.  Kind of made us feel safe standing on the CURRENT walkway.  Also, Iceland continues to look like another planet.  From this geothermal field, it was a quick drive over to the coast. And another stunning view.  Iceland is terrifyingly pretty.

Nearby was a statue dedicated to the last surviving pair of Great Auks, who were summarily murdered on a nearby island so a collector could have them stuffed.  People are awful.


And on that cheerful note, we headed back to the bridge between continents that I had visited on the first day, so we could wave at each other from North America to Europe:

And with that, it was time to fly home.  Iceland is pretty.  You should go.

UK / Iceland – Saturday: Snæfellsnes

Having spent Friday on the primary tourist loop, we wanted to take a different excursion on Saturday.  We had dinner reservations (more on that later), so our range was not unlimited. We decided that a drive up to the Snæfellsnes peninsula would be a good day trip.

A word on pronouncing “Snæfellsnes”: We have no idea how to pronounce “Snæfellsnes”.  We kept saying “Snuffalupagus”, which is probably insensitive.  We apologize.

The drive up the coast was, unsurprisingly, stunning.

Lots of volcanic mountains.  Also sheep.  Lots of sheep.  Those were less stunning, however.

We made a stop at a cafe for baked goods, and then another at a volcano that you can, in theory, hike to.  However, the hike turned out to be a bit longer than we had budgeted, so we stopped to look at some goats and then moved on.  I am not a good judge of goats – these may be stunning, I’m not sure.

Our next stop, however, certainly was: The Gerðuberg Cliffs, (seriously, we have no idea how to pronounce this stuff, please stop asking) an ancient wall of basalt columns.

And legally mandated panorama.  Seriously – it’s worth clicking on.

Continuing up the peninsula, we reached the farthest north point of our trip, the fishing village of Stykkishólmur, which we also have no idea how to pronounce correctly.  This is also the farthest north we have ever been, full stop, surpassing Jyväskylä, Finland, which we also also have no idea how to pronounce correctly.

We had a delightful lunch of local seafood in an appallingly quaint little restaurant, and then hiked up to the top of the overlook point on the north side of town.  Once again, pictures say it better than words.

After our hike, it was time to return to Reykjavik for dinner. Where Thursday’s meal represented a cutting edge culinary experience, Saturday’s was fine dining that focused on traditional Icelandic culture and ingreedients.  We did NOT choose to experience rotted shark, but instead feasted on lamb and an entire cod head glazed in blueberries and honey:

The fried bit on the upper left is the cod’s tonsils.  Did you know cod have tonsils?  Me neither.  Tasty, tasty tonsils. (Lower left is nothing more unsettling than potatoes.)

Saturday was probably our least touristy day in Iceland, and we really enjoyed just driving and walking ourselves around looking at stuff.

Next up: Lava and Lobster!

UK / Iceland – Friday: The Golden Circle (Part 3)

Having successfully acquired fish, it was now time to get something to put under the fish.  Even though we had decided not to actually pay the fee to sit in the hot spring, we nonetheless drove back to the one we had previously considered to acquire another Icelandic traditional food item: fermented shark.

No, just kidding. We wanted to get some geothermal rye bread, baked right in the hot springs.  Purchasing a loaf was straightforward, but locating knives proved trickier.  We checked at a nearby restaurant, and while they didn’t have any plastic silverware, the proprietor noticed our loaf and was at pains to warn us not to eat more than a slice or two, lest we suffer acute gastric fluidity.

So now we had lots of fish, suddenly suspicious bread, butter, and no way to combine same.  There was obviously no alternative – we went to a gas station, which meant driving even further back the way we had come.  At said gas station we acquired a loaf of presumably safer paprika bread and a box of plastic knives.

From there it was time to visit one of the most important national parks in Iceland, Þingvellir. Since I’ve now gone four paragraphs without a picture, let’s make up for that right now:

And, how about another panorama? (It’s the law.)

And in case the scale of that big pile of geology isn’t quite coming across:

Þingvellir literally means “Assembly Field”, and it’s where the ancient parliaments of Iceland met.  We found a picnic table surrounded by ducks and ate our bread and fish, and it was delicious.  The ducks weren’t allowed to have any.

By this point, it was after 9 PM, but there was absolutely no way to determine that from the ambient lighting, which was pretty much the same as it had been all day long.

Did we mention that Iceland is spectacularly pretty? I think we mentioned that.  At any rate, after a hike around this corner of the park, we were about out of gas, so we returned to our AirBnB in Reyjavik where, at 11:30, it was STILL just as bright as it had been all day.

Next up  – Snuffleupagus, volcanoes, and goats!