Norway

Norway may be one of the more expensive countries to visit but it is a marvellous place in terms of its scenery, its culture and its people. After all, you have to recognise the simple efficiency with which the public transport services are run. The fact that everything looks clean. The simple observation that even the people begging on the street have a VIPS (sort of bank account) to receive payments from donors.

Our reason for travelling there is to visit our daughter and her family in Oslo and we have managed three trips together, two in the summer and one in November. The November visit introduced us to the concept of cold. At its coldest it was only -12C for one day whilst we were there but the whole idea of Sognsvann being frozen over for a further five months at least was a bit mind bending. The cold pop pool I’m a made me think about the first chapter of The Collector of Tales.

I was particularly excited to explore the culinary delights of Norwegian food, traditional food that is but the whole concept was more or less dispelled on a first walk into downtown Oslo. Looking at the various eateries on offer, there were every variety of cuisine under the sun. The most dominant appeared to be sushi, followed by bakeries but there wasn't anywhere that was clearly set out as a traditional Norwegian menu. Indeed, in the first visit we made we didn't try anything specifically Norwegian ( ok maybe other than brown cheese) except the bolle.

Whilst not exactly a healthy snack especially in terms of the butter content, they are difficult to refuse. We found an excellent little bakery on Inkognito Terrasse in Oslo called Apent bakeri. In my opinion, they offered the best bolle and kanelsnurra. We liked them so much that we brought a copy of their Bread Baking cookbook back with us and have tried our own versions with some success.

It wasn't until we took the second trip that we risked something that looked at least like it was Norwegian food. We were visiting a viking village at the end of the world's longest road tunnel at Njardarheimr. It was a salted meat fest with mashed kohl rabi. It was good solid comforting food.

The kind of thing I guess a viking would expect when he came back in from viking. I wouldn't repeat it though and was indeed only glad that it didn't repeat on me. Looking back at the menu board it went by the name of Potato dumplings and I guess that I can see that now. Actually it was better than it looked by a long way.

This all being said, am sure that I haven’t done justice to Norwegian food and so I will have to explore further when next we visit.