My love affair, now turned long distance relationship with Skyr

Everyone knows that long distance relationships are hard. You don't get to see each other very often and it gets expensive. NO DIFFERENT IS MY NEWLY MINTED RELATIONSHIP WITH SKYR. This is us at the airport.

Recap: Skyr is Icelandic yogurt made out of cows milk that is virtually fat free (0.2%), but contains all the flavor of a full fat yogurt and tastes heavenly and is thick and light.

I used to consume a bunch of Fage, a Greek yogurt that was creamy smooth and THICK. Then I used to eat a lot of Hawthorne Valley's delicious runny yogurt. Then I settled for whatever was convenient. Now I haven't had my usual breakfast of yogurt, fruit and granola since I left Iceland.



I tried to have it everyday that I was there. Then after I had some at the Icelandic Fish and Chips place, I was obsessed. It was the best skyr ever. And it is so versatile! Make dips with it, use it instead of sour cream, have it for breakfast with granola, or dessert with berries. Put it on your face and use it as a collagen mask! (actually no, don't do that, unless you want me to lick your face). I've been raving about skyr since I first tried skyr and when I was at the airport, I wanted nothing more than to take copious amounts of it in freezer and dry ice bags on the plane with me. Alas, blue lagoon moisturizer was weighing me down. Thank goodness I didn't attempt this, because when I got to New York, sniffer dogs were sniffing out stuff and came around to check me out, with no incident. I'm sure US Customs would be none too pleased if they uncovered barrels of yogurt culture.

Anyway, as I was grumbling as I was grocery shopping back in the land of high fructose corn syrup and modified starch and emulsified soy, my friend Christine paused a little too long at the yogurt section. A lot of stuff was already wiped out and I had no eyes for any other type of yogurt and accepted my calcified future with a former flame, Ronnybrook Chocolate Milk (which is still pretty spectacular if you ask me). I contemplated a skyr imitation, Siggi's. And then slowly, slowly, Christine pulled from the shelf a serving sized portion of SKYR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG SKYR. SKYR IN AMERICA*. REAL SKYR. REAL SKYR HERE!!!!!!!!!!! They were sold out of the plain type but they had the fruit flavoured ones. Remember what I said about eating Skyr everyday and being a happy girl? This is my Icelandic dream come true.


*I found Skyr in WholeFoods. I quite abhor WholeFoods, but you have to eat sometimes, so what can you do. But you can see if they sell Skyr at your current location if you visit skyr.is

I love Bonus

I love this pig! More than you can ever imagine! It has lazy eye! (it gets more obvious when you see it BIG in the stores, and I think it is amazing because the eyes are even more unequal in real life. I badly want to meet the designer who made this pig.) This is the cheap grocery store that was around the corner from the apartment. The pig is happy because you're saving money and I suppose you're also giving them money too, much like a Walmart low cost business model, but with a BENIGN LOOKING LAZY EYE PIG!!!!!! I am a sucker for cute and ridiculous animals.

(Aside) Feast your eyes on this ridiculousness! Moo-maid of Zennor ice cream in Cornwall. No one can resist a moo-maid. INDEED THEY CANNOT:



So at Bonus, there were isles and isles of house brand produce. Wonky pigs on everything! On meat! On Bread! All over! I was overcome with joy. Sometimes when the printing was a little off, especially on more delicate (cheap) packaging, the wonky eye discrepancy was even more apparent. I bought some Bonus bread to make sandwiches with because it was the cheapest, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the bread was laden with seeds and was really very tasty.

I also bought a carton of eggs that I stupidly didn't take a picture of (it had a picture of an enthusiastic chicken's head on it), and made the CREAMIEST scrambled eggs I have ever had. They were so buttery smooth even though I didn't put any butter in them.

Also in my grocery haul was some ham and bacon cream cheese (very creamy. very hammy.) Different types of yogurt, skyr, ham, some blue lagoon colored ice cream bars and a bag of coffee (for emergency brewing). Check out these pork products:



Yessssss, scientific diagrams to compel you to eat more ham, bacon and salami in perfect proportions. Most excellent. (Thanks Roboppy for pointing this out! I would have totally missed this even though I had two packets of of it in the fridge.)

I am sad that I was only in Iceland for a whirlwind 4 1/2 days, and would loved to have explored all the bounty that Bonus had to offer, starting with the assortment of very curious milk (I didn't understand a word of what was on the milk cartons, so I picked the ones with dancing blue and purple stick figure children on the box and figured if it must be safe for doodling children, it must be safe for me).

I'm on a processed food roll!

What baffles me is that even though Iceland gets such lovely seafood and I don't think it is that hard to round up some puffins if you needed a quick..I don't know, roast puffin..but there is still a market for fast food and they love hotdogs and burgers – things that I would gladly turn down for the rest of my life in exchange for fresh fish. I'm not sure if fish prices at the market are or used to be sky high, but if they were and if I lived there, I'd make friends with some fishermen.

I guess Burgerjoint in Icelandic means Burgerjoint in English! I guess burgers weren't invented in Medieval times and therefore don't have proper names for them with fancy and confusing characters???



One of the many many things I love about Iceland is the atmosphere in restaurants and especially smaller cafes, diners and dingy burger joints. It's definitely festive, and you definitely need it when you spend a good chunk of the year in the dark. The burger joint was a lone low lying concrete building near the harbor, where I imagine it would be blustery cold in the wintertime. It was decked out in hand drawn posters, pages from kids coloring books and fairy lights.

There are no pictures of food because....I didn't get one and Candice ate hers too quickly.

PYLSUR means HOTGOD...I mean....hotdog.

I was waiting for Candice to get in from London and went foraging for food. I didn't particularly want to eat any of the exciting groceries that I bought because those were for breakfast. I am also not a fan of processed meat, but I'd bend the rules a little for a Pylsur. It's a hotdog, and together with Coke, it's Iceland's national food. And how can you go to a new country and not eat their national food?

I guess when everything cost twice what it did and was prohibitively expensive for anyone to do much else but look around, hotdogs were not exactly cheap, but they were affordable. I'm glad I didn't have to subsist on hotdogs and powerbars alone, but I'll say that after aimlessly wandering around with my energy levels waning, I pretty much NEEDED this hotdog. The wrapper was enough to charm the pants off me anyway.



I bought it from this cart, that had a discoball. You can charge everything to a credit card in Iceland. Even a $1.50 hotdog. From a cart. I broke out some bank notes and smiled apologetically when they asked if I had any coins, explaining that I had just arrived. The vendor squeezed a generous amount of brown looking mustard on the hotdog and said "Welcome and enjoy your first pylsur!" YEAH! CHOMP!



We found some of the suspicious brown mustard in the supermarket and although very cute, did nothing more to explain its contents. Is the hotdog running TO the sauce? Away from the sauce? Why is it running? Oh wait...it's because it's fast food....Sorry, I couldn't help it. It's not the most appetizing of sauce bottles and it's still a little bit of a mystery to me.

Candy and Booze

YEAH VIKING CANDY!

I'm actually not sure what it is, apart from being Viking's Gold ("Gull" means golden. So when you go and check out Gullfoss, the enormous waterfall that I sadly didn't have time for, you'll know that it means Golden Falls). I don't buy candy anymore since I consciously gave up high fructose corn syrup. I'm told that you're not allowed to make things with corn syrup in the UK or EU, but Iceland is part of neither, and it doesn't help I can't make sense of their medieval language. The language hasn't changed much since Viking times and Icelanders can read and understand the original sagas from way back when. Actually, on hindsight, since you can't really grow anything in Iceland and there are certainly no cornfields, it might have been safe for me to buy. But on the other hand, if they can't even produce sugar, what synthetic chemical composition are these seemingly benign viking candies made of?????



This is some very pretty vodka packaging. I've found out through scapegoats, guinea pigs and tourists hungry for a Real Icelandic Experience, whatever that means, that Icelandic liquor is quite awful. No one I met has sampled some of this, but a lady on the plane back to New York had a last Icelandic hurrah by downing some other local vodka in a vile green vial. Never again, she said.



and this is some Icelandic Schnapps with some weird arctic seaweed in it for MAXIMUM AUTHENTIC EFFECT. Icelanders use this to chase the rotten shark down, so I guess it doesn't have to try too hard to be tasty. Again, extremely suspicious and bizarre.

Opal.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Gage

But what took the cake was some a shot of Opal liquor. 4 people shared 1 shot of this and it was still too much. Candice and I met some Swiss girls on our bike ride and after a waffle, decided to go to Kaffibarrinn on Bergstaðastræti (till this day, I am still unable to pronounce this correctly), just 5 minutes from our apartment.

Kaffibarinn used to be part owned by Damon Albarn from Blur. Now what's left of his ownership is the tube sign awning. It's in a cute building that's very chill and unpretentious. It's cozy and has two bars, lots of chairs, a couple of couches, and some KICK ASS music.

One of the girls that we met asked the bartender for something that Icelanders would typically drink and she pulled out a bottle of Opal from somewhere and said that it tasted like Fisherman's (Friend, that is. The nasal passage clearing chalky lozenge). She said it was like candy and it was good, just DON'T DRINK TOO MUCH! She also poured a pint of Viking beer. Candice and our other Swiss friend ordered some Viking beer, which I heard was unspectacular. I had a glass of Iceland's national drink, Coke. People there consume so much Coca Cola, that in a year, they would drink about 380 bottles of it per person. Total consumption for the year is enough to fill up two of the giant water towers that supply the city with water at the Perlan. I just hope they make it with sugarrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The Opal hit you like an ice storm IN YOUR FACE. It was like Fisherman's Friend, Woods Peppermint Cough Syrup AND Nin Jiom Pei Pa Gao (Chinese herbal cough remedy) all in one with 10 times the intensity of all combined.

If there is any advice I can offer you if you visit Iceland, it is stay awayyyy from the local booze. You don't need to have that immersive an experience.

Kaffi

I have a huge huge huge caffeine problem. If I don't have enough at the right time I have an enormous headache. Heathrow is one of my most hated airports and that alone was enough to give me a headache even with a large coffee. So looking for some more once I got to Reykjavik was a top priority.

Things close early there. Shops close at 5.30 or 6. The Bonus supermarket closed promptly at 7. I arrived in the city at about 6.45. I decided to go for a walk in search of the 24 hour supermarket and the apartment manager said opened until 11.30, but stopped short at Babalú, an unbelievably cute cafe at Skólavördustígur 22a.

It was a nice day, so I sat outside.



Iceland doesn't have many trees and the wooden houses were made of driftwood and shipwrecks. French shipwrecks were especially coveted because they brought WINE! Most of the houses are made of corrugated metal or concrete and painted vivid colors which look amazing against the changing greys in sky.

This was my first stop in Reykjavik and I wanted a bottle of water for my outdoor adventures in the next couple of days. I asked the guy if he had some bottled water and he told me pointedly that bottled water came from the tap.



That's glacial ice. And it tasted GOOOD. It is better for drinking at the source, but not for washing off in. I sunk knee deep in mud after being warned not to go too close to the water and had to wash my legs and feet in glacial melt. FREEZING. I love Icelandic water. It tastes amazing. If you travel by Icelandair, you can grab as many free bottled glacial waters as you want, but hey, the tap water is just as delicious. It makes New York Catskill water taste gross.

But back to the cafe! They are a small operation, so depending on how busy they are, they will or will not get to making some of the food (on the first day I was a little too early for crepes, but not too early for sandwiches). Everything is made with much love. I went back on the last day for a coffee and the owner was mixing up some cake batter for a cake!

Sorry about my shaky iPhone, but they had some adorable ads on the walls...







On the last day, I was chatting with the owner and found out he was from Long Island and he'd moved to Iceland 5 years ago to marry his husband. They met at a new year's eve party in Los Angeles and when 9/11 happened, his boyfriend had to move back. Since they could legally get married in Iceland at the time, they decided to both move there. So now he has bought this cafe and has made it unbelievably charming, warm and cozy. I could've stayed for hours.

Við Tjörnina Cookbook

Pamplemousse was dying to see the cookbook that I bought from Við Tjörnina, the best restaurant I ate at in Reykjavik hands down in terms of atmosphere and value for money. They also had an 8 course sampler menu that I was too afraid to try. Icelandic portions really fill you up and it's quality and quantity. With the current exchange rate, restaurants are about London/New York prices for a nice restaurant and much less for a cafe/bistro. If it sounds like a lot, imagine what it would've been last year – so things now are literally half price!

The cookbook makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, much like how my dinner made me feel. The drawings are too cute! I especially like the one with the gutted flat fish.

Even more fish...and waffles

This is how bright it was at 10.30pm. The sun doesn't go down at this time of year, so we worked up an appetite for dinner cycling. A tour guide was supplementing his income by leading free Reykjavik bike tours and working for tips. 6 of his tours in the summer were cancelled because there was a drop in demand for tours and more people were showing up and doing their own thing or camping. So he and his wife/girlfriend bought some bikes and decided to give free tours around the city! He took us through Reykjavik neighborhoods, pointing out hotdog stands, ice cream shops, burgers, lobster soup shacks and finally by the ocean and Bjork's house. (you can allllmost see it in the picture. It is a small 2 storey black house, off into the distance)

Also where the new opera house by the sea to rival Sydney's, which is under construction, designed by Olafur Elisasson. We cycled through the university where it costs NOTHING to go to school. Our guide had 7 degrees, 5 of which were masters degrees, costing him a grand total of $300. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!! Maybe I should move to magical Iceland and get some education. That means that every degree costs about half a monthly MTA metrocard.



Anyway, earlier in the day, a shopkeeper gave us a recommendation for dinner at a place by the lake, Við Tjörnina, which means..."by the lake", that serves meat and fish. They handdraw/write their menus everyday.



It isn't traditional Icelandic food – most people can't stomach real Icelandic food. How about ROTTEN SHARK? Neupe, I'm giving that a miss. BUT, what was special was that this place was decorated like an Icelandic house and we were told that going there was like being invited to dinner in someone's house. So when the bike ride went about 45 minutes longer than anticipated and 40 minutes late, we started getting verrrry antsy. It was 10.45pm and we bolted out of the drop off car even though our guide assured us that Icelanders were very flexible with time and burst into the restaurant apologizing profusely since the kitchen was closing in 15 minutes.







Their menus had some sort of bizarre cover.



And on the inside were more drawings of fish!



All the tables had different decorations and tablecloths. Ours had cross stitch on it. (Hand stitched, NOT printed)



When I went in to make a reservation earlier in the day, I asked what fish just came in and the chef told me that they had gotten some artic char, cod and monkfish fresh in that morning. Candice and I both had the char.



It was HUGE!



It came with some root vegetables and a skinned tomato with some sort of cilantro corridander mix hiding under it. I've never had fish so good and so fresh. I was enticed by their cookbook that was in the lounge where we were waiting for our food and I bought it, captivated by more fish drawings and beautiful photography, despite the fact that I can't understand a single word it says because it is all in Icelandic.

Earlier on the bike ride, I met some people that were looking for the Waffle Wagon earlier in the day. It only makes an appearance late at night, so you have to be patient. It stays open for the late night weekend crowd so it closes whenever people go home early in the morning. 6am? We emerged from the restaurant past midnight, having saved room for waffle.



mmmm tasty waffle. I ate it too quickly to post pictures. But here is their menu: