Wife and I celebrated our 26th anniversary today. She gave me a card, I sent her shirtless pics of Chris Hemsworth on FB. But later in the day I took her out for dinner and then we vegged on the couch watching Netflix for a few hours.
You romantic, you!
This made me chuckle. The whole package is a really cute way to spend an anniversary.
Whenever we do that I get a delayed anger/disappointment reaction a week later, even if such a celebratory venture was her idea. Next time, I’ll try the Shirtless Hemsworth photo in addition. That may do the trick.
Ah, Iceland :). Did you see the troll in the Skógá river in your picture behind Skógafoss? (I’m going to make this a thing).
I never found the Iceland food to be super weird - honestly the Airbnb tours led by young people showed they all loved pizza tbh. Most of that weird stuff seems to be for the tourist. We did try what seemed to have been mostly raw horsemeat or something on a food tour with some chutney. But on the whale watching tour the boat guides seemed to imply (true or not) that much of the weird foods was for tourism. I think they secretly do like headcheese or some other gross thing when in private company though.
OTOH, lamb is a thing. We stopped randomly on the way to Jokulsarlon (like at 9pm and daylight or something) at a bed and breakfast, flanked by pastures full of fluffy baby lambs leaping and frolicking in a field. And then asked if we wanted lamb burgers.
So obviously she had the pasta and i the fish.
Troll? I don’t recall seeing one (or it being called out via signs or anything). There were some vaguely human looking rock formations out there to be sure though…
I wasn’t that bothered by eating lamb despite being surrounded by sheep - not really sure why that was even though I probably would have cut down on beef consumption if I saw cows during my trip at the same frequency.
I went to a horse lodge/farm rental riding tour place in Iceland a few years back, the whole family went for a horseback ride, kids loved it and it was great. We stayed for dinner and the buffet served a variety of meats, no explicit labeling but if you asked you would learn that they served among other meats, horse meat and minke whale meat. Talking more to the staff they had many stories of VERY angry tourists furiously storming out. Their philosophy was that it was no different from eating lamb or beef and they were sticking to it.
If anyone’s curious about Iceland I should be able to answer some questions since I am in fact Icelandic, it may not belong in this thread though?
Apparently the native cuisine of Iceland is something or a lost art, although there are some hipster (which I mean on the nicest way) chefs trying to resurrect it.
I’ve always wondered how accurate these type of resurrected cuisines are. I suspect that most are really more of “inspired” by the ingredients of the given cuisine, than even vaguely pseudo-accurate revivals.
For example, I recently read an article, on a flight, about Chef Sean Sherman, who’s revitalizing Native American cuisine. Here’s a different article on the same chef: The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen
The concept and pictures look great, but I’d be surprised if the a Native American of 150 years ago would recognize the dishes or even the flavors.
Historical cookbooks are tremendously interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. There’s a number of various books / tv shows dedicated to restoring / retaining historical recipes. Where verifiable historical recipes are available, cooks often just respond with disbelief at some of the things they’re instructed to do. Where written recipes don’t exist, and it’s entirely cultural / oral history? It’s likely impossible.
You’re definitely right, in many cases, we don’t even have the ingredients that they would have had just 100 years ago, unless you’re lucky enough to have access to specific heirloom breeds (for produce, but for livestock, eggs, etc as well). Getting appropriately fatty pork is a challenge by itself, for example.
If you can find it, The Supersizers is a delight, as two comedians basically do the “Supersize Me” treatment of immersing themselves for a month in historical cuisine.
Less good, but representative of the treatment, is Lords And Ladles, which is recently available on Netflix
Ooooon the other hand, I’m reminded of this quote from a recent profile of Martin Yan:
There’s no such thing as traditional fried rice. Look at the menu of a typical chop-suey restaurant. You can have vegetarian fried rice. You have egg-white dried-scallop fried rice. You can have Yangzhou fried rice. They’re all fried rice. There’s no such thing as traditional. The way they fry rice in Northern China is a little different from Southern China. Ask a Sichuan chef to fry rice and they’ll add chili. In China, there is no one standard recipe, unlike with something like a traditional eggs Benedict. And even a chef cooking eggs Benedict can create new sauces, new flavor profiles. So in a true sense, what defines tradition is how you execute a dish. A Chinese chef can use any ingredient. If they go to Peru, they have to use ingredients from Peru. If you go to Cuba, you’ve got to use ingredients from Cuba, but you’re still basically doing a Chinese dish.
So, yesterday afternoon I get a call from the folks at the nonprofit that I do IT volunteer work for, all in a panic because they’re getting error messages on some Internet sites and their phones aren’t working right. “I had to call on my cell phone, the office phones won’t dial out!” “I can’t upload my documents to the shared folders!” That kind of thing. I’d already planned to be there the next day so I tell them not to worry, I’ll take a look then.
Today I get over to their office and they’re still having issues. I try to dial out and it gives me some message about allowing only emergency calls. I connect up my laptop to the network, and up pops a warning about accessing an unsafe site. You know, the old “certificate doesn’t match the site name” warning page. As the all-knowing IT guy, I know enough to click past the warnings and find the actual message, which is from AT&T saying there’s an account problem.
The big emergency? Turns out their payment method had expired and AT&T suspended service after they missed payment. Apparently it was a debit or credit card that expired a couple of months back and no one had seen the warning emails or letters. Maybe they tried to call, too, but if so no one ever got the message.
But the really amusing thing to me was that they needed “the IT guy” to figure it out. Amazing how hard it is for the non-technical folks among us to identify the simplest problems!
That’s funny. I had guessed what the problem was before finishing reading your first paragraph.
All right, back at Ft Myers airport beginning the long trek home. Hopefully no stolen airplanes this time.
Edit: but fun storms, I guess? Anyway, stuck at DFW for a little while.
Double edit: and my flight is canceled so I’m sleeping at DFW. And I cant get a flight out until 7pm apparently, and I’ve got to fly through Phoenix. Ain’t that a kick in the head.
I saw a bald eagle today. I’d never seen one in the wild before, so when it flew directly over me, I was pretty excited.
I think it was Bilbo who said: Never leave home.
DFW is Satan’s domain.
Ah but my story turned out happily after all, I wrote this post from home, having just arrived safely. My luggage, unfortunately, has not arrived with us but I guess nobody bats 1.000.
I once had a bass guitar go missing for over a month. It was finally delivered to my door. At 3AM. I wish you much luck.
Which is why I’m flying Spirit for weekend trips to Chicago.
They can’t lose your luggage if you don’t have any.