Christmas, New Year

After Iceland, we returned to face the festive season full on. Which meant my wife went into full-on cook-and-bake mode, to my delight.

First up, the traditional-in-our-house Brussels Sprout soup:

 

Creamy and warming, and a good start to the Christmas feeling. I can recommend it even if you don't much like brussels sprouts, really: the best way to eat them is like this.

Next up, some scones to comfort me while I weep over the end of The Snowman.



We ate these with clotted cream and raspberry-and-ginger jam from Iceland. I'm a sucker for scones and cream, and the jam was just unusual enough to make this a bit different, a warmer spicier sort of taste overall.



Spinach, cheese and spring onion puff pastry swirls. We had manchego and gorgonzola in the fridge, so both of those went into these. Really fresh-tasting with the spring onions, really rich and gooey to eat.

And then of course, Christmas Day!



We're not big believers in a giant turkey on Christmas Day, so we usually go for a duck instead, and kept that up this year. Roast duck with orange liqueur glaze, roast potatoes, stuffing balls, brussels sprouts, yorkshire puddings, bread sauce and gravy. We drank it with sparkling yuzu flavoured sake, and it was great.

The duck was lovely, really juicy, and there was just enough of everything to leave a few leftovers but not huge piles of them.



The Christmas pudding was started weeks in advance and gradually topped up with more booze over time. Then it's steamed on the day, for two hours, and it is amazing. No storebought pudding is a patch on this type of thing. It's so soft, and light and moist.

Also, you can serve it with your choice of these:



That right there is like my idea of heaven, honestly. Cream and custard? Oh baby.

Other Christmas bakes that I have been presented with:

 

Leftover pies! With the meagre leftovers of the main meal, plus some cumberland sauce, wrapped in shortcrust pastry. Very good!



Cranberry and stilton swirled into bread! This was amazing when it was still hot and gooey, but a lot easier to cut when cold. Lasted us barely one day, because it was too tasty to not just wolf down.



and finally, rosemary and cheese scones! Very filling, these. Made from a Paul Hollywood pre-mixed flour thing, with extra cheese on top.

We also went out for food twice -- once popping into the cafe Timbers in Colchester Town centre, for quick comfort food after work.



Jacket potato with cheese and beans is very much comfort food.

We also went to the chain restaurant Chiquito over by Stanway Tollgate on new year's day for a meal with a friend.

 

Steak fajitas! Chiquito's little thing with their guacamole is that 'you get to grind it yourself!' which, er, okay? It looked pretty damned ground-up already, to me, but also devoid of much tomato, to my delight. Raw tomato isn't a good thing for me. Anyway, the meal was good. A little pricy, but the service was very good and I think they expect you to knock back the relatively cheap drinks to make up for the food prices.

Here's to more delicious things in 2017!

Wednesday in Iceland: The Fish Market

On Wednesday we took a lovely tour around the south coast of Iceland. This arrived back in Reykjavik at about half past seven, and we asked the hotel to try and book us somewhere for dinner that evening.

We lucked out; they booked us a table at The Fish Market.

Since it was our last evening in Iceland, we decided to go for the tasting menu option here, along with a couple of cocktails to start things off. I had a ginger martini (captain morgan, triple sec, ginger liquor, apple juice and fresh ginger -- not as nice as the Matarkjallarin one, but very nice) and my wife had the Mr Nikka (nikka whisky, elderflower liquor, lemongrass liquor, fresh lemon, honey, chili, egg white and bitters), a cocktail that was served in a noodle box and topped with dried noodles. It was also delicious, thankfully.



Our tasting menu was nine courses long! 



To start with: Arctic char with edamame puree, dried fish, pickled ginger and thin-sliced cauliflower. We each took one half and ate it in one mouthful, and lo, it was delicious.

 

Minke whale with horseradish, redcurrants and soy sauce. I know, it's whale. I wouldn't have ordered it off the menu personally, but once set in front of me I don't see the point in sending it back. It was delicious, in fact -- like a really meaty fish -- though not enough so to make me decide that whaling is worthwhile.

 

Next up was marinated herring with ryebread and orange-flavoured whipped butter. We were advised to butter the bread and eat the herring as a topping. This was really good. The herring was sweet and almost like a dessert.







Rock shrimp tempura with jalepeno dressing. We don't know why the tempura is red, but it was tasty.

Scallop nigiri and volcano maki (langoustine tartar with sesame oil, 7 spice and chilli on top of maki roll with salmon and cucumber). Very tasty, though I'm not a convert on the same level as the people next to us who apparently always come back here for it when they visit Reykjavik.

Salted cod with pureed celery salad and potato. This was pretty good, but not so outstanding I'd want a full dish of it, I think. Tasting menu sizing was just right for me.

Beer steamed mussels -- the waitress poured in tea under the dish of mussels and it foamed up with dry ice, a very pretty way to present it. After we'd eaten the mussels, the waitress gave us little cups to pour the broth into so we didn't waste the tastiness.

 

Pork belly and goose breast with confit leg of goose, cauliflower potato, pickled vegetables, whipped butter 'snow', and mushroom puree. This was good, and rich, and felt luxurious to eat.

And finally the dessert, from left to right: white chocolate and passionfruit cheesecake, raspberry mousse with poured lava sauce, lychee sorbet, red velvet cake with italian meringue topping, and raspberry sorbet. My heart is sold; two raspberry things! And the rest were delicious too.

This was... a lot of food. But great, and a really lovely way to finish off our trip. 

And there was coffee, too. In fact, there was a lot of coffee in Iceland that has gone unmentioned, but I should say: in the whole time I was there, I didn't have a bad coffee. I am astonished and awed. Good work, Iceland.

 

Tuesday in Iceland: Svarta Kaffid and Sjavargrillid

Tuesday was assigned to be our 'wander Reykjavik' day. Reykjavik isn't very big, and we'd criss-crossed it during the food tour, but we did stop by a place I'd seen recommended online: Svarta Kaffid.

According to the waitress, locals barely notice it's there (it's on a mezzanine above street level), but tourists flock there due to excellent online reviews for their soup-in-bread dishes.

 

We had reindeer soup, because it was seasonal, and it was very good. And also fun, once you've guzzled the soup, ripping the bread bowl apart and eaten the soaked-with-soup innards.

Our afternoon involved swimming, and we walked to and from the pools in a howling blizzard that threatened to knock us off our feet and which did knock a coach over outside Reykjavik. Our trip back involved a little stop-off at a cafe called Kornið Bakarí -- which was very cheap, especially by Icelandic standards. It seemed to be popular with pensioners!



The coffee was drinkable and the pastry was sweet and covered in caramel sauce. Perfect for recovering from swimming and icy winds.

That evening we had a dinner reservation (made for us by Wake Up Reykjavik) at Sjavargrillid, just off the main street. I wanted another ginger-y cocktail, after the one at Matarkjallarin, and asked the barman to improvise something dry without gin.

It involved whisky, campari, ginger ale and cinnamon, and flames at one point to singe the rosemary. It was very tasty, and I kept that cute little cocktail stick too.

The meal started with a little appetiser of prawns in pickled vegetables, along with the standard bread and whipped butter.



Then the mains! My wife had salted cod, and I had pork belly and reindeer.



(I'll confess; I expected to be able to skim their menu to pick out more information about the ingredients for this post, but the menu online isn't the same one that we were given. But both our meals were delicious!)

For dessert, Pez had a Ris A L'amande with apple sorbet, and I had a chocolate mousse that came with a caramel mousse and a raspberry cake-and-sorbet confection.



I am a sucker for raspberry everything. This made me so happy.

We waddled back through Reykjavik after this, again very full and very content. I think of the three restaurants we went to for dinner, this was the least impressive, but it was still very good -- it's just tough competition!

Monday in Iceland: foodie tour

We had arranged a foodie tour with Wake Up Reykjavik, who were delightful in email communications and who also booked two restaurant reservations on our behalf.

Our guide was the lovely Gabriela, who was friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Iceland, food and all sorts of information on culture and mythology.

Our first stop was Íslenski Barinn, a cosy bar that serves lots of different Icelandic beers and also traditional Icelandic food. Here we were given lamb stew (there's a lot of lamb in Icelandic meals) with bread and more whipped butter.




And then we were given the option of fermented shark. Which we tried, of course!

It tastes like cheese made from fish. Not awful at all -- pungent, definitely, but not bad. Our guide explained that it's not usually eaten at this time of year; usually it's eaten in February as part of a week of traditional fermented/pickled foods, and so this particular shark was not as thoroughly fermented or strongly-tasting as it would be normally. I would happily eat it after another couple of months of fermentation, I think.

Next up was a stop at Ostabúðin á Skólavörðustíg -- a sort of delicatessen cafe on the main street in Reykjavik.



Here we were given samples: first meats, then cheeses.

 

The meats we sampled were smoked lamb, horse, and cured geese. My first taste of horse! It tastes very like beef. The cured goose was very nice, quite gamey. The cheeses were a smooth gouda, a brie, and a blue cheese -- all of which were produced in Iceland, and which our guide was very proud to describe to us, since cheesemaking in Iceland is a relatively new thing.

 Our next stop was Caffe Loki, a cafe up near the big cathedral Hallgrimskirkja.




They serve an icecream here that is made from the same dark sweet ryebread that crops up a lot in Icelandic meals. It's bread icecream, and it is delicious, and comes topped with cream and caramel syrup.

After this we ambled down to Bæjarins Beztu, the oldest 'restaurant' in Iceland, established about eighty years ago.



It's a hot dog stall! The hot dogs are made with lamb, which makes them quite rich, and they were delicious enough that almost everyone had two, with mustard and mayo and fried onions.

I can't remember, but I think this was the point in the tour at which we were given tubs of Skyr -- the icelandic thick yoghurt -- to eat as we walked. Strawberry flavour, which I usually avoid, but this was nice enough and the texture of this brand was creamier and thicker than the variant sold in the UK under the brandname of Skyr. Eating it in the wind and cold was a challenge, though!

Next up was a walk down to the Old Harbour, and Sægreifinn - Sea Baron restaurant, a place that feels very old-fashioned and has a waxwork model of the old owner sitting under the staircase to surprise you with. Here we had lobster soup (and more bread and whipped butter).

(Both excellent.)

From here we went to the rather upscale-feeling surroundings of Apotek, a restaurant in a building that was purpose-built as a pharmacy and which is decorated appropriately.



This was apricot marscapone dessert with hazelnut and caramel, plus mango and passionfruit sorbet.

(It looked delicious even inside. And a very nice coffee to go with it.) 

That was the final stop of the food tour, and it was a delicious finale. Our guide gave each of us a Sirius chocolate bar to cap everything off.

It was a wonderful tour, and a really good start to the trip -- even without the food, it would have been a nice tour around Reykjavik, but it certainly didn't hurt to eat such delicious food and to have such pleasant company to do so in! Highly recommended.

Having filled up on the tour, our dinner that evening was drinks, bread and a grilled cheese sandwich in the bar of the Fosshotel Reykjavik (where we were staying). 



Even the grilled cheese sandwich was delicious, and the mulled spiced wine was a very nice cap to the day!

Night 1 in Iceland: Food Cellar Matarkjallarin

We'd arranged a reservation for our first night in Iceland: Food Cellar Matarkjallarin. It was at the far end of Reykjavik's centre from our hotel, which meant a twenty-minute amble in windy weather. We were quite peckish by the time we got there.



Matarkjallarin offers a few set menus, an a la carte menu, and a tasting menu which we eventually plumped for.

But first: a green tea gimlet (gin, green tea syrup) for my wife and a molecular lemon drop cocktail (vodka, lemon juice, sugar syrup, cointreau foam) for me, both of which were delicious.



Alcohol in Iceland is expensive, so those cocktails cost us about £15 each. Everything in Iceland is expensive, truth be told, but the cocktail menu was too tempting to pass up.

Like most meals in Iceland, this one started with warmed ryebread and whipped butter.

 

Icelanders are understandably proud of their dairy produce; the butter everywhere is gorgeous to eat.

Our first course was slow cooked cod with asparagus, smoked dried lamb, langoustine-hollandaise sauce and croutons. It was delicious; the cod was melt-in-the-mouth good, and the lamb was salty and earthy, and the hollandaise was creamy and tasty.



Next up was cured salmon with mustard, mayo and thin-sliced cucumber. The cured salmon had a really nice consistency, firm and almost sashimi-like, and the whole thing was really nicely balanced. Possibly a bit mustardy for some people but I really like mustard.



Then came tiger prawns in a sort of string batter with panzo sauce and chilli dressing. The batter was such a nice, crunchy texture! Really fun, if a bit messy to eat. I ordered a glass of wine at this point, which was a decent standard white wine and I mention it only because it is relevant later.

The next course was pork loin and lamb, with celeriac and pickled something. The pork loin was so, so soft and caramelised, it was blissful. The mashed celeriac cake was a delight, too.

 

There was a long delay at this point. We were quite full, warm, happy to just sit and chat to each other. It helped that we could see that the waiters were noticing our lack-of-dessert-course regularly and kept going to chase it up, but it still took perhaps forty minutes and a lot of scrambling and several apologies before the dessert arrived. The head waiter came and apologised and offered us a free cocktail each (which was very generous) and told us the dessert would be free too. Which is a good way to apologise, really.

We ordered a ginger martini (dark rum, ginger syrup) and a dry martini (gin, vermouth, lemon). The ginger martini was so good that it sent me off on a quest for ginger syrup so I could attempt to replicate it, because I need more of that in my life.

The dessert, when it arrived, was the chef's mother's Christmas meringue recipe, with strawberries and white chocolate sauce. It felt a lot like a seasonal Eton Mess, in fact, and we liked it a lot. The desserts both came with a little fortune-cookie-ish message in; my wife's was seeded with a 'you are a winner' message that landed her with a little package of Icelandic sweets, which was a nice touch.

Top one says: congratulations, you are a winner. My fortune says: better a flat beer than a dry bottom (of a glass). A pun!  I approve greatly.

The winning package has a Hraun bar, some chocolates, some toffees and a lollipop.

We topped the meal off with coffee served in a thermos flask that my wife had to show me how to use; I'd never seen one with this integral pouring spout on top! The coffee was smooth and delicious, too.

At this point the waiter came and explained that as our dessert was part of the tasting menu they couldn't give it to us free, so instead they just gave us all our alcohol free, merry Christmas, they hoped this made up for the delay.
I'm just going to explain this in actual money value: the tasting menu was approximately £70 per head. The alcohol came to about £90 in total, we calculated afterwards. As apology gestures go, I think that's the most generous I've ever received in return for minimal irritation and annoyance. A very pleasant way to start our trip, in other words! We wound our way back through the windy cold streets of Reykjavik afterwards, replete and tipsy.

Next day: a food-sampling tour of Reykjavik! Which absolutely deserves its own post.