The Flyvemaskine Diaries

Icelandic fermented shark. It is gross and it smells like ammonia. And we ate it. Check it out:
(For HD click on the title to go to the Vimeo site)

Sampling Iceland’s Tradtional Cuisine from Sara Gray on Vimeo.

We just got back from an amazing trip to Iceland. Which is spelled Island in Icelandic. Go figure. We have wanted to go to Iceland since we have been together, and it has always been too expensive, so we decided to do a stopover there on our way to visit Erika and Morten in Denmark.

The houses were amazing in Reykjavik — lots of corrugated metal and simple shapes and bright colors. There are regular homes right in the middle of downtown Reykjavik, which is a really small city. There are only about 120,000 people living there. That’s literally smaller than Beaverton, Oregon.

We decided we would totally go back to Iceland — next time, though, we’d rent a car and drive around the perimeter of the island (the interior is uninhabitable) and camp and enjoy the outdoors.

Fun fact: The highest recorded temperature in Reykjavik (of ALL time) is 79 degrees farenheit. It was in the 40s when we were there. Luckily, it barely rained at all.

We swam at The Blue Lagoon, which was cool but turned out to be a major tourist trap. We got off our motorcoach from Reykvavik and then soon realized we were being herded down a path like sheep with the entire population of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship — yikes. On the ads for the Blue Lagoon, they show this beautiful blonde Icelandic woman bathing by herself in the thermal pool. Yeah, right.

I’m not technically a lousy blogger, because I blog five days a week on my photography blog, but I still feel like a lousy blogger since we update this one so infrequently. I’ll give you the life update, for those of you who care or even still come here, and then we’ve decided we’ll be posting a little bit more over here about our lives and the food we fill it with (which has been pretty amazing as of late).

First of all, we moved into our apartment in Hillsdale (SW Portland) in June and we totally love it. We love it so much, in fact, that we’re actually moving across the hall to a bigger unit at the beginning of September, which will be great since we’ll have a spare bedroom and room for guests and a separate office.

We are continuing to work hard, Eric is doing lots of IT consulting and my business is growing. It’s the craziness of wedding season right now, which it turns out I totally love, and everything is going really well. Other than that, we’ve been cooking a lot and dreaming of traveling a lot. We think we’ve decided to go to Copenhagen for a week in September to see our friends Erika & Morten and visit the city we haven’t seen since just before we got married. That will most definitely be blogged - funny, we started this blog right before we left for our last trip to Copenhagen - back then it was a Tumblr blog, which was fun.

So get ready for food posts, coming at ya soon. Start reading again, because at least a couple times a week, we’re back.

I’ve never been one for antiquities, but with heirloom tomatoes, I can make an exception.  This week I’ve been trying to come up with as many ways as possible to eat tomatoes without cooking or otherwise covering up the flavor. After all, once they are gone for the season, it’s back to the flavorless mush they sell at the grocery store.

Last week, it was no-cook tomato sauce, which was a huge hit. I did it something like this:

No-Cook Tomato Sauce

Dice or quarter a few tomatoes and place in a large bowl. The tomatoes are preferably at room temperature as the refrigerator can make them mealy. Add chopped basil and minced garlic to the bowl and throw in some kosher salt and pepper. Maybe even some red pepper flakes if you’re into that. Add some good olive oil, maybe a fourth of a cup and combine.

Let the mixture sit covered and unrefrigerated for 30 minutes or more (more is better!) Bring water to a boil and add a pinch of kosher salt just before throwing the noodles in, so its salty like the sea.

Drain the pasta, saving a little of the water just in case. Put the noodles back in the pot, and add the tomato mixture. Let it sit for a minute or two and serve.

To garnish, I added some toasted pine nuts as well, as well as some fresh grated parmesan.

Something is fishy in Portland

Today, the cupboards were almost bare, with the exception of the tomatoes. This calls for fish sauce. What is fish sauce? It’s better not to ask, but if you must know, wikipedia has your answer. If you don’t have this in your kitchen, you are missing out.

Dice up some tomatoes and throw in the fish sauce,  a little salt and pepper, and I was in heaven. Try, you’ll see.

This past weekend, Eric and I went to Pullman (our old stomping grounds) to WSU to watch Eric’s brother Jamie graduate. It was really fun, including the dinner we made for Jamie, their brother Danny and a few of Jamie’s friends on the night before graduation.

Eric made one of his classic recipes - it’s pasta shells with pancetta, asparagus, green beans, shallots, creme fraiche and butter. It’s creamy, fatty goodness and it pretty much melts in your mouth. Yum.

I worked on my forearm muscles by whipping up some fresh cream to adorn our strawberries with for dessert. It was a great meal for the night before graduation. Thanks to Danny for taking all the photos in this post!