norwegian summer

in which we discover a delicious norwegian snack

have you noticed that i am now in oslo, which deserves its reputation as the world's most inexplicably expensive city?* soon after arriving here last week, i discovered that every place worth eating at is closed for the summer, that norwegian grocery stores sell neither sweet butter nor yogurt containing still-living cultures, and that the price of food here is no indication of its quality.

on the plus, oslo city water is remarkable. for refreshingness and clarity of flavour, it beats boston's quabbin water and new york city's much-vaunted catskills water handily. copenhagen city water cannot be spoken of in the same breath, as it tastes profoundly flat and forms crusty deposits of lime scale at the slightest provocation.

the real gem of norway is Smash! these are crunchy cornmeal and cornflour cones, lightly salted and then dipped in chocolate that appears to be mostly hydrogenated vegetable fat and artificial vanilla. reprehensible, but the balance of crunchy and unctuous, salt and sweet is completely delicious. i have not seen these outside of norway, though they will be a runaway success in japan or the usa.

Smash! is also available in a variety of inferior formats including the mini format (tiny Smash!), the snack mix format (Smash! bits with pretzels), and ice cream format (a giant Smash! filled with ice cream), but the original Smash! is the best Smash!

the name doesn't hurt. i recommend buying an ekstra stor pose.

* (obviously expensive because of the oil reserves, since the sovereign wealth fund has assets in excess of $500bn today, but inexplicable in the sense that it is expensively unspectacular instead of being expensively exquisite. like, say, kyoto.)

the E6

the E6 is one of norway's major north-south freeways. between oppdal and lillehammer, it passes between some steep mountains and can get quite windy.

coffee in a gentrifying neighbourhood

grünerløkka, on the east side of oslo, to be precise. tim wendelboe is both the man and the coffeeshop. the tekangu aeropress was dry, light, acid, and full of berries. he endorses many products including the aeropress (which is nice) and the hario slim grinder MSS-1B (which is an extraordinarily expensive piece of poorly engineered junk). they serve what looks like a 12oz aeropress in a steamer jug, so that you can pour as much as you want into the accompanying cup and thus slow down the overall cooling process. a good idea.

i suppose this could be tasty

relae

the pace of work at noma is crushing; 90-hour weeks are common. when the people who work there leave, sometimes they open their own restaurants with a different approach to service. i met one of the ex-noma guys in aarhus a few weeks ago; he brought an incredible bottle of natural wine with him*, and mentioned that he worked at a new restaurant called relae. we went for dinner on friday night. platings were simple and most everything we had was good. three things were good enough to go back for:

• a pile of fresh peas, a scoop of fresh sheep cheese, a scattering of red pine shoots, and a bright green snow made of pine and peas. these peas were listed as frozen, but they were tiny, sweet, tender, and many had their little funiculi still attached to them. peas begin to convert their sugars to much less tasty starches within minutes of being picked, which is why peas flash-frozen at harvest are almost always better than even relatively freshly picked peas. the chalkiness and mild lactic character of fresh sheep cheese with the citrus aroma of the pine: simple-seeming and very delicious. 
• grilled spring onions, leek stem, and puree of charred onion. charred alliums are always fantastic. they usually have enough water and sugar that very intense heat dries them out a little, caramelises sugars, and drives off some of the sulphur compounds. 
• cooked turnips, strips of lamb from west denmark, marrow broth, samphire, new garlic. this was incredibly good and fully evolved, a perfect dish and one which to me felt indisputably different from noma in style and intent. circulator-cooked, then briefly (very briefly) pan-seared lamb in very thin strips over samphire and new garlic, a clarified marrow broth over that, then a layer of thin slices of cooked white turnips over the top. lamb from the west of denmark is often grazed on salt dunes close to the ocean, giving a slight salt air flavour to the meat. samphire is a succulent that grows in salt soil and becomes salty itself, in a juicy and crunchy way. the turnip slices were softly crunchy and had a mild mustardy bite; the soft crunch is a texture unfairly ignored in western cooking. taken together, a range of beautiful textures and flavours. the lamb was not the main point of the dish.

* a magnum of domaine les griottes navine chenin blanc. i think. things were getting a little hazy by the time it was opened, but it was cloudy bronze, rich, tannic, and full in the mouth, with a distinct bite in the middle of the tongue.

trifle at st john bread and wine

strawberries, sherry-dampened sponge, candied toasted almonds, custard, cream. very delicious and good for your arteries.

the espresso room

this was nice. the espresso room is not in cleveland, oh.

2.5 pounds of british cherries

our true intent is all for your delight

in or near bloomsbury

bohemia

the st john cream donut

the borough market on saturday was a zoo, as you might expect. the line for monmouth snaked around the big table in the shop, then exited the building and went around the corner. but word on the street is that the only reliable time and place to get these cream donuts is on saturday mornings at the st john bakery outpost in the borough market neals yard. there would be a photograph here of the best filled donuts i've ever had, but they were too quickly engulfed.*

the deluge

i left copenhagen on sunday, after a torrential downpour that raised the water level of the inland lakes an appreciable amount while also flooding streets and basements and, not incidentally, my laptop computing device. as it dries out, more and more keys on the keyboard return to full function. it is particularly inconvenient that the backspace key produces a "y," and that the "e" key produces "ypu," though everything else appears fully functional. thanks must be given for small mercies and big ones too.

london and the surrounds for the next two weeks, for a lab with a quite different organisation and philosophy. "field" notes will be left in the places to which you have become accustomed.

unexpected pleasures

pop rocks

garum

pulverised mackerel bones and heads, mackerel guts, whey, salt.

just your regular kitchen cabinet

thinking for the long term

The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost.

danny hillis

thousands of miles away

[photo by corky]

sloes

bulrush

late night, early afternoon

tea

hot: dried gooseberries, dried morels, chamomile buds, chamomile leaves
cold: juniper wood

june

As months go, June is unassailable. It holds the longest day, the lushest greens, the sweetest peas. Its calendar heaves with commencements and betrothals. Roses bloom and strawberries blossom only in June. Fireflies flare against June's night skies alone. Its birthstone is the pearl! Fresh and unfettered, June knows nothing of the clawed, parched trail of summer days to come, and returns, every year, as deeply and perfectly June as ever.

anson mills

sprezzatura

(definition)

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.

jonathan ive

[thx josh]

beach greens

ved stranden 10

the one thing you never do (or at least i never do) before arriving at a field site is check to make sure i'm not arriving on a public holiday. thursday was the day of the ascension in denmark, a public day of rest followed by the pseudo-holiday that always shows up whenever the possibility of a 4-day weekend arises.

a holiday for the field site is a holiday for me too. i spent much of the last 48 hours, both of which featured impeccable weather (warm, bright, clear, dry), taking naps under trees, by the waterfront, and in parks, all of which copenhagen is abundantly provisioned with.

late in the day, i took the bike over the bryggebroen that connects vesterbro with the islands brygge, and then along the waterfront path heading in the direction of christianshavn. the city built, some years ago, a public swimming facility here (havnebad), and on a hot summer day the danes come out in force. almost all i heard spoken was danish, which suggests that there were hardly any tourists. why aren't they here? i asked myself (later, when i unwisely cut through part of strøget, the shopping street, to get home, i figured it out: all the tourists are at H&M). the only obviously non-danes i saw were a few asian and eastern european folks with large bags filled with recycling. bottles and cans spent no more than a few minutes in trashcans or on the ground before they were picked up. think paris plages but less hokey, with more blonde people, and fewer empties. there were also many souped-up powerboats. i saw several <12-ft fiberglass craft with 300hp outboards on the back, and the water was filled with the sound of acceleration and boats bouncing on the chop.

after that, a peaceful ride through the assorted piers and docks of christianshavn, which revealed numberless vistas of people sitting around cloth-covered picnic tables stocked with lots and lots of wine and real wineglasses. norbert elias notes, in a somewhat different context, that civilisation is indicated by the use of cloth and glass.

then there is ved stranden 10. at 8pm, the sun still a hand's width above the city roofs, i stopped by to take a look at a shop whose windows were filled with bottles labeled in a style even a relative novice in natural wines, as i am, recognises as being of a type: no bright colours, untraditional, scrawly handwriting often in evidence. inside, carefully selected furniture, lots of copies of monocle and the new yorker, and a long list of wines by the glass that included a vin jaune from the jura, an oxidised yellow wine (i never see this on lists of wine by the glass). all good indications.

i got a glass of the vin jaune and went outside to read by the water. when the glass showed up, it came with a few pieces of 2 year old comte that were soft, ripe, sweet, and nutty. the wine was incredibly delicious, perfect for the weather, and complex: rich, mouth-filling, lightly oxidised, plenty of acid, the bite of alcohol, the flavour of all sorts of summer fruit, the odd, unsettling but also comforting aroma of a geueze. i've never had anything like it and it was especially perfect because completely unexpected. upon inquiry, it turned out to be a 2002 vintage from jean-françois ganevat, one of 12 bottles in denmark. it was nice that it took some investigation to figure this out, because ganevat is another of the hero winemakers of the natural wine nerd movement.

another beautiful, unassuming* place, like frederiks have. and their coffee program is supervised by the coffee collective. very nice.

* "Kun vine, som vi selv sætter pris på at drikke, såvel i langstilket krystal som i sennepsglas, finder vej til sortimentet."**
** "Only wine we like to drink, either in long-stemmed crystal or in a mustard jar, finds its way into the selection."

freedom, choices, style

You're bringing an informed aesthetic point of view to a visual problem. You have freedom, so you have to make choices—and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building: It's a signature.

frank gehry, reported by alex hoyt.

ttfn

will i ever again plan to move to a different apartment on the same day that i leave for a field site for 7 weeks and on which a major paper i owe the department comes due?

you can, therefore, imagine what the last week has been like.

i never know who reads this but say hello if you happen to be close to denmark, sweden, the UK, or norway in the next 7 weeks.