(Odd) foods of Norway

It's not like the food in Norway is all that different from home; pizza, tacos, spaghetti etc. are all normal. I'm not going to talk about the strange Norwegian foods that come up when you google search it either; I've never even seen lutefisk (jellied fish) or smalahove (sheeps head)

Rather, just a few foods you come across in fridges and cupboards that aren't necessarily strange to most people, but just unusual for me. Doesn't mean I don't like these foods either:

• Flatbrød: if eating paper is your idea of a good side dish, then here you go. It shatters when you try to put on any topping, except maybe sour cream. Even though basically all food packaging is smaller than home, sour cream containers here are bigger than the ones we bought at home. figures!

        

• Pickled/canned fish: 

I still don't get this pickled fish in a jar/bucket idea (they eat it for breakfast on bread), and I've never bothered trying it before. But for the sake of this post, I did.:

It was....chewy and sweet and weird. Fish shouldn't be sweet! 

• Bread: I pretty much hated eating bread before I came here, unless it was toasted or fried in some way. The everyday bread here is much denser than at home (you can see a chunk in the picture above), and actually tastes good without compressing into a squishy little ball. So whole wheat bread is more the norm, and I actually WILL make a sandwich when I'm hungry instead of eating crackers, like Dad always told us to do :P

• Salad dressing (or lack thereof): The only kind of salad dressing I've seen used here is thousand islands, and I'm usually the one who remembers to bring it to the table. They like to eat salad with their other food, putting a bit on their fork along with meat or potatoes or whatever. Like trying to disguise it so they don't notice they're eating vegetables? I tend to eat things in order, usually from what I like least to most, without mixing much. Maybe I'm just strange.

          They also use the same word for "lettuce" and "salad", making things more confusing. 

• Hamburger dressing: just like a flavoured mayonnaise. No doubts about what you put this sauce on!

• Chocolate pudding: The exchange students like to make fun of this one. Chocolate pudding here is a jelloey square that comes out of a box, and is basically plain brown jello with a slight hint of chocolate. It looks chocolatey, but I'm pretty sure that's mostly food colouring.

• Kaviar in a tube: I always thought caviar cost like $20000 per spoonfull, and was the steryotypical rich person food. Or, you know, you could come to Norway and buy toothpaste tubes of it and squeeze it all over your breakfast (why do all these foods seem to be breakfast related?) I'm guessing it's blended out with other ingredients and a different kind though, not that I know anything about caviar. I've grown to like it over the past couple months though, even if I never thought I would.

That's all that comes to mind for now, I guess the rest seems normal to me? I told Tonje I'd meet her for a run at 8 so I guess I should go change, although this chair is much more inviting than outside, where it's been foggy and cold all day. Don't think I've ever been so ready for warm weather; the Norwegian weather website has popped up in my top visited sites over the past week or two.