KennethT

Appetizer of Lady Wong curry puff, then Thai style steamed red snapper with lime sauce, with some stir fried Chinese broccoli. Fish steamed in the CSO. Pulut inti from Lady Wong for dessert.

We spent about a week or so in south island New Zealand in Dec. 2019 (check it out in the New Zealand dining forum). It is gorgeous and definitely worth visiting - we barely scratched the surface of it, but it's a totally different experience/scenery than Iceland. They're both uniquely wonderful.

Thanks... makes sense - Iceland is probably about as far away from you as you could get (other than the North Pole!).

Thanks - yeah, I have one of them also (a cheap Harbor Freight special) but never thought to use it in the kitchen. As @Steve Irbysays, as tools go, it's one of the safer ones out there. Definitely much safer than a reciprocating Sawzall!

huh. I never thought of wrapping it in plastic wrap. Simple - I like it! One final question - how do you use it so it doesn't tear up your cutting board as you cut through the meat? Do you freeze the meat first or does it not matter?

How do you wash it? I know the blade is removable, but sometimes gunk gets everywhere.

Thanks - I use my 16 year old Krups rice cooker/slow cooker. The key is to wash it well, use the proper amount of water - for Jasmine that means using enough to hydrate teh rice but not boil it. Jasmine rice has to steam once hydrated. One thing I learned about my machine is that when it says the cycle is done and it switches to keep warm mode, you really need to keep it in there unopened for an extra half hour or so, then it comes out like this. I'm going to pick up more tamarind this weekend. I can get some a couple blocks away from me but it wouldn't be "seedless", but I can go down to the Thai store and pick up what I want, which I'll do this weekend as I'm out of my giant economy sized bag of rice and I need more rice bran oil, which they have at a really good price. I think the postage from Costa Rice would be a LOT more than the value of the product inside!

Singaporean Nyonya curry with a bit less tamarind than normal

Only leave myself with 15g of tamarind pulp! How do I not have an extra block in the pantry?!?

Yeah, I read about that...

Sichuan twice cooked mahi mahi

I need to find a way to take a trip there during mango season!!!

What do you do for pho broth? Homemade? Northern or Southern style?

But to how many decimal places? Seriously, is there a reason for using an irrational number as a measurement?

How was El Quijote?

I've had BonChon in NY - their wings are good.

Foot burnin' chicken tacos....

Could be?!?! I'm insulted!!! Just kidding, but really, it is very delicious. And conveniently....

Javanese chicken soup.... Oh how I've missed you!!!

Nyonya chicken curry with belacan bok choi

@Shelbydid you ever try the Kent mango from Misfits?

Red snapper on mango som tum

Coming this Xmas/NYs to an eGullet near you...

For the next trip, pack sunglasses, sunscreen and a 2nd stomach.... Penang, Malaysia! One of the street food capitals of SE Asia...

On the road again.... this time it was a 5 hour drive to get back to Reykjavik in order to catch our plane the next day. After packing up the car, we took a short walk to see this small waterfall which we could see from our hotel room. Our first stop was in Vik, about halfway between where we started and Reykjavic, for lunch. We went back to the first place we stopped. At this point we were feeling slightly bloated from eating all the red meat and bernaise/hollandaise sauces that we had over the last week. We rarely eat red meat or those heavy types of sauces. Cured salmon salad. The salmon was a little salty, but not too bad, and had a nice dill flavor. Arctic char. One thing we neglected to have on this trip so far was a hot dog. For some reason, Iceland is known for hot dogs. I was curious so I read a bit about them - turns out that they are typically made from a combination of lamb (mutton?), beef and pork but are mostly lamb (mutton?). We passed this place by in Selfoss many times - it was across the street from the Kurdish shawarma place we went to. This is the basic hot dog. It's covered in a slightly sweet mustard and has fried onions in the bottom. It was really tasty. I don't know if I'd rank it above my NY hot dog with spicy mustard and sauerkraut but it was tasty and slightly addictive. It was a little tough not to walk back and get another one. 550 Krona which is about $4.25 US. We got to Reykjavic in the late afternoon, checked in to our hotel and then walked around a bit before our dinner reservation - I made a reservation once I checked into the hotel using a common reservation app they have there. Most of teh restaurants I had wanted to try were booked, but I found one that had a couple tables left. Outdoor seating filled with tourists The rainbow bridge (street) to Asgard One of Reykjavic's most recognizable spots, a church design inspired by the Svartifoss waterfall Inside the church is a large pipe organ. People were allowed in for free to watch the organist prepare for a concert they were having the following day I really enjoyed watching the guy prepare. I've seen videos of pipe organs being played, but I don't think I've ever seen one played in person. We finally tore ourselves away from watching the rehearsal since we had to walk across the city (it's not that big) for our restaurant reservation. Oddly enough, the prices here were similar to what they were out in the middle of nowhere - maybe even a little less!!! And what we had was fantastic. I think the chef is originally French but lived in Iceland for a long time. Hot smoked salmon with a citrus yogurt. This was fantastic - the salmon was perfectly cooked, juicy and smoky. Hearty langoustine soup a la Robert. Also really tasty - great langoustine flavor and a few pieces of perfectly cooked langoustine. Fillet of horse. This was amazing. The horse is lean and has a lot of flavor, tender but with a decent chew. We really enjoyed it. Arctic char with a croquette of bacala. Again, perfectly done. We're not usually dessert people but this looked so interesting. It's the skyr mousse and rhubarb compote. We really liked how it wasn't too sweet or heavy. It had an interest combination of textures and flavors and the rhubarb gave it a good lift. This was probably the best meal we had, overall, on this trip. I would very heartily recommend it and would go again if ever in Reykjavic. After dinner we walked back to our hotel which is pretty much in the center of town. While walking around Reykjavic during the day it was quite nice, but we weren't fans of it come night - tons of young people who were extremely drunk and loud wandering the streets, some quite obnoxious. It also seemed like cruising through the streets with a muffler cutout is a thing to do there as we saw many cars doing it. The above restaurant was out of the city center a bit and that area was much quieter - like a residential area. I would much rather have stayed in a hotel in that area. Even though our hotel had double glazed windows and we were on the 4th or 5th floor, you could hear the bass from a nearby night club and people carousing. Luckily for us, we're from NYC so that type of noise is like a lullaby but I could imagine it being quite annoying for people not used to it. Our flight the next day didn't take off until around 8PM, so we had plenty of time to walk around Reykjavic some more. Breakfast at this hotel was ok but they didn't have the chia porridge that my wife had every day for the past week. A blue cheese and "camembert", croissant and cured salmon with blini. I have a weird buckwheat allergy, so of course I asked the staff if there was any buckwheat in the blini - turns out that no one knew, even the cook came out and talked to me about it. Evidently they're not made in house but the cook was eventually able to find an ingredient list for the blini and confirmed no buckwheat. After waiting around for like 20 minutes for an answer, I had it and after all that, it wasn't even good! Ha! The salmon was pretty good though - I enjoyed it more on its own. We looked at some classic Icelandic architecture - not that we didn't see it all over when in the countryside... Sculpture celebrating the Viking heritage. We decided to go back to Asgard since you could go to the top of the tower and we didn't have a chance to do that the day before. The bells toll every 15 minutes... I didn't edit the video but I think it's worth the wait. After that we had a late lunch - spoiler alert, this was maybe the worst (and most expensive) meal of the trip. Cured salmon. This was probably the best thing we had. Creamy langoustine soup - they should put more emphasis on the word creamy. It tasted mostly of cream. Arctic char - this was the most overcooked, dry char we had in Iceland... Wolf fish - this was ok, but I could have done without the cream sauce. After lunch (which took a REALLY long time since between our appetizers and main courses a tour bus full of people came in and bogged the kitchen down), we sauntered our way back to the hotel to pick up our bags and make our way to the airport. After going through security etc. we decided to get something to eat as they wouldn't serve anything on the 6 hour flight. Fried chicken legs. I think this was the first time we saw chicken on a menu since getting to Iceland! It was pretty good, especially for an airport. Fried chicken sandwich. The day before, we went to the supermarket to pick up some snacks to have on the plane. We looked all over for more of those lamb sticks but couldn't find them anywhere. Some sort of pork jerky. It was quite tender but very tasty. I think the package contained one long rope! Dried cranberries Crackers So that's it! Thanks for reading along. I'm sure we'll be going back to Iceland at some point - there's so much to see there.