Iceland!

I just got back from Iceland. I’ve been obsessed with Iceland for over 15 years now and have desperately wanted to visit, but I suppose I hadn’t had the same overlap of opportunity, means, time, etc until now.

One thing that I was not expecting: the food in Iceland is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Like, anywhere you go. It doesn’t matter if it is a fancy restaurant, a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, a tourist trap, a dive, etc. All food in Iceland is amazing. It is like all the cooks went, “Yea, I know I’m a cook in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere and people are going to have to stop here no matter what, but dangit I’m a cook so I’m going to do my darndest and cook the best I can!” Even the gas station hotdogs were pretty darn good. It is amazing! How can the food be so universally good? I wonder if it is because it is all so fresh and free of hormones and preservatives, or if everybody just really takes cooking seriously, or some combo. Either way I’m not complaining.

I also think that Iceland has the perfect weather. For me. I usually have a problem with feeling far too warm, and basically any time it gets over 75F I melt. Whenever I was outside, the temperature was perfect and I felt super comfortable. Now, I don’t like it miserably cold like way below freezing or anything. But it doesn’t really get miserably unbearably cold in Iceland. It doesn’t get as cold as New York or Minneapolis, for example, because it is warmed by the gulf stream. So I actually found the weather extremely pleasant. Especially after we’ve had what seem like endless heat waves in California >:(

I liked the wilderness explorations as well as hanging out in the city. We structured the trip such that the first half of the trip we would do wilderness stuff, and then the second half of the trip we would just wander around Reykjavík and look at the shops and bars, etc. There are several backpacking trips that I am really interested in, which would require going back in the summer.

Back in college, I actually started teaching myself to read and write Icelandic so I could read the sagas, but I only knew how to read and write it. I never learned to speak or hear it, and on this trip I have realized that the pronunciations are all completely different from how I had imagined they would be. There’s a lot for me to learn in order to speak it. So now I think my goal is to be able to learn enough of it to have very basic conversations by the time I go back again for my backpacking trips. I’ve already got most of the noun declension down from the reading/writing, so now it will be about ear training and pronunciations.

Being an Altmer Dragonborn can be Confusing

torizel-comic-compressor
Click for full size (so you can actually read it)

I rolled an Altmer Dragonborn recently because… because.

When he went to Markarth, he was almost immediately handed a note asking him to meet Eltrys at the secret shrine of Talos. And I just cracked up.

I know that not all Altmer are Thalmor, but still. Maybe pause for a minute and think about what you’re doing, if some strange Altmer you’ve never seen before rolls up into town under mysterious pretenses, and your first impulse is to invite him to meet you at the local Talos shrine.

Or, maybe, don’t invite ANY random strangers to meet you at the secret Talos shrine. Because you never know who’s been paid off by the Thalmor.

So I’d like to think that my Dragonborn can’t help but wonder if he was being made fun of. So I drew this comic about it.

Furry Little Coat of Mold

Our homemade brie is successfully growing its furry little coat of mold! And just look at how different they look compared to when I first took the curds out of the forms!

Our homemade brie is successfully growing its furry little coat of mold
Furry Cheese

They’ve really flattened out. I didn’t even notice this until I looked back at that old post!

Trying our hand at brie now
When I first turned the curds out of the forms… they were so much taller and fatter back then!

However, I did hit a bit of a snag, which I think I should warn everybody about. I was following instructions from a zine that said, “when you see mold, wrap it in cheese paper” so I did just that. The zine then went on to describe all the terrible horrors that await the person who waits too long to wrap their cheese (and showed photos of drying mats tearing the mold off of the surface of the cheese, thereby ruining it). Nowhere did it mention it would be a problem to wrap the cheese too early.

Turns out this was slightly misleading. I interpreted this to mean, “wrap the cheese as soon as you see even a microscopic hint of mold,” when actually what they meant was “once the cheese is completely covered with a thick blanket of mold.” The problem with covering the cheese with cheese paper as early as I did is that the moisture sitting on the cheese where the paper is touching it will actually inhibit the mold growth (which is ironic, as mold will also fail to form if there’s not enough moisture).

Luckily, I was so excited to see how the mold was coming along that I unwrapped it to take a peek and noticed that the sides were covered with a luxurious coat, whilst the tops and bottoms were patchy-to-completely-bare. Concerned, I looked up a second opinion on brie making, and saw that the consensus was to wait until your brie is completely covered before wrapping it. Whoops! So I unwrapped them and returned them to the casserole dish that had previously been their mold-making home. There, I hoped they would still form the mold all over, as if I hadn’t ever wrapped them in paper.

Luckily, it would appear that they have quickly recovered from this error, as you can see in the photo above (taken about a week after discovering my error). I don’t know what this means for the aging time, to be honest. I suppose I’ll have to feel it out. By the original estimates, they should be ready next week at the earliest, but they are supposed to age for ~4 weeks after getting wrapped so I think this moves things back a bit.

So let this be a warning to all you would-be cheesemongers out there: wait until your brie is completely covered in mold before you wrap it in cheese paper, or meet the same fate! No matter what your zines say.