What We Ate in Norway

I know this is a strange first post about Norway. (I promise I took lots of pretty photos of the scenery, too!) But does anyone else care about the food people eat in other countries? It’s something I’ve always found fascinating. I love food, and I love exploring new countries. So, obviously, I took a lot of food photos in Norway and Iceland. I think it’s time for a food photo dump… are you ready?? K, here we go…!

Our first meal was on the plane from Seattle to Iceland where we had a 1.5-hour layover. This was the vegan meal Icelandair offered. (A falafel salad box that actually wasn’t very good, but I thought it was awesome they had a vegan option at all!)

This was Adam’s jam. Knekkbrød is like a hearty cracker with lots of seeds. Adam ate it every morning with Norwegian cheese. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that we can find knekkbrød at our local grocery store here in Washington, too! We always have some on hand now at the house. It makes such a great snack.

Speaking of cheesy snacks, Lily enjoyed the string cheese of Norway (and we did, too!).

We saw lots of babies eating these puffs, so I got some for Lily since they were gluten-free. They were mostly flavorless and airy so she wasn’t a huge fan.

My one and only bubble tea the entire trip! It wasn’t great, haha. I went for a walk by myself after Lily went to bed one night and I just happened to stumble upon a bubble tea spot that was still open.

None of us liked our food from this salad bowl place, lol. It was cold and boring. Maybe too raw for my liking?

Does anyone else love spending a ton of time at grocery stores in other countries?? Check out these Oreo O’s. They’re about $5.50 per box.

This soda caught my eye because I hadn’t seen a bottle of Surge in so long, but then I realized it said Urge and not Surge. I had to look it up!

“Urge is a citrus-flavored soft drink produced by Coca-Cola Norway that was first introduced in the country in 1996, and later on was released in Denmark and Sweden. It is the predecessor of the American soft drink Surge, which was introduced in the US in 1997. Urge was discontinued in Denmark and Sweden in 2001. In Norway, Urge sales increased greatly over the years reaching a market share near 10% despite receiving no marketing since its initial launch.”

$1.81 for raspberries and $2.26 for blueberries! And people think Norway is expensive…

Norwegians love their wieners.

They also LOVE mayonnaise. Like way more than the Midwest does.

They love cheese, too, but this seemed to be the main brand there. Not a huge selection.

Thank goodness for Skyr. Lily ate a ton of these!

Regular milk was always a bit tough to hunt down, but they had a ton of flavored milks like this at every shop. I accidentally bought the red one without realizing it was strawberry milk. (Figured it was whole milk, whoops.)

Loved this very specific section, lol.

Speaking of tacos… let’s talk about the frustrating experience I had trying to order Lily a quesadilla from this place. (Do they mean Tuesday?)

The girls working at the Mexican restaurant didn’t quite know what a quesadilla was. Or black beans. It was tough, but using teamwork, Google images, and after speaking to someone in the kitchen, we finally figured it out. I think it took almost an hour for the restaurant to make two small cheese quesadillas on corn tortillas for Lily, but hey, it was a big success in the end, lol. I was very appreciative.

Just want to take a moment to mention how very difficult it is having an allergy kid. It’s hard enough in the US, but traveling out of the country is so much more difficult. I packed a ton of food from home in our bags because I was so paranoid she wouldn’t have anything to eat and I knew communication would be difficult. The situation at the restaurant was frustrating at the moment because I just wanted to feed my kid and I was so relieved to have found a Mexican restaurant since those are typically safe places for her, but when even a Mexican restaurant seemed confused about a simple quesadilla, I felt so defeated. Not their fault obviously! But I was appreciative that they worked with me and we figured it out and Lily was able to eat a safe, familiar meal.

Kind bars are Be-Kind bars in Norway.

A typical baby & toddler section in Norway.

I used the Google Translate app a ton on these pouches. So helpful!

Lots of canned fish, obviously.

Loved all of the gluten-free items!

Sad to see whale meat, but totally normal there.

Same with reindeer meat.

Sweet cardamom buns with some sort of custard in the middle.

Adam ordered a waffle and it came with the brown cheese in the middle. Not sure if you recall my Instagram story about brown cheese… but it’s basically described as salty goat fudge. I wasn’t into it, but he liked it!

I loved all of the vegan sweets in Norway. I saw this brand a lot. How cute is their “Be nice.” slogan?

We went to this famous tiny bar in Tromso and got some vegan hot dogs. They were okay... I’ll talk about the bar in a separate post!

Like I said, Norwegians love wieners. We could usually find vegan options at every place that had regular meat options which was nice!

This shop was inside of the airport, btw. At one of those corner shops that sell snacks and magazines. Gotta have hot dogs for flight, too!

Just like the impressive veggie McDonald’s menu, Burger King had a good one, too. We have a plant-based Whopper in the States as well, but we only have one option. (They had four total, just different cheeseburger and hamburger combos.)

Impressive free breakfast spread at one of the hotels. A ton of fish. (Not that we eat fish, but it all looked really fresh and pretty fancy for a hotel breakfast bar.)

Seriously, five or six massive tables like this with endless food options and everything had allergy labels. We ate so well there!

Had to go to Starbucks in Oslo. Our cups certainly don’t have this much detail on them. I want to say ours are mostly compostable though, right? Maybe not… I think it might vary from store to store.

Better vegan options there, too! Not surprised… I think they also had some sort of vegan avocado bagel sandwich situation, but I didn’t look too closely.

Iceland’s baby & toddler food section was amazing! I couldn’t believe all of the snacks and pouches and microwave meals they had there. I went a bit crazy…

It was a relief to find all of these because we were almost out of everything I had packed and we needed snacks snacks snacks for the long plane ride home.

I might write a blog post about what to expect when traveling to Iceland & Norway with little ones (especially those with allergies) because I searched a ton online trying to find info before we left the US and really struggled to find anything helpful. If I had seen photos like this, I would have felt way less worried about packing all of the food we did.

Lily loved these Ella’s Kitchen pouches. Pouches are so so helpful for allergy kids when you have no idea what the food or snack situation is going to be when you travel. I really stocked up for the flight and she went through so many of them!

She loved these when we were in Iceland, too. I might try to find them online. They’re like little puffed rice raspberry gummies.

Another fun snack she loved. They were sort of like a cross between fruit snacks and fruit leather. Pretty small, almost matchstick-sized gummies.

Iceland had these sandwiches everywhere and they were really good! When Adam and I went to Iceland almost 10 years ago, the only vegetarian sandwiches we could find were egg salad sandwiches, so it was great to see they have more variety now.

The best flavor, haha. What does a cool American taste like? I should have purchased a bag to find out.

I have so much to share from Norway and Iceland, it’s just so hard to find the time these days. I honestly haven’t even looked through the photos from my camera yet! Maybe when Lily starts preschool in September, I can focus more on all of the things I used to love so dearly - this blog being one of them. :)

As always, thanks for reading! xo