More Weird Food

After swearing off fish and potatoes for a couple of weeks, I suddenly had a craving at lunch today for a Swedish meal. (I know, crazy, right?) Possibly to tease me, Niklas took me to this working class roadside stand that might have been a taco cart, only they were selling lunch items that all included fried fish and potatoes. We looked up the name of the type of fish served there in a Swedish-English dictionary, which offered an unfortunate translation: "bloater."

So, I ordered a sandwich called a tunnbrödsrulle med strömming, which means "thin bread with bloater." It was pretty much a Swedish burrito. The "thin bread" was akin to a shortening-free wheat tortilla, rolled around a couple small filets of fried, herring-like fish, some mashed potatoes, lingonberries and some veggies (I think cabbage, grated carrots and bean sprouts). It was pretty tasty, as peasant food tends to be. My colleagues were sort of horrified when we came back to the office and told them what we'd had for lunch, like "What did you take her there for?" I guess checking out interesting street food isn't as popular a pasttime here as in New York.

Also, I tasted a salt fisk (remember the licorice I mentioned in an earlier post?), which had all the makings of a practical joke. After I put it in my mouth someone told me the package actually said "super salty." Can you imagine anything being marketed in the U.S. as "super salty"? (Now, with 85% more sodium!) Ugh, so outlandishly nasty I had to spit it out.