Uhm, yeah…the food wasn't ever one of those things that called to me, except maybe Lingonberries. 😀
When I was young (early to mid-1980s), my parents would take us to Griswolds (a long defunct smorgasbord restaurant) after church. I got double whammied because back then I never ate breakfast and other than juice or some bread nothing there appealed to me. It's only in the last year or so that breakfast food has started to be palatable to me.
Of course my father never went there for lunch or dinner because, you know, meat's way more expensive and he wasn't going to spend for three people and one carnivore (me).
Unfortunately, in my adult years I discovered that IKEA didn't have much to offer me either.
But hey, the coffee has always been good! 😀
I was invited once to a lutefisk and lefse dinner in the Twin Cities when I lived there. It was the only time I politely declined such an offer, but even a polite decline was taken as a kind of rebuke against the notion of partaking in the gelatinous-grey blob smelling of dirty gym socks.
I’ll eat smoked, canned herring or even smelt, but I’ll take a hard pass on lutefisk every time. I lack Scandinavian forebears who ate lutefisk in December (as a reminder of how hard the first Norwegian and Swedish settlers had it), so there was no desire for me to indulge in culinary pain for any reason.
That said, before I moved to Minnesota, I referred to the pyrex dish, baked in the oven, as a “casserole”, but ever since, I call it “hot dish”.
🙂
Lingonberries are delightful, as are bakeapple/cloudberries (which aren’t Scandinavian, but I’m sure the Vikings who made it to Newfoundland enjoyed them). One Scandinavian dish I absolutely love love love comes from, of all places, Thunder Bay, Ontario: the Finnish pancake, served daily at a Finnish community centre diner co-operative (opened in 1919) called The Hoito. Finnish pancakes are much thinner and eggier than what you might be accustomed to. They’re delectable, especially on a frigid morning.
Unfortunately, the Finnish labour hall (a building on the national historic register) which housed The Hoito, was gutted by a major fire a year ago, so the best one can muster for Finnish pancakes these days is at home.