Not perfume related, but after reading similar posts over at The French Exit, AnotherPerfumeBlog and ScentState I just couldn’t help myself from tagging along

1) My grandmothers pancakes. In Iceland, pancakes are thin and lacy, served simply; sprinkled with sugar and rolled up. My grandmother was a master pancake maker and, as an added attraction, her kitchen was something of a hub for the local housewifes to meet for coffee and gossip. Faulty presidential candidates and who had illegitimate kids all over town (often, these seemed to go together) were popular topics for discussion. Meanwhile my grandmother scurried around; pouring coffee, frying pancakes and making sure everybody was happy. Some of my best childhood memories come from that kitchen, the warmth and the feeling of belonging is something I hope I’ll manage to pass along to my own children.

2) Blacked fish fingers and clumped spaghetti. I have always been an adventurous eater, but I hate repetition. My middle sister eats everything but is totally uninterested in food. My youngest sister, on the other hand, is extremely picky and the only dish we’d all eat as kids was fried fish fingers with spaghetti. I used to vary the proportions between ketchup, soy sauce and fake lemon juice (I’ve no idea what that actually was, but it came in plastic, lemon shaped bottles). Lets just say that cooking isn’t my dads strongest side, but fish fingers were a dish that he almost could pull off. I remember removing the blackened outer crust of the fish fingers, separating the spaghetti strands with my fork and thinking that the day I’d do my own cooking I’ll never ever eat fish fingers again. And no, I don’t.

3) Pears gratinée with goat cheese and peanut butter. My mom, on the other hand, is a very good cook. She marches to her own beat and goes where no cook has ever gone before. Her pears gratinée are an example of this. It’s very easy to make; half pears, scoop out the pips. Lay a generous dollop of chunky peanut butter in the hollow of each pear. Then a thick slab of goat cheese. Bake in the oven until cheese is browning and voilá – a side dish that goes with anything!

4) Apfelstrudel. The first time I ever went abroad (that was not going to Iceland or Norway visiting relatives) I went with my family to violin camp in Austrian. I made a point of ordering only menu items I didn’t recognize and soon enough, I hit the jackpot. Apfelstrudels are pastries filled with apples, nuts and rum dunked raisins, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and rolled up in filo dough. The pastries are served warm, with whipped cream on the side and no other apple pie I’ve ever had has been anywhere near as good.

5) Home Made Ice Cream. When I turned 15 I got an ice cream maker for my birthday. One recipe that I came up with back then, and that I was especially proud of, is mixing 50% plain yogurt and 50% home made jam. Freeze this in the ice cream maker and you’ll end up with the freshest, easiest most fool proof ice cream ever. If you have no idea how to get popular, consider getting an ice cream maker!

6) Escargots in garlic butter. Violin training payed off. I got accepted into the top youth orchestra of my town and we got to do a mini tour in France and Belgium. While traveling, I discovered that if there is an age limit for buying wine in France, nobody seemes to care. I also discovered that the weirdness you might end up with in France when ordering only unknown things from menus were in a different league from Austria. But escargots turned out to be an excellent choice. Shiny, slimy, slippery snails, drenched in garlic butter and served with pieces of crusty baguettes to suck up every last drop of fat. And then a big carton of white wine to go with it. Heaven!

7) Yam pla duk foo. I went to Thailand as an exchange student and in order to greet me upon arrival, my entire class came by my host family. Together we prepared enormous amounts of yam pla duk foo, which is a salad of based on minced and deep fried catfish, making it very crispy. The fish is tossed with green, exteremely sour, shredded mango, peanuts, raw onions and chili. The result is a divinely  delicious blend of flavors and textures. And also, when saying that you’re ”eating catfish” (gin pla duk) in Thai, that’s also slang for fellatio. The female equivalent is ”gin hoy”, which literally means ”eating clam”, just saying.

8) Som Tam. The Thai people are masters of enjoying life. There is a phrase ”sabai sabai” that is very hard to translate but the essence of it is ”absence of anxiety or pressure”. When you’re in sabai sabai mood you feel all relaxed and happy, not a care in the world. A good way to sabai sabai is to  go on a tour, typical destinations are the seaside or waterfalls in the jungle. And whenever Thais go on these kind of tours there will be food vendors present, selling Som Tam. Som Tam is green papaya salad, consisting of shredded green papaya (which has similar texture and taste as cabbage, minus the funk). The papaya shreds are pounded in a clay mortar with lime, chillies, garlic, dried prawns, lime juice, peanuts and sometimes tiny salted crabs, thrown in with shell and all. My own (Icelandic-Swedish) family would never consider going anywhere if there wasn’t a purpose with the trip, like visiting relatives or violin cramming. The Thai way of traveling was such a revelation to me, going somewhere in order to relax and feel good, who would have known how much fun that could be? So whenever I think about som tam Iäm a few steps closer to the bliss of sabai sabai.

9) Kanom Jeen. A few years later I took my husband (then boyfriend) to Thailand. Upon getting into Bangkok I explained that the back alleys usually are the best places to eat. He looked very skeptical so just for making a point I stopped at the first little food place we passed. It turned out they were serving kanom jeen, white noodles coils usually topped with fish curry. At every table there were heaps of different kinds of fresh herbs to help yourself from and stir into the noodles. After that first meal of kanom jeen my husband was fully converted and there have been no further questions about the appropriateness of eating in Bangkok back alleys.

10) A Japanese Banquet. In Japan we got invited to join a group of Swedish ex-pats for a weekend at a seaside club. There was some kind of a package deal involved and on one of the nights there was a traditional Japanese, >10 course, banquet served. There were only seafood and vegetarian dishes, everything exquisitely prepared, highlighting seasonal fare, showing even the lowliest little fermented bean from its best and brightest side. This might very well have been the best meal of my life and meanwhile, all around me, the ex-pats were going ”Japanese again?”, ”Can anyone help me ask if there will be tempura?” and ”I really hate Japanese food”. The girl in front of me ended up ordering French fries and ketchup. I really don’t know what to say about that.

11) Beef Pho. While I’ll forever love Thai cuisine, my husband prefers the freshness of the Vietnamese. Beef Pho is a noodle soup, served with thinly sliced, almost raw sirloin and a big heaping of fresh leafy herbs and onions on top. My husband is fond of making this from scratch, boiling marrow bones and spices for hours to get the broth right, heating the bowls so the soup will be the right temperature at serving. Needless to say, his pho is perfection. I sometimes order other noodle soups, just because I love a good noodle soup, but they never even come close. The picture is my own.

When setting off on my recent weekend trip to Paris, one of my main objectives was to get to smell as many Guerlain scents as possible. They are not easy to find here, there used to be Guerlain booths in 2 of the major department stores here but since a few months ago, those booths are no more. On the other hand, at our airport, there is a small Guerlian shelf. I had read up and I had planned to try on some of the new Neroli Bianca to have something nice to think about during the flight, and maybe spray on some Le Petit Robe Noir as well. But things did not go as planned. The Neroli Bianca was available for purchase, but there was no tester bottle. The way Robe Noir smelled when sniffing the top of the bottle just wasn’t appealing. As I stood there in front of the shelf, decision anxiety building up as my flight was about to board, one of the cleaning girls walked up behind me with her trolley. I had noticed this particular girl earlier as I went to the toilet. She was wiping down the basins as she was simultaneously chatting into her mobile phone head piece, sounding very happy and animated as she did so. Anyway, she came up behind me, stretched out her hand and discreetly grabbed one of the Guerlain testers and quickly gave it some 5 good spray all over her uniform while passing. I couldn’t help but smiling and within seconds I decided to go for the same bottle as she had done – it turned out to be the Idylle EdP.

Idylle is a floral. It’s correct, fresh and modern but not very distinctive. There is not much that I can say about it except that after an hour of general floralness there is a phase where something plush, intriguing and buttery, peeks through. It was a good thing I was safely sitting down in the airplane, because when that faint little patch of butterness showed up, it took me completely by surprise, made me weak in my knees and I knew I just had to get more.

The next day I went straightly to Champs Elysee 68, the Guerlain flagship store. I had originally planned to get a bottle of Sous Le Vent, but the stuff in the shop smelled nothing like what I’d samples before. I haven’t read if has been reformulated but my guess is that it has, in a major way and I felt very disappointed! I also did not get along with Vol de Nuit, which I hadn’t smelled before and I’d thought I’d love. But there were also positive surprises, Rose Nacree de Desert was absolutely stunning and if I’d made my visit to Paris during either scorching summer or in the middle of winter, that bottle most likely would get to go home with me. There was also a tester of Muguet 2013 out, which I lavishly sprayed onto my wrist. That is one very good lily of the valley soliflore. According to the SA it also contained jasmine and rose, and it went beautifully with my skin chemistry!

I also asked for some Idylle extrait to try on. I had hoped that the buttery note that I got on the airplane would be more prominent in the extrait, but unfortunately, that did not turn out to be the case. But as I was aimlessly walking around, smelling the lesser known perfumes – I found THAT SCENT! The buttery whateveritwas, only more of it, without any disturbing ”freshness” and it turned out being the focal note of an entire perfume!

I had a moments of ”this is  want to smell like for the rest of my life!”, found a free patch of skin and sprayed on. Then, I spent a magical day, walking around in springtime Paris. The sun was shining, nothing planned, just strolling around, watching people, talking to my husband, taking turns inhaling Muguet and my buttery mystery scent as I went along.

I knew I ‘d take one of them home and for a long while I’d decided on the Muguet. But in the end, it was a bit linear (my pet perfume peeve). The 399 Euro price tag was also scary so I went for the other one which turned out to be none other than the most dreaded and trashed Guerlain scent in history – Mayotte.

The things people say about it, I find it hard to believe it’s the same scent I’ve been wearing for the last week (and maybe it isn’t, you never know with those reformulations). What I’m getting is an abstract tropical. There is tuberose, gardenia  lots of ylang on a rich and fatty vanillic base. Except for a brief burst of life like gardenia at the very beginning (blue cheese et al), none of the flowers stand out, they’re tightly integrated into something that feels like a tapestry of warm bodies in the sun. There is decay in there and a hint of something metallic which I often get from scents containing tropical fruits, except I’m not getting any actual fruits from Mayotte. It’s warm and welcoming, and there is something about it that makes me prefer wearing it on my chest and decollage – it’s a boob scent. The only other scent I think about in this way is Bal á Versaille, which is also very intimate with hints of decay. I love it but I wouldn’t feel comfortable waving it around in the air on my wrists in public, so to say

And what about you, anyone else that feels that certain scents are best worn on certain areas of the body? Or likes to buy perfume as a souvenir when traveling?

I just got back from the most lovely weekend in Paris that I will, no doubt, talk about for many blog posts to come. But there was this one incident that I just have to share, right away, that happened while visiting the Parfums de Nicolai shop on 28, rue de Richelieu, near the Louvre.

I went there, going about my business as usual, lurking around the shop, spraying scents on various patches of skin, established that most of them were very nice but I that I really wanted to sit down with a cup of coffee and let the scents take their time in order for me to make up my mind.

The scents continued to grow on me, and there was especially one, sprayed on my hand that stood out. Only problem was, I could not remember which one it was. So, I went back to the shop and told the lady working there, a tall, thin lady in her 50-ies, that there was this scent I liked but I could not remember which one it was. She nodded, then she rounded the counter, resolutely grabbed my arm, sniffed it up and down, going: ”Oh, here is Odalisque, it is very nice on you madame. Yes, this is Vanilla Intensee, no, this one is not good on you. Really not! Hm, here you’ve sprayed on something that is not from our shop. And yes, Musc Intense is nice and Violette in Love too. AH, THIS IS VERY GOOD, Juste une Reve it is, and yes, Kiss Me Tendre is another good one for you”.

The one I liked on my hand was Juste une Reve, and I do believe that she recognized each and every one of the other scents correctly. In the end, I didn’t just get that bottle of Juste une Reve, I threw in Odalisque and Kiss Me Tendre as well. There was just no way that I’d let this level of passion and knowledge go unrewarded!