Travel

Gluten Free Munich

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Munich was definitely not the easiest place to eat gluten free. I did research before and it seemed like there were not really specific restaurants you could go to with gluten free menus, but suggestions of places or things to eat which would be celiac-friendly… and well, I don’t necessarily need a list of places to eat if I have to wing it like that.

The first night we got there we wanted to go to something like the Hofbräuhaus, but going to this typical German-style restaurant with beer and wurst is really hard for me. We ended up at Augustiner-Keller which was all right, but nothing special.

The waiter was a little abrasive. When I asked about a gluten free menu or gluten free possibilities, he reacted like, “What? You can’t eat bread or flour? What can you eat? Can you eat anything??”… kind of like, well… you’re going to be a difficult customer, what are you doing in my section of the restaurant?

We noticed later on that he seemed to be the roughest of all the servers. He really just wanted to take our orders and serve us our food quickly and make a tip and I can’t really fault him for that, but I always appreciate when waiters and cooks are sensitive and understanding about my diet. I can’t help it and yes, it sucks, but please don’t make it worse for me!

I couldn’t order from most of the menu, but I ended up with good old potatoes (celiac classic), lamb without sauce and some fresh horse radish, which was honestly the most flavourful part of my dish. I also had some mediocre wine because gluten free beer is not to be found in any Keller in Munich.

Breakfast at our hotel was better. I picked the NH Hotel Group which we first stayed at in Madrid. I had booked this hotel before Madrid, hoping that it is a nice chain and it does not disappoint.

The German version of the hotel offers even more gluten free options, including packaged bread, gluten free muesli, fresh veggies, deli options, etc.

On the last day at the Deutsches Museum, I wanted to go to a restaurant early before our bus at 6pm, but even after we scrambled to get there on time, it was not open yet at 4:30. We ended up running back to the train station where I was almost crazy hangry. I ended up breaking down and ordering my very first döner box. I have been really afraid to eat döner since going gluten free, but I just ordered it in a box and I didn’t seem to react, so I think it was OK without the bread and watching out for the base. Kay asked if I wanted couscous or rice, and of course couscous has gluten so that’s a no!

I  felt a lot better after the döner. We picked up a few more snacks for our 4 hour ride back to Zurich and were on our way.

Travel

Munich

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We knew that the weather in Munich over Easter weekend was not supposed to be as nice as Oslo. The forecast called for rain or snow, which it did both of, but luckily we enjoyed a little bit of cloudy blue skies and sun on the first day.

Knowing that it would be colder than Oslo (that’s global warming for you…) we headed first to the BMW museum for Kay.

I was a little museum-ed out after Oslo, so mostly, I was super tired and a little bored going through here. This was all for Kay, who pretty well enjoyed himself here in car paradise.

It was a little hard to get excited about the BMW museum after visiting Geneva’s Motor Show twice already, where they have a sick display of incredible cars. In comparison, the BMW museum was a little lackluster.

Around Munich, it definitely was colder than Oslo! It actually snowed while we were at the BMW museum. After the warm weather the week before in Zurich, I was actually SO surprised about the weird white stuff coming out of the sky, which really looked like styrofoam, I kept asking Kay, “What is this stuff??” Apparently it was more of an industrial snow, hence the weird texture.

We still managed to find a little bit of sun at the English Garden.

We ventured in a little before heading to the Cathedral for Easter evening mass.

In the church, we were actually surprised that the service was only like 30 minutes and did not include communion, so it did not “count” as a church service. Oops. But thank goodness, because I almost fell asleep in church!

Some evening sun.

I was pretty happy with the weather we enjoyed. We were lucky because it could have poured and rained the whole day!

The weather wasn’t so nice on Easter Monday, but we had a long brunch at then spent the whole day in the Deutsches Museum for Kay, which I also struggled to stay awake through. 🙂 It was just a little too technical for me, but Kay was in heaven!

View from our hotel over the train station. We are making it a thing to stay by train stations. I also stay at the main station in Berlin and it is so convenient to get to and from the airport! If only Munich actually had a train to their airport and not a 45 minute bus ride. But we were leaving from the train station home via bus, so it was still convenient in the end.

Only when we finally made it to our IC bus and were sat in the front row of the upper deck did it start to drizzle and rain.

I guess it’s hard to be super impressed by German cities when it’s a little cold and rainy, or maybe I have just seen one too many German town by now. We did visit in early April, so maybe it is better during the summer? Berlin for one was a lot better in June rather than December!

Food, Travel

Oslo GF Eats

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Oslo is a really easy city to eat gluten free. They are wonderful about labeling things in menus and we even noticed gluten free products in the train stations being advertised.

We stayed in a Scandic Byporten hotel, partly because we know they offer wonderful buffet breakfasts. Kay was really looking forward to eating salmon tartare. But not only did they have fresh fruits, veggies and meat for me, they also had gluten free bread and even gluten free knekkebrød (crisp bread/crackers).

Knowing that eggs are bad, I avoided those completely and filled up instead on bread, knekkebrød, salmon, beans, veggies, cheese and fruit. They also had wonderful smoothies, fresh pressed juice, and coffee. On the last day I even had some of their gluten free muesli, which surprised me. I felt very well taken care of! The breakfast of the hotel was actually at one of the Egon restaurants in Oslo, the one next to the train station obviously. They had a partnership with the hotel to let guests eat there and since I had read about them in my gluten-free research, they were already on my list for dinner places.They didn’t offer so many gluten free options at dinner. The gluten-free menu was only in Norwegian, but it wasn’t too hard to follow along with the English menu. My pizza was fine, but maybe a little boring. I was really stuffed in the end though. We had an appetiser and it was just SO much food in the end.The next night we thought about just going back to Egon Restaurant again because it was insanely convenient to just pop down from the hotel there, but we thought maybe it is a bit lame to eat all our meals including breakfast at our hotel restaurant basically.

Sure, we eat a bit more constricted thanks to my diet, but we have never been the type to eat all the meals at one spot night after night. Kay didn’t like any of the non-Norwegian options I’d found in my gluten-free research, so he found a burger place we could try, but when we got there, we found that it was definitely closed and looked like it was still under construction.

Folks, this has happened to us a lot lately in our search for gluten free food! But… but… we had also passed a Brazilian churrascaria. We agreed to check out the burger place, but see if the churrascaria had room if the burger place was closed.

BEST. DECISION. EVER.

We didn’t realise quite when we sat down, but outside of Brazil, this is the best churrascaria that either of us have been to… and that’s saying something coming from the Brazilian himself.

We started out with delicious pão de queijo cheese breads which, score, were naturally gluten free. I kept asking about gluten free things, but the buffet even had gluten free signs on all the dishes everywhere and with options like feijoada, farofa and more, lots of things were already gluten free by natural. Brazil is just amazing!

The meat was also mouth-wateringly amazing.

They also made a mean caipirinha. Kay was really afraid about the costs of alcohol because Norway has notoriously expensive alcohol and their cost of living is on par with Zurich, but they worked out to 15CHF a piece, which is honestly pretty fair. Back home, you can easily pay 20-25CHF for one of these drinks.

The only thing I couldn’t really partake in was Kay’s dessert, which was a chocolate mousse with normal flour somewhere in there. I’m sure I could have ordered something gluten free, but to be honest, I was SO stuffed from all the meat by that point, I did not have room.

We both left, so, so full. And even with the drinks, our meals only came out to around 80CHF per person, which in Zurich is also pretty darn fair, especially considering all the high quality cuts of meat we ate, the unlimited buffet food and the drinks and dessert.

I can only recommend this place for everyone, even if it’s not “Norwegian” food, we couldn’t stop thanking ourselves that the burger place was closed and we made it here instead of going to the Egon Restaurant again.

Travel

Oslo

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Easter weekend in Oslo was marvellous. While it rained in Switzerland (ha ha!) we enjoyed deep blue skies and bright sun. I couldn’t get enough of the weather, even if it was a little chilly still. It wasn’t worse than the cold temps back home!

I bleached my hair again right before we left so that I was nordic blonde. Maybe it was the shock of seeing sun again, but I was crazy about taking selfies that weekend.

Yeah, soak up that sun. Mmm.

I also tried to take lots of selfies of me and Kay, because otherwise I would almost never have any pictures of the two of us. He’s so cute too!

We visited the Nobel Museum, the Fram museum, Kon-Tiki Museum, Holmenkollen Ski Museum, National Museum of Art, the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and the Munch Museum.

The Nobel Museum had some very cool interactive design engaging museum-goers. I was really impressed how well it was done.

The Fram museum really tired me out. It was dark and not set up very well and to be honest, I am just not as interested in viking ships as Kay is. He really wanted to go to the Viking Ship Museum as well, but by the time we finished the Kon-Tiki museum, it was too late!

It was a funny shaped museum to match the ships. I was happy to get moving outside. I was starting to fall asleep on my feet!

Since all the museums were closing, we decided to head to the opera house to check it out.

We watched the sun setting until we got hungry and then headed back to the hotel for dinner.

I really liked our Scandic hotel. It was innovative and cool with lots of handy touches. The only negative was that it was a bit cold the first day, so I ran the space heater they provided… but then it was sooo stuffy hot the last night, we could barely sleep and opening a window was not possible.

Aside from that, it was conveniently located at the train station and it had great Norwegian breakfasts!

View below from the top of the Holmenkollen ski jump.

Sooo happy about the sun and good weather! 😀

After the ski jump, museums started closing so we headed down to the brand new renovated harbour.It was beautiful! All the buildings are gorgeous and we imagined ourselves living there some day.

Love is in the air!More new buildings in the “thieves island”.

The main train station with our hotel to the left.

The last night had a wonderful sunset and then on Easter morning when we flew away, it was starting to cover up a bit. We were happy to leave for Munich then.

We had our early morning ride to the airport and then we were off!

Oslo is a beautiful, clean city with easy transportation, lots of museums, wonderful gluten free food options and more. We really enjoyed this weekend trip!

Food

Winter/Spring GF Eats

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We’ve had a fairly cold start to the year with spring taking awhile to get started. Although we enjoyed a little warm weather in the past couple weeks, it went back to the single Cº digits, or around the 40s in Fahrenheit. Boo.

To keep warm, we’ve been eating lots of delicious gluten-free food! Here is a little highlights tour of some of our meals.

I’m slowly trying out GF oatmeal in my diet after over a year quitting oats completely while I flushed gluten out of my system. I need to double check if I have symptoms when I eat it. I did not feel feverish after though and that seems to be a common symptom on gluten for me.

Above was a delicious dinner from cooksmarts with garlic and rosemary cauliflower mash, spicy chard salad and roasted chicken thighs.

I do a lot of fish dinners during the week now because it’s so easy to throw them in the oven with some roasting veggies. Here we had avocado with balsamic cream on the side.

Kay made an Indian Cooksmarts recipe but mixed up “Kümmel” with “Kreuzkümmel” in German and accidentally used caraway (Kümmel) instead of cilantro. It tasted special… not bad, but a little strange. I’m not a big caraway fan. I should probably just chuck it all!

It made good leftovers though!

This Pineapple and Cashew Curried Fried Rice below sadly made me feel awful afterward. It has eggs in it and since this meal, I’ve pretty much been avoiding eggs. It makes me sad, but they are giving me horrible stomach pain.

Easy stir fry beef always goes down well in this house.

And again, filling out the week with an easy herb butter fish tossed in the oven with some veggies. Yum!

I was proud of this one below because I whipped up a random stir fry using random stuff in the fridge, including the sauce, which I normally use a recipe for. It was so tasty!

A friend posted a recipe to a tahini bowl that sounded really tasty, so I made that one day and Kay grilled up some steaks we got on special after Easter. We ate a lot of steak that week and both of us were happy.

Kay also started cooking for me a bit more lately, so he made this lovely garlic quinoa dish that another friend posted. I pinned it ages ago! It was also wonderful. As usual, Kay did the best job plating it. He makes all his recipes look so divine on the plate! 🙂

Right now I am branching back into dishes with lactose to see how I adjust, but we are staying away from eggs and gluten obviously. Sometimes I still get very frustrated how hard it seems to substitute things or know what to cook instead, but we still enjoy a lot of yummy food. I’m just pretty darn compulsive about our meal prepping and cooking. 😉

What’re you cooking lately?