Ever since the Edmonton International Airport started to offer direct flights to Iceland via Icelandair, I've been itching to travel there. With my busy schedule I haven't had the opportunity to visit yet, but if you're like me you're in luck, because Iceland is coming to Edmonton this weekend!

photo thanks to Iceland Naturally
Taste of Iceland is back in Edmonton from April 9-12 to celebrate Icelandic culture through food, music, and film. Hosted by Iceland Naturally, this cultural event is a great way to get a taste of what life in Iceland is all about. I'm all about the food, but if you have time this weekend you should check out the free concert (Saturday) and film screenings (Sunday) going on!


The Viktolicious Cocktail - Reyka Vodka, Blueberry Puree, Ginger Soda
In collaboration with Chef Shonn Oborowsky at Characters, Chef Viktor Örn Andrésson has put together a four course menu for $79 to showcase traditional Icelandic ingredients with a contemporary twist. Chef Viktor is the head chef at Blue Lagoon's LAVA Restaurant, and was crowned the 2014 Nordic Chef of the Year. That's a huge title to hold and it's pretty exciting to have him here in Edmonton. The dishes available this weekend feature ingredients flown in from Iceland, and Chef Viktor's culinary talents are apparent in each dish.

The first course on the menu features a lemon cured Icelandic Arctic Char served with roe, cauliflower two ways (pickled & pureed), horseradish, and dill (aioli & oil). The fish is fresh, cooked beautifully, and the dish is well seasoned. The flavours balance out one another and don't overpower the arctic char, making it a tasty start to a great meal.

The second course is a sous vide Icelandic Cod topped with dried seaweed (known as "söl") from Stykkishólmur, a harbour town on the west coast of Iceland. Also on the plate is a lightly smoked langoustine salad, apple, parsnip, and pickled pearl onions. The seafood on the plate is fresh and the natural sweetness of the fish and langoustine really comes through. I loved the different textures in the dish and the flavours were spot on. Another fantastic dish. Fun fact: langoustine is considered the Icelandic lobster, as Iceland doesn't actually have large lobsters like we do!

Iceland is known for it's free-range lamb, and the roasted rack of lamb in the third course does this protein justice. The meat is moist, tender, and flavoured with a combination of Icelandic herbs. With some wild mushrooms, roasted carrots and a rich Madeira glaze, this main dish is another hit.

To round off dinner is a dessert featuring Icelandic Omnom Chocolate and Viking Skyr. Skyr is a low fat Icelandic milk product similar to that of cheese and yogurt, so I was really interested to see how it would be used. The dessert is an almond and marzipan cake with hazelnuts, served with raspberry and skyr mousse, chocolate toffee, and a spoon of skyr and lemon ice cream. Raspberry is one of the only fruits that Iceland is able to grow in greenhouses, so Chef Viktor really wanted to use it as a component in the dessert. I loved that it wasn't too heavy or overly sweet, and the fresh and dried raspberries added some natural sweet and tangy notes.

At $79 for four stellar courses, its a very reasonable price to be dining at Characters and getting a taste of a one-of-a-kind menu. If you have the time this weekend definitely stop by for a meal! And if you're a cocktail fan, the Viktolicious cocktail features Reyka Vodka, which is distilled in Iceland using Arctic spring water and filtered through lava rocks. So neat! A huge thanks to Iceland Naturally and Characters for the invite to check out the menu - see you when I'm in Iceland!

Disclaimer: as this was a media preview event, views expressed in this post are solely mine. I was not expected to feature this restaurant on my blog, nor obligated to do so. This post is 100% my opinion, and as always, my priority is to you, the reader, to present an unbiased, thorough review.

At the end of the first underground dinner hosted by The Salt Room, I was already checking my schedule and booking my spot for the second dinner. It was that good. This time around Chef Tony Krause decided to host two dinners with the same menu to accommodate his booking requests and allow for more people to experience his prix fixe menu.

The Salt Room - 10251 109 Street (Mothers Market) - Edmonton AB

This time around the menu was set at $70 per person, with optional wine pairings (3 glasses) for an additional $30. Although advertised as a 5 course dinner, Chef Tony likes to throw in a couple of extras, one of which was an amuse bouche. To start off the evening an amuse with components from chicken, seabuckthorn and lichen sat delicately upon a bed of rocks. A flavourful chicken heart mousse was served between two potato crisps, dotted with seabuckthorn berry jelly and served with a small sprig of fresh reindeer lichen. The different combination of textures and flavours was fantastic. What a great start to the meal.

Next up was the bread course, but I didn't think anything would be able to top the combination of bread and butter we had been served at the previous dinner. Wrong. Our plates presented a bacon and onion bun and green cardamom and juniper branch focaccia. The bread was accompanied by a quenelle of onion butter and brown butter, each topped with a sprinkling of maldon salt. Both breads were pillowy soft, but the bacon and onion bun was my favourite…who wouldn't love bread laced with chunks of bacon? Both butters on the plate were unique, adding an extra dimension of complexity to each bite of bread.

Given that it was April Fool's Day, Chef Tony made sure to include a couple unexpected twists in this dinner. Our second course featured scallop jerky in a one week old fermented turnip juice broth, served with shaved poached turnip and topped with cilantro microgreens. If there's one thing you can expect from Chef Tony, it's strong umami flavours in his cooking. The turnip broth was just that - stinky fermented juice with strong bitter, sour, and savoury notes. With a couple dots of canola oil to cut the acidity, I enjoyed the broth. The scallop jerky was dried to a gummy, sticky texture, similar to that of a jujube. Although I can appreciate the techniques utilized to create the jerky, jujubes just aren't my thing (I hate them getting stuck to my teeth!) and I personally prefer fresh or seared scallops.

Course number three was plated beautifully, making me think of the warm Spring weather to come. Veal sweetbreads (thyroid) were presented alongside wilted kale, charred shiitake mushrooms, and fresh oxalis flowers. All of this sat on a bed of black barley cooked with bacon, and the dish sat in a bay leaf & whey beurre blanc finished with fresh kale juice. The sweetbreads were cooked beautifully tender, and I loved the chew the barley had to it. Savoury, sweet, rich and acidic, there was so much going on, but all the components worked together harmoniously.

Our fourth course was titled "Flavours of Onion," so I didn't expect to see a pasta course. Housemade tubular pasta had been infused with French onion soup. and served with charred wild onions and their blossoms sourced from MoNa Food. Each component had a different intensity of onion flavour, with the blossoms being the strongest of the three components. Topped with some shaved Sylvan Star Old Grizzly Gouda, this was a strong finish to the main courses.

The dessert that evening was a work of art, featuring flavours of chocolate, banana, pecan and calamondin. Chocolate cream had been splattered on the plate Jackson Pollock style, and three small portions of light banana cake were topped with pecan shortbread crumble, brown butter strings, and calamansi fluid gel. The cake in the middle featured a quenelle of an amazing housemade banana gelato. To make the calamansi fluid gel, Chef Tony used previously self grown and harvested calamansi oranges preserved in salt for one year, which gave this dessert a fantastic salty-sweet combination. Once again, the components with their different textures and flavours worked together perfectly.

Rounding off the evening, Chef Tony presented us with a plate of petit fours. A mint mojito macaron, frozen chocolate parfait, smoked paprika wildberry pavlova, and wild sour cherry gummmy sat daintily in the dishes, waiting to be eaten. Each either had strong (macaron, gummy) or subtle (pavlova, parfait) flavour, and I made sure to savour each one.

Chef Tony's underground dinners really showcase his skills and passion for locally sourced ingredients and nose-to-tail dining. For the upcoming dinners in April Chef Tony is currently sitting at a waitlist of 50+ people, so if you're interested definitely shoot him an email (antonykrause[at]gmail[dot]com) and wait patiently. If you don't want to wait, swing by Mother's Market Friday thru Sunday to try out his menu. The items change weekly, so there's always something new to try. I'm still waiting for the day I can try his charcuterie - set to be ready in a couple weeks!

What if I told you that you could have restaurant-quality, Instagram-worthy meals in the comfort of your own home with little to no effort? You would think I was crazy. Maybe I am, but Sobeys is changing up the grocery shopping experience so that you can enjoy luxurious meals at home.

Last month Sobeys Newcastle (16943 127 Street) hosted a pop-up dining experience for community members in Northwest Edmonton. The guests had been invited to what they believed was a five course menu preview for "Fresh Market Bistro," an upcoming restaurant set to open in North Edmonton.

The 25 special guests got to enjoy charcuterie, butternut squash soup, salmon, prime rib, and a selection of fine Italian pastries. At the end of the event it was revealed that the food on the menu that evening was actually from the take-out kitchen and fresh market at Sobeys Newcastle, where everything is prepared fresh daily.

What a creative way to make an announcement to the community in Northwest Edmonton! Take a look at the recap video below.


Isn't that awesome? I think it is great that Sobeys is taking grocery shopping in a new direction, where fresh, high-quality gourmet food is available for take-out.

Sobeys Newcastle opened in June of 2014 as the first new concept Sobeys in Edmonton. Items are prepared fresh daily and sold for takeout, which would be perfect on evenings where you're heading home late from work or if you don't have time to prepare lunch for the next day.

To celebrate the launch of the new kitchen and market, Sobeys Newcastle has kindly offered to give one of my readers a $100 gift card to shop and check out all the ready-made meals! I'm so excited to check out the store for myself, and I'll be heading straight to the deli to see which cheeses they have brought in from around the world. See below for all the giveaway details!

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THE GIVEAWAY

$100 Gift Card to Sobeys Newcastle
(to be used by end of April 2015)

DETAILS
This giveaway is being held via Twitter. To enter, you must tweet the following: "See the #SobeysKitchenSurprise & enter to win a $100 GC to @Sobeys Newcastle from @littlmissandrea! #yegfood" Make sure to include a link back to this post.

ADDITIONAL ENTRIES

1. Follow me via Twitter (@littlmissandrea) (+1)
2. Follow me via Instagram (@littlmissandrea) (+1)
3. Visit my Facebook page and share the contest post with your friends! (+2)

Please leave me a comment below letting me know which entries to count! :)

This giveaway is open to anyone 18+ years of age in Edmonton. You have until April 9 to enter and the winner will be selected by random and be contacted via email. Good luck!
*All photos thanks to Sobeys Newcastle