Outside
Fort Mason's convention center has as great a view of the bay as the Ferry Building.
I love the Norwegian flag planted in a snowpack. Clearly this required some planning. Oddly, I didn't noticed it when entering, only when leaving.
Inside
The aptly decorated convention hall. The entrance and booths are on the far side; I took this photo near the stage.
The multimedia performance of Terje Vigen, in progress.
Food
Lunch: an apparently Norwegian open-faced shrimp sandwich (smørbrød), accompanied by lefse, a thin, sweet, folded bread.
Another lefse. Lefse are made from some sort of flour and, usually, brown sugar and butter. This lefse was made from potato flour and topped with cinnamon and sugar. As the cook said, there are lots of other possible toppings (e.g., cardamom, almond, vanilla) for lefse or lefse could be used to wrap around other things. One could even wrap a lefse around a hot dog, thereby making a dish called a polse, though in this context one uses lompe, which is slightly different from lefse. The lefse I had with lunch was made with wheat flour; I think I preferred that one.
Rømmegrøt: sour cream porridge. Sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Really rich and custardy. (Yet no butter or sweet cream were involved in the recipe.) I found it so rich I couldn't finish the little I was given. The instructor emphasized that one cannot make this dish with sour cream bought from a store; it doesn't have the right milk solids.
A rosette: a crunchy, inflexible pastry with a thin shell. Basically, deep- fried dough, often made in funky shapes and then dipped in sugar. Although it looks symmetric, it isn't! There is no bottom. That is, those arches that cover air have nothing underneath them.
A krumkake: a light, flaky, cone-shaped dessert. Look how thin it is. In texture, it's more like a butter cookie than a waffle or a pancake, though it's made like the latter. Apparently the recipe was Scandinavian but, two centuries ago, immigrants in the Upper Midwest invented the elaboration of rolling it into a cone, thereby making it easier to fill with cream and carry.
Statues
Funky statues (of gnomes?) made by Ira Kessey were scattered around the hall.
This guy looks shocked!
I can't take this goblin/devil seriously because of its tongue sticking out.
Fodder for Panorama of Fort Mason
