Icelandic cooking, recipes and food

I got a request for this some weeks ago through the discussion forum, and now I have finally found a recipe. Mysuostur is a soft brown cheese made from whey (mysa), which is a side product of cheese-making. It is boiled down until it thickens and caramelizes, just like dulce de leche , except it is not as sweet. Cheeses of this kind are made all over Scandinavia. Icelanders use the whey that is produced when skyr is made. The soft, spreadable version is sold as Mysingur in Icelandic supermarkets. In Norway it is known as prim or myseprim . 5,75 liters (5750 ml) whey (if you can't get skyr-whey, use cheese whey) 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 cup brown sugar 2 tbs butter 2 tbs cream Put the whey and salt into a wide-mouthed pan and cook, uncovered, until it has reduced by 2/3. Stir in the sugar, butter and cream. At full boil, stir constantly until the cheese thickens. Test by putting a little on a plate. If it begins to set, the cheese is ready. Remove from the heat and stir until cooled. Sto...

I finally got round to making those coconut balls, and here are the results. I only made half a recipe, which was enough for seven balls, about the size of golf balls. + (I have also added a second photo to the original recipe). I was contacted by Freyja (if you know Icelandic you can read her comments), who tried the recipe and wrote back to say that the cookies tasted a bit too much of raw oatmeal. She also suggests using icing sugar instead of regular sugar, which I agree with, since there isn't really enough moisture in the dough to dissolve the sugar grains. The balls came out looking just like bakery made ones, but neither the taste nor the texture was enough like the coconut balls you can buy from bakeries. Bakery coconut balls are chewier and the texture is similar to thick cookie dough. These are harder, the sugar has not melted properly (as Freyja commented) and the oatmeal taste is too raw. Rum or sherry drops could help with the raw taste, as could reducing the oatmeal ...

I have joined the Foodie BlogRoll, which you can find on the right, below the label list. It is a list of foodie blogs and by linking in this way to each other, we get the chance to discover other foodie bloggers out there, increase our chances of being seen and our search engine status. If you have a foodie blog and want to join visit The Leftover Queen to register.

If you have read my book blog you will know that I am in the middle of a reading challenge. I recently made an inventory of my books and realised I had many cookbooks I had never tried as much as a single recipe from. While browsing these books I have often thought I should try this or that recipe, but more often than not I didn’t. When I realised how many cookbooks I had I got to thinking about my cooking habits and realised that in the last five years or so I have only tried maybe half a dozen new recipes a year, most of them found on the web. Before that, I used to try a couple of new recipes every month, many of them from cookbooks or my grandmother’s collection of newspaper recipe clippings. I do think it’s okay to collect recipe books one never uses for anything other than reading or looking at the photos, but I still feel a little guilty for having them, because I originally bought them or was given them with the intent that they would be used. Therefore I think I would like to...