Icelandic cooking, recipes and food

It's Bolludagur again - so it's time for a repost from 2008: In Iceland, the last Monday before Lent is called Bolludagur , or Bun Day. On this day, we stuff ourselves with delicious, sweet buns, and many families eat meatballs or fish balls for dinner ( bolla can mean both "bun" and "ball").  Two kinds of buns are made: One recipe uses yeast for rising, the other uses eggs. My mother always makes the egg kind, which are made with choux dough. As a result, I have never been able to acquire a taste for the yeast buns. The choux buns are basically profiteroles with a local twist. Choux buns, AKA profiteroles 125 g margarine or butter 250 ml water 125 g flour 4 eggs 400 ml heavy cream or whipping cream Put the water and margarine together in a saucepan and heat until margarine is melted. Sift the flour into the mixture and stir until the dough is smooth and thick. Keep the saucepan on the hotplate while stirring. Remove from the hotplate and

I have finally found some time to start updating the blog. How? I decided to institute one social media lite day per week. This means I take at most five minutes twice on that day to check my social media, to see if I have any messages that need answering, and strictly no browsing. It‘s amazing how much time I suddenly have to do other things. What I am doing is saving the photos I use on the blog to Google Photos, so they will be visible again. It‘s going to be a slow process, as I never got round to saving all my food photos in one folder, so I have to go through my considerable collection of photographs to find them. I am also planning to check all the links and update or remove the ones that are outdated or dead and to go over the text of all the recipes to fix the formatting, update them and alter as necessary and correct any errors I might find.  I may also add some photos to recipes that don‘t have any. Don‘t worry, I am not going to add four pages of chatter

Here you will find some information about the traditional Icelandic foods eaten at the Þorri feasts. The links will take you to recipes or instructions for making some of these foods. Note : I am working on inserting photos into the Þorri recipes, so if you click on a recipe link and there is a "This Image is currently Unavailable" message from Photobucket, just wait and come back in a couple of days and the photo(s) should be in there. Þorri is one of the old Icelandic lunar months. It always begins on a Friday, between the 19th and the 25th of January, and ends on a Saturday between the 18th and 24th of February. The first day of Þorri is called Bóndadagur or "Husband's Day/Farmer's Day", and is dedicated to men (formerly only farmers).  In my family (and many others) , the women bring the men breakfast in bed on this day - just as the men will do on Konudagur “Woman's Day” (if they know what's good for them). Many women will give their hus

As you may have noticed, Photobucket is holding some of my photos hostage. The "ransom" is not tremendously high, but instead of paying it, I think I shall consider this a hint to spruce up the blog a bit as I move my photo hosting over to Google Photo Albums. I don't have a tremendous amount of time available for this, so the photos will come back online gradually as I work my way back through the blog and update the posts.

I was given this recipe by a friend, but haven't personally tested it, so I'm not making any guarantees as to originality or similarity to Gunnars remúlaði. 100 grams mayonnaise 50 grams sour cream 3-4 tbs. sweet relish (she uses the Heinz brand) dash of mustard dash of curry powder Stir together well and adjust spices. Serve with fried fish or hot dogs.

I’ve just been reading an interesting report by Matís, an Icelandic biotech R&D institute, about skyr.  They make a distinction between modern skyr and traditional skyr and one of the conclusions they come to is that MS Skyr is not traditional because it deviates from the traditional methods of making skyr. (I have already posted a recipe for skyr , which may be referred to for one traditional method). If you want to try the real thing, the report mentions that KEA and Bíóbú both make skyr with (modernised) traditional methods. Their products are available from supermarkets.  In addition you can also buy traditional skyr from a couple of farms that participate in the Beint frá Býli movement (Farm Food Direct), and from specialised shops (I'm sure you can buy it from Frú Lauga , for example). I'm planning to read the report in more depth and may post a digest of the findings.