Icelandic cooking, recipes and food

I'm bringing this to the top because I wanted to add a note about the best mayonnaise to use in the recipe. While this is hardly Icelandic, I will say that Icelanders have a fondness for sandwiches filled with mayonnaise-based salads. Shrimp salad is one of the most popular. This is a healthier option that uses less mayonnaise. 2 slices of sandwich bread (I prefer whole-wheat, but French is just as tasty). When I intend to eat a sandwich like this while reading, I use pita bread. 1 small handful frozen arctic shrimp, thawed and drained 1 hard-boiled egg, sliced 1 slice sandwich ham (optional) mayonnaise (see note) pepper or fresh chives Spread mayonnaise on each bread slice according to taste. Put ham slice (if using) on one bread slice and top with egg. Top egg slices with shrimp, grind some pepper over it or sprinkle it with finely chopped chives and close the sandwich. OR Finely chop the ham and mash the egg with a fork. Put into a bowl with shrimp and 2 tbs mayonnaise. Give it ...

It's the season when fresh offal is to be had in every self-respecting supermarket, and liver is one of the things I enjoy at this time of year. My mother used to make Lifrarbuff fairly often when I was a kid. 500 g. lamb's liver 1/2 - 1 cup flour 1 egg 3 ea. potatoes, raw 1/2 - 1 cup milk 2 medium onions 1/2 tsp baking powder to taste salt, pepper and/or other favourite spice Remove all membranes and blood vessels from the liver and peel the potatoes. Peel onions and chop coarsely. Mince together liver, potatoes and onions. Mix in flour, baking powder and spices. Add the egg. Thin the mixture with milk until it is the consistency of porridge. Drop the mixture by the tablespoonful on a hot frying pan and fry on both sides until firm. Serve with butter-fried onion rings, mashed potatoes, green peas and rhubarb jam. Fried eggs are also good with this dish.

Slaughter season is in full swing in Iceland. This means that besides lowered prices for fresh unfrozen lamb, mutton and horse meat, you can also get fresh offal, which is not only cheap, but also nutritious and often quite yummy. While it is generally possible to get these products fresh year round now, it is more usual to find them frozen and when fresh they tend to cost more off season because there is less supply. This is also the only time of the year when you can get fresh sheep's blood to make blood sausages. In the next week or so I am going to revisit some offal recipes I have published here in the past, but I am going to start with a recipe I haven't published before: Fried sheep's hearts . 2-3 sheep's hearts, or 1-2 pig's hearts 1 bunch parsley 1 tbs butter or margarine 50 g margarine or butter 1 tsp salt 300 ml water or milk 2 tbs flour 100 ml cold water Wash the hearts well under cold running water until there is no blood left in them. Soak in cold wate...

This is a luxurious relative of rye bread soup. 300 g dark rye bread 1 litre water 700 ml dark malt ale, Guinness for example (Icelanders use Egils Malt) Brown sugar 100-200 ml cream Finely chop the bread and soak in the water overnight. Cook over low heat until completely dissolved, stirring occasionally. Press through a sieve, put back in the saucepan, thin with the ale and mix well. Bring to the boil, stirring constantly. Add brown sugar to taste and cook for 5 minutes. Serve hot with whipped cream as a dessert.

If you enjoy gorgeous photography, haute cuisine and chefs on ego trips, this is a book for you. It also happens to be quite informative about Icelandic food and traditional ingredients. The book is too big for my scanner, so I had to borrow an image of the cover from another website. It is therefore not quite as large as I would have liked. This prizewinning food book (honorary Gourmand Cookbook Award, 2007) was written by Chef Völundur Snær Völundarson, assisted by Haukur Ágústsson, with photographs by Hreinn Hreinsson, and published by Salka (Iceland), in 2006. This is a heavy, large format book, more suitable for the coffee table than the kitchen. It combines the subjects of Iceland and cooking, with gorgeous photographs of Icelandic nature, people and food, and text about the same. The recipes are original and were conceived by the author to showcase how Icelandic ingredients can be used in fine cooking. The author is very central to the book. He writes of his personal experiences...

This is something that should appeal to kids: 1 litre red or purple fruit or berry juice, for example redcurrant, blackcurrant, raspberry, cranberry or pomegranate juice 60 g cooking starch (e.g. potato flour, cornflour, or sago) Sugar to taste Water, if needed Put the cooking starch in a saucepan and stir in the juice. Heat gently to boiling. Add sugar to taste and thin with water if the flavour is too strong. When the juice boils, it should be thickened. Remove from the heat, pour into a large bowl and sprinkle sugar on top. Cool. Serve as a dessert.

There are a number of Icelandic cookbooks available in English, most of them published in Iceland and aimed at the tourist market. Most are printed on heavy, glossy paper and some have gorgeous colour photographs in them, both of which makes them expensive. Buying one for the equivalent of 50 US Dollars or more and then discovering it isn't what you were looking for is an expensive mistake. Therefore I decided to review as many of them as I could get my hands on, to make it a little easier to decide which one to invest in. Not all of the Icelandic cookbooks in the book stores are available from the library. I will stick to the ones I could get from the library, as I have been able to read them all the way through. First up are Cool Cuisine and Cool Dishes , which is a baby version of the former. They were written by Icelandic food writer Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir, with photographs by Gísli Egill Hrafnsson and published by Vaka-Helgafell in 2004. These books combine gorgeous food phot...