Yummy Iceland: Kvöldverðarboð

Invitation to dinner

We had visitors last weekend and invited them to the “Icelandic Evening”.

Our visit is usually in the south of Europe, but they willingly embarked on the adventure of "Icelandic cuisine" and bravely even tried the Hákarl, the famous (infamous?) Icelandic "rotten shark".

As a starter I made green pearl barley salad .

On the one hand, my youngest offspring loves this salad very much, and on the other hand, pearl barley is really a big topic in Icelandic cuisine: Pearl barley used to be an essential part of everyday Icelandic cuisine, as a side dish, for thickening stews, for making sausages, in groats, but also in desserts . However, since the 1940s, pearl barley has been increasingly replaced in Icelandic cuisine by "modern" imported products such as rice and pasta. Today there is a movement that is consciously re-introducing the use of traditional Icelandic products in Icelandic cuisine, such as barley.

So - several good reasons why I chose exactly this green pearl barley salad as an appetizer!

For a bit of authentic Icelandic feeling, we specially bought Hákarl , fermented ice shark.

Everyone at the table tried it and found it really tasty... well. Some actually took a second or third piece, for others a small piece was enough and the smell was overwhelming. I really think it smells worse than it tastes!

There was also a bit of Brennivín to counteract the aftertaste...

The main course for our visit was Plokkfiskur with Rúgbrauð and salad.

For the traditional Icelandic plokkfiskur ("pounded fish") I used this recipe here, which is actually one of the first recipes here on the blog.

However, I modified the original recipe a little:

So when I fried the onions in the butter, I added ground cumin , which grows on the island of Viðey off Reykjavík, for example, and which found its way into everyday Icelandic cuisine in the 18th century thanks to the bailiff Skúli Magnússon. A wonderful spice that I now also like to use when baking bread!

I also used very spicy cheese and added a bit of the cheese to the sauce, as well as a handful of diced blue cheese for a more intense note. Sprinkle with the cheese, add some fresh parsley - and then put it in the oven!

As a side dish to the Plokkfiskur there was the classic rúgbrauð, Icelandic rye bread. Baked in milk cartons in the oven, I now prefer to use this recipe with curdled milk and baking soda. The whole thing is then baked overnight in the oven at 200 °F (90 °C) for about 11 to 12 hours...

You just have to start in good time if you know that visitors are coming - but it tastes really delicious and was very well received again this time! (And - no, it's really not chocolate cake!)

There was also fresh spinach salad with blueberries and the same blue cheese that I also used in the Plokkfiskur. (However, unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the salad last week, so there is now an older photo of the recipe here on the blog.)

For dessert there was skyr with fruit - easy, nice to prepare and looks nice too, I think!

Simply mix vanilla skyr with a little cocoa powder, a little cappuccino powder and a little syrup, then layer with berries in the glass and chocolate shavings on top. Wonderfully uncomplicated, definitely delicious and easy to vary. Always good, I think!

I also prepared these skyr strawberry slices, simply frozen strawberries and skyr and then covered them with chocolate.

(I'll have to submit the exact recipe in a few days, but before that I should optimize it a bit... or at least find out the optimal serving time, between "too hard" and "unfortunately it flows away"...)