Inspired by Iceland - The blog

Created in Iceland with boatloads of love

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Which type of festival-goer are you? To celebrate Iceland airwaves we want to know many rockers or ravers are out there! 

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Eat Like An Icelander

They say you are what you eat so prepare to be incredible.

Icelandic chef and Iceland Academy tutor Ylfa showed you some of her favourite recipes in our Facebook live cookery class. So you can cook them at home you can find the full recipes below.

If you missed the live class you can watch it here.

Main course: Smoked haddock, with herb & garlic potatoes and a white wine butter sauce

Haddock. About 800g for 4 people. Slowly poached at 80°c for a bout 2-3 min

Herb & garlic potatoes. 500g potatoes, fresh herbs, parsley, chives, cilantro, chevril, 2 cloves of organic garlic, 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper. Boil the potatoes and grate the garlic, chop the herbs and mix everything together, binding it with the oil.

White wine butter sauce (beurre blanc.) 1 shallot onion, 300ml white wine, 200g butter – cut into cubes. Dice the shallot and sweat in a pan, deglaze the pan with the white wine and reduce to about a half. Take off the heat and add butter, one cube at a time while stirring continuously. Season with salt and pepper.

Combine all your ingredients for the perfect dish.

Dessert: Skyr & caramelised white chocolate with hazelnuts  and a raspberry sauce

500g skyr, 350g white chocolate, 100ml cream

1. Put the white chocolate on an oven tray lined with parchment paper and bake for about 10-15 minutes at 150°c

2. when the white chocolate is caramelised put it in a bain marie along with the cream until melted together.

3. Add the skyr and fold gently.

4. Raspberry sauce. Take 250ml Raspberry pure, 1tbsp lemon juice and 2 tbsp sugar, mix everything in a pot over a medium heat until sugar is dissolved.

5. Take 100g hazelnuts a sprinkle of sugar and salt and roast them in the oven at 170°c for about 10-12 min

Combine all the ingredients for a delicious Icelandic dessert!

Now you can cook and eat like an Icelander it’s time to enrol in Iceland Academy. Find all the classes here.

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An Iceland secret or two you may not know about our national football team... For the first time ever, the Iceland men’s national football team has qualified for the European Championship. As you can imagine, here in Iceland we’re really excited, but it hasn’t always been a smooth journey. After British shipmates introduced us to football in the late 19th Century, Iceland has been on a rocky road to get to where we are today. Now that we are about to embark on our first match of the European Championship we thought it was time to look back at the highs and lows of Iceland’s national football team. Let’s start in 1947, when Iceland played its first national game. We fought hard against Denmark but lost 3-0. It wasn’t our finest hour, but it wasn’t our worst either. 20 years later, in 1967, we faced Denmark again, ready to show them what we were made of. The final score was 14-2 to Denmark, making it our biggest loss to date. At least it could only get better from there... Skip forward eight years and Iceland wins its first match in a European tournament against East Germany. Hooray! Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength (more or less) and in 2000 we achieved our biggest ever win; 5-0 against Malta. But it’s not nice to brag and we’ve still never managed to get one up on Denmark! Anyway, that pretty much brings us up to date. It’s been 53 years and 10 months since our first EURO play-off match and now the wait to qualify is over; we are finally in our first major tournament. Luckily for us, Denmark isn’t in the running, so we might even stand a chance. COME ON ICELAND!

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The first sunrise of the Icelandic Summer 2016.

The First Day of Summer (sumardagurinn fyrsti) is an annual public holiday in Iceland held on the first Thursday after the 18th April. So we all get to have the day off and enjoy the change in seasons.

This day used to be considered a time for young girls and boys to tell the person that they liked how they felt without getting into trouble. A sign of Summer love perhaps?

It was also said that if Winter and Summer "froze together" or in other words, if the temperature overnight went below freezing, the rest of the year would bring good luck. Some say that the cream on the milk would be as thick as the layer of ice that night, which would be lucky in itself!

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To celebrate Reykjavik Food and Fun Festival we met with Icelandic top chef Gísli Matthías Auðunsson. From a tiny island on the South Coast called the Westman Islands, Gísli started cooking eight years ago and opened his first restaurant after just three years. 

We were lucky enough to see him at work and he has shared one of his favourite recipes with us! Icelandic Kleina Recipe (twisted doughnut)

Icelandic doughnut: 600 g wheat 100 g sugar 100 g butter 4 tsp baking powder 3 eggs 2 pc ripped cardamom Combine all the ingredients. Knead the dough firmly in your hands. Roll out the dough and make sure that it doesn’t become too thin. Carve it out, twist and then fry under 190°C in a deep fat fryer. Once browned take them out and leave to cool.

Icelandic Brown Cheese cream: 50 g milk 50 g cream 12 g potato flour 35 g brown sugar 10 g butter 50 g Mysingur (Icelandic brown cheese) Place the brown sugar in a pot and caramelize it. Add the butter and cream. Thicken the milk with potato flour. Mix it all together. Add the brown cheese then sieve the remaining liquid out. Place on top of doughnuts and enjoy! To find out more about Food and Fun visit: http://www.foodandfun.is/  

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Very limited, specially priced early bird festival passes for next year's Sonar Reykjavík are now on sale and available to buy here:https://sonarreykjavik.com/en/pg/tickets. We wen't behind the scenes during this year's event with Björn Steinbeck, Festival Manager for Sonar in the Nordic Countries, to find out how the festival has developed over the years and what's in store for the future.

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We caught up with Icelandic pop group Milkywhale at Harpa Reykjavik. See them talk about how they started out, making the audience sweat and their experiences at Sónar.

Visit https://sonarreykjavik.com for more information on this year's festival.

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1st of January: Áramótaheit

A new year, a new beginning. Right? The last piece of these series about Icelandic Holiday Customs and Traditions is about New Years Resolutions, or more correctly: THE New Years Resolution. According to the newspaper and tv now is the time to get seriously fit. Run off the hangikjöt and stretch the konfekt away. Icelandic gyms are giant for the sole reason to fit in all of those that want to get fit in January. Needless to say more – we wish you a very healthy, happy year.

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31st of December:

Today is the last day of the year and the first day of the rest of your life. Tonight the Icelandic nation will celebrate both occasions with unbelievable amounts of fireworks. The fireworks are sold by the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue and the profit makes it possible for them to buy gear and gadgets to rescue cold and lost hikers all year round. The general public makes sure that sales go well and all of this just adds up to one wild, legendary New Year’s Eve. Gleðilegt nýtt ár!

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28th of December: Malt og Appelsín

Icelandic Christmas is no Christmas without “malt og appelsín”. The tradition is a blend of an orange soda and Malt Extrakt which is a non-alcoholic rather sweet beer-like beverage. The drinks are both readily available all year around but rarely mixed unless it is Christmas. Icelanders are trained to like this from birth although preferences differ when it comes to the mixture itself: Some like it dark brown, others with more orange tones.

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27th of December: Jólatré

Do you know what you should do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? Just stand up! For exactly this reason, creative Icelanders started making their own interpretations of christmas trees for decoration. They’d make them out of any scrap material they’d find, decorated with branches, moss, paper and candles. Some were very small, other big as a normal tree. The first home made trees where made in the late 19th Century (as far as we know) and where used until around 1950 when real, big xmas trees would be imported. The old charming homemade trees can still be found in museums around the country.

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26th of December: Jólamatur

For a long time it was a tradition in Iceland to not eat any meat four weeks before Christmas. For a period of time it was even illegal to do so. A lamb would then be cooked for the Christmas feast, you can just imagine how tasty that must have been (or as they say; hunger is the best sauce). The reasons for this were both cultural and religious and have fallen out of fashion now. This drawing shows the classical Icelandic Christmas Dinner hierarchy of today. 

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25th of December: Grýla og Leppalúði

After having introduced all the thirteen Icelandic Yule lads it is appropriate to wish you all Merry Christmas with a little family portrait of their mother, Grýla and her husband Leppalúði. The terrifying giantess is known to every child in Iceland and her reputation is frightening. Grýla has a long history of hunting for children, naughty kids are her favourite snack. So our advice is this; be good, be kind, be thankful and you’ll survive just fine. Happy Holidays!

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24th of December: Kertasníkir

Today at six o’clock church bells will be heard on the radio, rising in a familiar crescendo that signifies the arrival of Christmas. Families will gather around a dinner table full of delicacies, filling themselves up to the brim of their bodies before moving over to the Christmas tree where they’ll give and receive presents, eat cookies and be merry and perhaps a little tipsy. Kertasníkir Candle-Stealer will be lurking somewhere in the background waiting for the opportunity to steal some candles, he still thinks they are edible like they where in the old days.

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23rd of December: Ketkrókur

Ketkrókur, or Meat-Hook, arrives on Þorláksmessa which is a holiday that in Iceland has become a part of Christmas. Today there will be outdoor concerts and happenings in towns, shops are open until late in the evening and Icelanders will run around in panic searching for their last Christmas gifts. Today it is also a custom to eat buried and fermented skate-fish (somewhat like a ray), its smell is so strong that you might sniff it through your internet.

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22nd of December: Gáttaþefur

According to poet Johannes úr Kötlum ,Doorway-Sniffer never catches a cold despite his abnormally big nose. This king-sized nose would count as big in most places, but in Iceland, the country of potato noses, this is truly something else. The nose has a function of course – with it Gáttaþefur can smell laufabrauð (previously illustrated on the 8th of December) within a radius of 15 kilometres. What happens after that I’ll let up to your imagination and yule lad knowledge.

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21st of December: Gluggagægir

The much beloved Santa Claus wears a clean, red suit perfectly matched with his sophisticated beard and friendly ‘ho ho ho’. The Icelandic Yule lads have so different qualities that one might wonder what is up with this nation that they belong to. The thirteen brothers are foul and filthy and despite their cheerful spirit and jolly ways they know nothing of manners and civilised behaviour (in other words, you wouldn’t want to sit on their lap). Gluggagægir is the tenth brother and he will without blinking an eye throw himself on any window and peer through in search for something to eat, steal – or watch.