Adventures in an igloo

Today is the first day of winter on my rock and the first day of winter is always the first day of the month Gormánuður (this year October 25th- November 23rd). Supposedly it's a sign of a good winter when summer and winter freeze together and they most definately did exactly that last night. As you can see from the pictures from our garden, winter has taken a bite out of our apples and rowan berries, but I think it's an awfully pretty combination and I must say that our first apple pie ever to be made from Icelandic out doors grown apples was darn tasty!

Now on to etymology; Gormánuður means the month of slaughtering animals, pretty gory right? In fact, it seems that my fellow rockers have taken this activity or let's say the fruits of this activity quite seriously since the beginning of the recession. A wave of anti-globalism and a new-found national pride has sprung from the loins of the badly run banks and rockers now run around scratching the hell out of Game Overs I mean Range Rovers.

The return to the old times is quite fascinating for the historian in me but the other day it also left me feeling like an unpatriotic traitor whose car deserved to be scratched...

So, during the recession I, just like everyone else, have starting thinking about how to save money and one way is to eat a lot of parsnips as they are locally grown and thus environmentally friendly, cheap and healthy. I eat them raw as a snack, fried in the oven, boiled with spices and thus turned into a sort of curry and so on and so forth.

However, the other day I got a dreadful craving for aubergines (I found a really nice recipe that required one aubergine and a few button mushrooms so it's not like it was going to be super expensive). So off I went to the grocery store...Little did I know that former bankers and bankers' mums would all be there shopping.

As I stood in the line waiting to pay for the one aubergine I noticed that everyone else had the very big trolleys filled with plastic bottles containing frozen sheep's blood and enormous bags of sheep fat, offal and liver. Yup, everyone and their mum are now chilling in their kitchen, mixing blood and fat (and maybe some raisins for extra flavouring) and stuffing the messy lot into an empty pouch that used to belong to a poor sheep's digestive system. This is then boiled and eaten with parsnip stew and mashed taters. Cheap, messy, tasty and local.


A woman who looked like a former banker's mum (who had 2 full trolleys of innards and blood) looked at my aubergine and I could read from her eyes: Die bourgouisie scum! I started panicking and thought: She's going to follow me out and hit the car I'm driving (a borrowed one btw) with all the weight of her enormous and heavy trolley!

All of a sudden I realized that she wasn't giving me the evil eye because of the blasted eggplant in my hand, no, it was the other item I had just picked up at the register, something so super English that even looking at it made you think of Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, a Toffee Crisp Bar.

Who knows, maybe I deserve my car to be trolleyed for that oversight, if only I had a car available for scratching and trolley attacks, say maybe a Bentley, an Aston Martin or a Land Rover...