11 December 2007

comfort food

On a blustery, rain-swept Tuesday, nothing's better for lunch than plokkfiskur, the Icelandic twin of my mom's homemade macaroni and cheese. Cubed potatoes mixed with white fish and plenty of sauce are topped with cheese and baked until toasty. It goes down easy with cracked pepper sprinkled on top and dense slices of dark brown bread spread with butter on the side.

I just discovered that the Boston Globe thought it worthy enough to include in an article about Icelandic food last month. Not sure about the clam juice in the recipe but if anyone's wanting to know the feeling of wintertime Iceland, it's a good place to start.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not sure either about the curry, I think that's why the recipe is called "Dressed up plokkfiskur" (dressed up being the direct translation of "í sparifötum" - Sunday clothes... well, I guess that wording is ok too, but still slightly different). Some people like plokkfiskur with curry, but it is by far not the most typical version.

Regarding the clam juice, it's not so much off, in some variations of plokkfiskur you use fish broth, the clam juice is probably just a fancy version of that. Some don't use fish broth at all and use only milk.

There's quite a lot of recipes going on here on the today's windswept island so you should just experiment with different versions if you want to find your favorite. I like our canteen plokkfiskur, but there's also an excellent one in the restaurant Þrír Frakkar! I really recommend you going there some day to try it out.