This post is sponsored by La Crema Wines. All opinions here are my own. You can find the companion recipes over on the La Crema blog. 

Apologies for the quiet here this past month. Things have been busy, and cooking, writing, and reflecting have fallen by the wayside a bit. We’ve got 24 days to go until our wedding, which is both insane and kind of a relief. I’m feeling rock solid about marrying Trevor, which is 99.9% of the battle, but there’s still a lot of miscellaneous stress associated with hosting a party for 50 with all kinds of societal and emotional strings attached. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on weddings at this point, but I’ll save those for a later date.

Today, what I’m here to talk about is this Scandinavian dinner menu – my latest collaboration with La Crema wines. It’s inspired by my recent trip to Iceland: in July I finally took advantage of Boston’s relative proximity to Scandinavia and spent a long weekend there. Iceland has been at the top of my travel wishlist for years and I was so excited to finally be in the land of moss-covered lava and epic waterfalls. I have to do a real travelogue at some point, but suffice it to say that the Icelandic landscape is incredible (and here’s a few teaser shots!). One moment we were driving through an alien landscape of hardened lava boulders tumbling into the sea, the next there were pockets of geyser steam rising up all around us, and then, suddenly, we were in the midst of fields of lupine in front of massive glaciers.

Iceland is known for being pretty expensive. I certainly found this to be true, particularly when it came to food. The silver lining to this was that the price differential between cheap food and fancy food was much smaller than it is here in the US. While a gas station hamburger could set you back $20, a three-course meal with wine at a top restaurant only cost $60. So despite the expense, we managed to have some very good meals. Our most memorable culinary experience was a 3 course dinner at Forettabarinn in Reykjavik. It was our final night as a group (and a semi-bachelorette celebration) after a long weekend of adventuring in South Iceland. The food was creative and well-executed, the wine was abundant, and the company was unbeatable. That lovely dinner served as the inspiration for this one.

There are three courses to this menu. First, a super-simple Smoked Salmon and Rye Crackers appetizer. Everyone should have a few minimal-effort, but still fancy-feeling appetizers in their repertoire. This should be one of them. The only “cooking” is to whip up a little cream with capers, slice a cucumber, and assemble. It’s also very portable, so guests can easily grab one of these and a glass of wine while mingling. On that note, the wine to open for this course is La Crema’s Monterey Chardonnay. Its bright acidity and smooth texture stands up nicely to the fatty, smoky salmon and rich caper cream.

The main event consists of two parts – Mashed Potato Waffles with Horseradish Sauce and Mustard-Thyme Pulled Leg of Lamb. I don’t think I’ve ever had lamb served BBQ style before my dinner at Forettabarinn, but it’s so wonderful. Ideally, I would have liked to use a slightly more economical and fattier lamb shoulder for this recipe, but I couldn’t find one at my butcher. The result was still good – tender, falling apart lamb, completely imbued with the flavors of mustard and wine and paprika. It was delicious on top of the potato waffles with a bit of horseradish sauce and grainy mustard. For this course, I opened a bottle of La Crema’s Monterey Pinot Noir and it was so good together! Just tangy and juicy and yum.

For dessert, I whipped up a light Skyr Mousse with Wild Blueberry Sauce and Gingerbread Crumbs. If you’re not familiar with it, skyr is Iceland’s answer to yogurt, only it’s thicker and tangier. Similar to Greek yogurt, it’s rich in protein and very trendy here in the US. To turn it into mousse, I incorporated whipped cream and a hint of sugar. It was such a treat – light and airy with a distinct tang from the skyr. It was also so simple to put together. The only other recipes I saw for skyr mousse involved a fussy gelatin method, but I opted for a much simpler treatment here – whip cream, whip skyr, fold together, serve. With the maple-blueberry sauce and a sprinkling of gingerbead cookie crumbs it’s a more-than-the-sum-of-it’s-parts dessert.

You can find the recipes for the first two courses on the La Crema blog: Smoked Salmon Rye Crackers with Caper Cream; Mashed Potato Waffles with Horseradish Sauce; and Mustard-Thyme Pulled Leg of Lamb. The Skyr Mousse with Wild Blueberries recipe is below!

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Skyr Mousse with Wild Blueberries and Sweet Gingerbread Crumbs

A simple skyr-based mousse made from whipped cream and thick, yogurt-like Icelandic skyr. Served with wild-blueberry sauce and gingerbread crumbs.

Inspired by dinner at Forettabarinn

• Author: Katie at the Kitchen Door
• Yield: 4

Ingredients

• 1 cup wild Maine blueberries, fresh or frozen
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• juice from 1/2 lemon
• 1 cup heavy cream, chilled
• 4 TBS sugar
• 1 cup plain or maple flavored skyr (Icelandic yogurt), chilled
• 1.5 oz. gingerbread cookies, preferably Anna’s Swedish Thins
• 1 TBS brown sugar

Instructions

1. Place the blueberries, maple syrup, and lemon juice in a small saucepan and stir to mix. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium-low heat. Simmer the berries until they have burst and released their juices and the sauce is slightly syrupy, about 8-10 minutes. Keep a close eye on them to be sure they don’t burn. Remove from the heat, transfer the blueberry sauce to a storage container, and chill thoroughly.
2. To make the mousse, whip the heavy cream on high until stiff peaks have formed. Add the sugar and beat for a few seconds longer, just to incorporate the sugar into the cream. In a separate bowl, beat the skyr for 30 seconds until it is lightened slightly. Add half of the whipped cream to the skyr and use a spatula to gently fold together. Repeat with the remaining half of the whipped cream, folding just enough to mix the two together. Don’t overfold or your mousse may deflate. Chill the mousse until ready to serve.
3. Place the gingerbread cookies and the brown sugar in a small food processor and pulse several times to make crumbs. Set crumbs aside.
4. To serve the mousse, drizzle the chilled blueberry sauce on top of the mousse. Sprinkle with the gingerbread crumbs. Serve immediately

The post Scandinavian Dinner with La Crema: Skyr Mousse with Wild Blueberries and Sweet Gingerbread Crumbs appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

The Book: Iceland is at the very top of my travel wishlist. The dramatic landscapes and vast, untouched wilderness have me aching to throw my hiking boots in a bag and hop on a plane across the Atlantic. In reality, I’ll be getting on planes to a lot of different places in the next few months – Colombia, Chile, and Charleston for starters – but none of them will be going to Iceland. I certainly can’t complain about the wonderful places I will be going, but that doesn’t mean I can’t daydream about Iceland at the same time. The book North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland, is one way to amp up my daydreaming. It’s a cookbook, sure, but I have to say that it feels like more than a cookbook to me. The interviews with food producers and stories of life on the island are as important to the book as the recipes themselves. The book is organized not by meal or by region, but by producer – a chapter for the arctic char smoker, one for the salt maker, and for the birch and mushroom forager. It was truly fascinating to learn about rugbraud, the hearty rye bread that is baked in underground geyser ovens, and about Siggi Henningson, a fisherman who spends his afternoons rapelling over cliffs to collect seabird eggs, not for himself, but for the entire town. The structure of the book and the stories paint a clear picture of where Iceland’s food comes from, on both land and sea.

I knew in advance that many of the recipes in North would be too esoteric to ever make at home, but was thoroughly intrigued anyway. The flavors throughout the book are consistent and coherent: smoke, salt, rich dairy, bright pickles, oily fish, and grassy herbs, the foods of a cold and isolated island. The fact that some ingredients may be hard (or impossible) to find outside of Iceland (seabird eggs, anyone?) is readily acknowledged, and many substitutions are offered – the authors have even provided an email you can reach out to with questions. The recipes also skew towards fine dining more than rustic eating – one of the authors is, after all, the chef at Dill. But although I know that I will never go to the trouble of making Lumpfish Roe with Smoked Mayonnaise, Beer Vinegar Jelly, and Horseradish Cream (smoke your own oil to make your own smoked mayonnaise, make your own beer vinegar and then turn it into jelly, you get the picture), other recipes can certainly be tweaked to fit into my repertoire – like Fennel Salad with Cottage Cheese and Spiced Nuts, or Poached Cod Cheeks in Roasted Cod Soup. Whether or not I find myself cooking from this book regularly, it’s so full of general inspiration that it deserves a place on my bookshelf, esoteric recipes or not.

The Food: One of the recipes that felt approachable enough to try was for Bacalo Potatoes with Fennel Ribbons and Sorrel Ash. I had to be a bit generous with my interpretation of this recipe, taking inspiration as much from the headnote and author Jody Eddy’s description of the ways they ate this throughout their trip, as from the recipe itself. The base of this recipe is creamy mashed potatoes mixed with bacalo, or salt cod, a combination sometimes called brandade. As written, the potatoes and cod are served topped with sorrel ash, roasted carrots, fennel ribbons, soft boiled eggs, and freshly grated horseradish. Since both sorrel and horseradish are hard to come by without planning ahead, I nixed them and decided to take a more rustic approach to the meal – serving the mash on hearty whole grain bread spread with mustard (a decent replacement for the pungent horseradish). I also skipped the eggs, as once you smear potatoes on toast you don’t feel like you need that many more things on top. Although I usually try to stick to the letter when testing recipes for cookbook reviews, here, I don’t feel bad about it. Eddy writes ” One night, Gunnar served it on toast; another, he substituted smoked haddock, an ideal replacement for the cod. The profusion of herbs he added was dictated by whatever we foraged that day.”  It’s a recipe that is more idea than science. I’ve written it here the way I made it, inspired by the instructions in North.

Recipe Shortlist: Salted Cod Tartar, Dill Mayo, Dulse Powder; Parsnips Three Ways with Arctic Char Roe; Cauliflower, Seabird Eggs, Burned Butter; Roasted Lamb Shoulder, Braised Cabbage, and Pickled Onions; Smoked Lamb with Skyr and Nutmeg; Stone Bramble and Cottage Cheese with Whey Caramel and Whey Granita; Red Beet and Rosemary Sorbet, Almond Cake, and Sugared Almonds

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Disclaimer: I received a review copy of North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland from Ten Speed Press, but I was not otherwise compensated and all thought and opinions are my own.

Bacalo Potatoes with Carrots and Fennel

Recipe adapted from North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland. Serves 4.

• 1 lb. salt cod
• 4 large carrots, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
• 2 TBS olive oil, divided
• sea salt and pepper to taste
• 1 lb. waxy potatoes
• 1/2 c. heavy cream
• 4 slices whole grain bread
• 2 TBS mustard
• 2 fennel stalks, peeled into ribbons using a vegetable peeler

1. Place the salt cod in a bowl and fill to cover with cold water. Soak in the water in the refrigerator for 24 hours, changing the water 2 to 3 times. When you are ready to prepare the meal, drain and rinse the soaked fish. If it has them, remove and discard the skin and bones. Set the fish aside.
2. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Toss the carrot pieces with 1 TBS of the olive oil and sea salt and pepper, and spread on a rimmed baking sheet. Roast, stirring every 10 minutes, until tender all the way through, about 20-30 minutes depending on the size of your pieces. Transfer the roasted carrots to a bowl and set aside.
3. Add the salt cod to the roasting pan and roast until warmed through, about 8-10 minutes. Break into flakes and keep warm.
4. Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks. Add to a large pot and cover with cold water. Salt water generously. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and boil until potatoes are tender, about 5-8 minutes. Drain the potatoes and mash with a potato masher. Add the heavy cream and mash until incorporated, then stir in the warm salt cod pieces. Season to taste with pepper.
5. Rinse and dry the roasting pan, then brush the bread slices with the remaining 1 TBS of olive oil. Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and toast the bread until golden brown, about 5-7 minutes per side. Remove the bread from the oven and spread with the mustard. Top with a generous heap of the potatoes and cod, and several pieces of roasted carrot. Just before serving, shave the fennel stalks into thin ribbons using a vegetable peeler and place on top of the potatoes. Serve immediately.

The post Book Club: North, The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland // Bacalo Potatoes with Carrots and Fennel appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.