Kerstin's Crafts: Icelandic February highland and food adventures

This weekend I had two first time events.
The first one was that I went on a two days ski trip and stayed overnight in a so-called fjallaskál, a mountain or highland cottage.
The other one was that I experienced my first Þorrablót, a come-together in February when you "enjoy" the classical Icelandic winter dishes with each other. Fresh food was a very rare thing during the harsh Icelandic winters, so in order to survive you have to know how to conserve your food during the long winters. So people survived on potatoes and turnips which are possible to store for a long time, and they had a special technique to make meat long lasting. The trick is to pickle the meat in whey or to smoke it. There was lamb meat and there was whale (bacon) and there was shark. The shark needs to be digged, though, because the fresh meat is poisonous and it needs to ferment. So the Þorramatur (Þorra food) is a mixture of potatoes, turnips and sour meat and fermented meat. Quite special but that was the way to survive.

Þorramatur (þorra food). Mashed potatoes, different pickled lamb meats, and whale bacon. Picture taken in the highland cottage.

The ski trip was a special þorra ski trip organized by the lovely hiking association of Akureyri, and we drove to the highlands East of lake Mývatn which is in the middle of the volcanic zone of Iceland. There are big stretches of lava and strings of little craters, and the biggest volcano of Iceland (Askja) is somewhat close-by. From the road to the highland cottage it was around 9 km over the rather flat lava highlands. The weather was mostly calm and cold and the snow was crispy and perfect for skiing. Since it was my first trip with a planned night in highland cottage here in Iceland I was thinking a lot how much food to take with me and ended with packing a huge bag of cooked pasta with vegetables which lasted for three days and then still a quarter or so of it was left ... I also carried my own þorra food which I had bought a little bucket of (you can get those buckets here in Iceland during February and they are full of meat "specialities" lying in sour whey). So with my backpack filled with a weird mixture of sleeping bag, the huge pasta bag and a bag of sour meat (and a thermos filled with wonderful hot tea) I went along with my group skiing over the crispy white endless highland landscape glittering in the snow along with the string of small craters. When we reached the highland cottage which was a bit hidden behind one of the craters I was surprised by how well equipped it was. Due to a solar cell it had electricity and two well working ovens (gas and oil), ten beds, a well equipped kitchen and a lobby with a good heating system to dry wet clothes. There was an outhouse with a toilet (the toilet seat overfrozen with little ice crystals, so I am quite sure that nobody took a seat on it ...). While heating up the cottage we took a little ski walk around the area and had a look at the old house (which hardly deserves the name "house") and walked up one of the craters to have a look inside (and it had boiling red lava inside ... no, just kidding. :) ). We spent a cosy evening eating the þorra food (and I am grateful this is only done once per year nowadays), singing þorra songs and drinking hot chocolate with cognac.