ok, let's all move here and lose weight....

[Guest guest]

....the real low carb way LOL.

Are you tough enough to try Thorrablot? In this Icelandic winter

banquet, folks eat foods like seal flippers, ram's heads, rotten shark,

blood pudding and pickled ram's testicles. If you can handle the cold

weather and the sketchy menu, head for Iceland any time this month to

join in the Thorri celebrations. Locals will gladly share with you!

Thorri is the Icelandic name for the fourth month of winter, which

starts every year on a Friday between January 19th and 25th, and ends 31

days later (this year, Thorri starts on January 19th and ends on

February 18th). Icelandic winters can be difficult to endure, with

extremely cold and windy weather, few sunny days (an average of 2 hours

of sunlight a day), a lot of snow and rain and the occasional blizzard.

Optimistically, " Thorri " means " the month of the waning of winter. " In

this depressing time of year, Icelanders need a little something to pick

up their spirits. There's nothing like a few bites of a ram's testicle

to add a zing to your day!

Thorrablot banquets happen in restaurants, homes and community centers

around Iceland throughout the fourth month of winter. The banquets are a

tribute to the Vikings, the ancestors of Icelanders who landed in

Iceland in the year 874 and took up residence. In those days, the lack

of refrigeration made it necessary to prepare foods for storage. This

was accomplished by the usual methods of curing, smoking, salting, or

drying, but also by laying the foods in mysa, a sour milk mixture, and

by kaestur, a delicious-sounding process whereby meat is buried and

allowed to rot.

As you might expect, Icelanders don't eat ram's testicles and blood

pudding on a regular basis. But during Thorrablot, they show that

they're as hearty as their ancestors by eating the sometimes-horrifying

dishes served up buffet-style on wooden slabs. Don't worry--if you

attend a banquet, you'll likely see milder dishes like flatkokur, or

flat rye bread; lundabaggar, lamb meatballs in mysa; kartoflumus, sweet

mashed potatoes; hardfiskur, dried fish with butter; and a favorite with

foreigners, skyr, curds served with fresh crowberries. Still, these sit

among scarier servings of svid, intact lamb's heads singed black to burn

off the hairs; lifrarpylsa, lamb's liver pudding; hrutspungar, lamb's

testicles soaked in mysa; and blodmor, boiled blood pudding served in

the sewn-up stomach lining of a lamb. When it comes time to eat the

hakarl, rubbery rotted shark that was buried for three to four months,

everyone is ready with a hearty serving of brennivin, or " black death, "

a strong Icelandic schnapps. Locals love to laugh at foreigners'

reactions to the rotted shark--it smells so bad that many can't get it

into their mouths!

The Thorrablot celebrations began as a way to ask the gods for a mild

month, usually beginning with a feast on the first day of Thorri. In the

year 1000, when Christian missionaries settled in Iceland and began

spreading the Gospel, Thorri banquets were discouraged because of their

pagan origins and fell out of practice. But in the early 19th century,

Icelanders began to fight for their independence from Denmark, and many

people began holding the banquets again. The feast was permanently

revived as a national tradition in 1873, when Icelandic students in

Copenhagen staged the traditional dinner as a rebellious gesture.

After eating the putrid dinner of Thorrablot, celebrants, amazingly, are

still in the mood to party. Dinners usually start around 9 in the

evening and the music, dancing, storytelling and roasting of dinner

guests begins at midnight and goes well into the morning. Join in on the

fun--that is, if you're not in the bathroom retching up the hakarl.--JC