Day 72-kleinur, laufabrauð, and harðfiskur

   March 16-The staff members at Spencer's preschool/kindergarten, Hraunborg, are travelling to New York City the week after next to visit preschools there and to see the sights.  To help defray costs, they have been having various fundraisers.  The students pitched in this past week when Kolbrun, the cook at the school, supervised them in the kitchen as they made kleinur to sell.
Kleinur are a traditional Icelandic fried pastry dessert.  They taste very much like donuts, which is to say that they are very yummy.  So, to be supportive of Spencer's teachers, we bought a couple bags of kleinur for ourselves!
   Alex and a few other girls from Bifröst were invited to a sleepover birthday party at a farm between here and Borgarnes.  It is actually the same farm at which Joslyn attended a birthday party a few weeks back.  So, Sigrún Lilja and Shan drove a gaggle of
girls down to the farm after school today. 
   When Shan got back, the whole family trooped over to Emma and Pálmar's house for supper.  This is the couple with whom we celebrated Beer Day a couple weeks back.  They wanted to serve us an Icelandic meal, so they cooked fish for us.  Pálmar's father was a fisherman, and it sounds like he ate fish practically every meal.  His grandmother also gave him cod liver oil every morning, so he acquired a taste for it and continues to have a spoonful for breakfast.  Their son Þorsteinn, who is four years old, wants to mimic Pálmar, so he has been demanding and receiving a spoonful for breakfast for a while as well.  Cod liver oil has traditionally been supplied to kids in school and our children are offered it at every breakfast at their schools.  They consistently turn it down.  Joslyn and we adults tried the mild form of the oil and we did not find it distasteful.  I doubt that we will buy any of it for daily consumption, however!  I should point out that not all Icelanders are fans of cod liver oil.  For instance, Emma stopped taking it as soon as she was allowed the choice! 
   Emma introduced us to another traditional Icelandic food, laufabrauð, which is made at Christmas time.  The dough for laufabrauð is made with a minimal amount of flour, hearkening back to the days when flour was a rare commodity.  The dough is rolled out wafer-thin and then designs are cut into it, before it is deep-fat fried.  It was Pálmar's turn to be unimpressed, but for him the reason was economics, which is his profession.  He said that Emma and her mom spend hours in the process to only make a small amount of laufabrauð.  We had to side with Emma, however, because we thought her laufabrauð tasted better than his cod liver oil.  Pálmar did have some luck with us, though, when he pulled out his harðfiskur.  We had tried harðfiskur, which is simply dried fish, a couple times before, but we had not found it very appealing.  However, we found Pálmar's variety to be rather tasty, especially when he had us put butter on it. 
   The kids had fun playing with Þorsteinn's extensive collection of playmobil toys and we adults had a wonderful time sitting around talking, trying out different food, and drinking wine and beer.  Time flies when you are having fun, though, and it was a shock to all of us, when we finally looked at the clock and realized it was getting close to 11pm!  We reluctantly pulled ourselves away and said goodnight.  We continue to be amazed by our good fortune to have met so many wonderful people over here who are so inviting.  So many people have been willing and able to interact with us and the language barrier has proven to be almost no issue whatsoever.