Svið

Are you ready for this? I ate sheep's head. 

(Pictures by Kara Woo unless otherwise noted.)

So after our trip to Gullfoss/Geysir and Rettir (which, at the time I am writing this post, has occurred ages ago), Kara, Edvardas and a few others got the brilliant idea to cook and eat a traditional Icelandic dish: Svið. Apparently we didn't see enough sheep that day. 

Nope, we had to see frozen, dead sheep too, just to round it all out. In the bus terminal down the road, as well as several restaurants downtown, you can find traditional dishes like svið, lifrarpylsa and hákarl, but from what I've heard, Icelanders don't typically eat this stuff. Only for really special occasions, like Christmas or Þorrablót, a traditional feast early in the year... I believe svið is supposed to be served with a brown sauce, or some such, but we were just in it to try it, so they only ended up being boiled and served with green onions and potatoes:

In all honesty, if you can get over the "I'm eating head" part, and can get some meat off the bone, it doesn't taste bad! I equate it to oily (or slimey) roast beef. And yes: the teeth and tongue were included, but the eyes were not (apparently they're a delicacy in and of themselves, somewhere...):

(Photo by Michelle Bethell)

In the immortal words of... whoever the marketing director of Cambell's Soup is: mm, mm, good!