EL, buy as much of that bi-colored corn as will fit into your freezer. Give it a quick blanche in boiling water and then zip it away into the freezer bags -you don't even have to scrape the kernels (I've been told this & it's what I'm doing this year). You can enjoy your corn all winter that way. Just take it out and drop it into boiling water long enough to heat it through. Wish there was a way to do the same for the heirloom tomatoes!

"It's never good to get too fond of summer produce. It always leaves you."

EL: Truer words have never been typed.

Substitute "a date" for "summer produce" and you have the story of my life.

Piano Rob, you are sounding like me a couple of years ago. Time heals all wounds and time wounds all heals!

Tru dat Joyce W. And sometimes when you least expect it. Trampoline!

I picked up some carrots and tomatoes, organic, of course, a geothermal plant in Iceland yesterday.

The tomatoes were a bit boring, but the carrots are to die for.

The water comes out of the ground boiling there (that's the thing about Iceland - if you fall into the water, you don't know if you'll boil, freeze or just get bashed into oblivion). They use it to heat greenhouses and other buildings for miles around.

No corn of any kind, though.

Lissa, go sit under a tree and contemplate why they have no corn. How do you like the longest sunsets in the world? Heat is free there so stores leave their doors open in the winter to attract customers. Keep those repors coming. There's plenty og heat for hothouses bt not enough sun. I had a little scrap of lettuce on my plate once that was yellow.

Had any pony yet?

Hey vegans, Icelanders eat very few vegetables and yet they have the longest life span on Earth. What up?

Who needs bicolor corn when the Honey Crisps are in season???

*crunchcrunchcrunchcrunch*

They are not mutually exclusive. :-) EL

Hey Owl, do Icelanders, inreality, live longer or, with very little sun, does it just *feel* (I'd italicize that if I knew how) that way?

I'm with you on this one. Italics are a lot easier than linking. It's the less than sign (over the comma on your keyboard), i, then the more than sign (over the period). To end italics it's the less than sign, slash, i, more than sign. EL

They do in fact live the longest. And sans vegetables they have some of the most beautiful women in the world (partly because they look so healthy and robust). Give me a sunless lamb-eating vegetableless Icelandic woman any day over Tofurkey Girl. (Please don't exist). And the men are always top contenders in that sport where they drag school busses on a rope and carry big stones.

Eve - I'm laughing out loud - quietly (to not attract co-worker's unwanted attention)! I do hear that they have the worlds highest alcoholism rate, for what that tidbit is worth.

Lissa - the Skyr - have you had it yet?

Owl, you seem very contemplative this morning. Seems that the trampoline agrees with you!

Let me try to give you the basic templates for the pitiful few html codes that are allowed here:

What EL calls "less than" and "more than" symbols I will refer to as "angle brackets". That more correctly describes their function.

For all these codes, just replace the square brackets with their corresponding angle brackets. The spaces around TEXT are not necessary, they just look nice.

Italics:
[i] TEXT [/i]

Bold
[b] TEXT [/b]

Bold Italics
[i}[b] TEXT [/i][/b]

Imbedding a link into text:
[a href="ADDRESS"]TEXT[/a]

I find that the easiest way to use the link code is to write your text. Then paste that code tmeplate into your text next to the text you want to associate with the link. Cut the text, double click on TEXT in the template and paste. The go copy your url, double click on ADDRESS and past. Boom, you're done. I save the link template (with the appropriate brackets] in a note on my desktop.

Joyce, I've 3 half-eaten quarts of different flavours of skyr in the hostel fridge. The skyr section at the grocery store was huge. So was the milk section. There were over 10 kinds of milk.

One of the skyr flavours I got was apricot red raspberry. It is delicious, and I usually don't like flavoured skyr, yogurt, etc.

They have drinkable skyr here, too.

OMG, Iceland is self-sufficient in meat and dairy, and they grow 60% of their own veg. Must be all those geothermic greenhouses.

I haven't had pony yet (here, I've had it before, tasty stuff, but you want the old horse for eating, not the young one), but I did have whale the other day for lunch. It tasted more like beef than fish, and the consistency was similar to a firm liver.

Hmm...that might restart the PETA wars. I should say it was minke whale, which isn't endangered.

I just had an Icelandic hot dog (I apologize for not getting a picture, I'll try later, but I was dripping wet and very hungry in a gas station very far from the tourist path). It was at least 3" longer than ours and a bit narrower. Alas, no natural casing, so no snap. But, it was delicious. They toast the bun in a panini type thing, and it came with raw onion, fried onion and "salad" (potato salad, I'm pretty sure). I put chili ketchup (boring) and hot dog sauce (maybe mayonnaise?) on it.

Very, very good. The meat was a bit smoky tasting. The bun was nicely crunchy (although it took a few bites to get used to that). Not at all like the hot dog I'd build back in the US, but I want another one. Just too lazy to go back out in the rain.

Lissa,
You ate a minke? Inspector Clouseau would be appalled. To say nothing of the organ grinder. : )

Lissa, what kind of meat is in Icelandic hot dogs? I mean, is it game (ie raindeer) or beef or a mixture?

Minke!

Oh Retired, you just fixed my day.

Joyce, I'm pretty sure Icelandic hot dogs use mostly or only lamb. There are cows here, but there are a lot more sheep.

I see I'm going to have to rewatch the Pink Panther movies sometime soon.

Lissa - hmmm, lamb? in hotdogs? can't picture it but that's not to say I wouldn't try it. I'm no Andrew Zimmern, but I am somewhat adventurous. Speaking of Andrew Zimmern, GF and I watched last night and to our dismay found that he could even gross us out in Sicily. The man's a marvel - I don't know where he finds the guts to eat so much well...guts!