Swedish Meatballs

A note about the food. When we first arrived in the north, I did my best to keep up with the meat consumption, trying to do as the Saami do, but my stomach rebelled after a couple days of moose and reindeer for breakfast lunch and dinner. I scaled back and luckily there was another person on the trip not wanting to eat so much meat, so sometimes we had a vegetarian option. The fare was pretty much meat (with fish a few times) and heaps of potatoes. Sometimes we would get some frozen vegetables, but as you can imagine, it’s slim pickins in the Arctic! One of the nice perks of Arctic life is the lingonberries, which are somewhat sour but make a wonderful jam and juice. We also tried some cloudberries (frozen as they are picked in summer), a unique product of the area. Also sour, but different and wonderful as jam. Our last meal in Kiruna was, you guessed it, Swedish meatballs with gravy and potatoes. I had a few, but was glad to get back to the variety of Stockholm!

It was in Stockholm, at the Mathias Dahlgren restaurant in the Grand Hotel that I had the best meal I have had in a long long time. I had my first experience with herring, and it was the best possible in a kind of herring tartare, which was herring side by side with whitefish roe, yellow beets, capers, potatoes, sour cream, and topped with a raw egg yolk. On the advice of my server, I mixed it all up into a salty, fishy nectar and ate it with fresh crusty sourdough bread. That was followed with croquettes of forest mushrooms and salt fried green asparagus, baked Bolivian wild chocolate with toffee ice cream, and lemon verbena tea (with tiny tangerine Madelines for good measure). I could come back to Stockholm early just eat there again!

And I have righted the coffee wrongs and found mostly excellent coffee after my first day in Stockholm. This includes Jordana’s wicked brew that made my hair stand on end!