Well, it seemed like we may as well get the obvious punchline over with right at the beginning. Mocha, a UK company with a eccentric home gadget line--specializing in items like Swarovski crystal egg crackers and mugs with built-in cookie holders--now offers these tres barbarique drink coolers. The Nordic Rock stone ice cubes are genuine chunks of "pollution-free base rock" mined in Sweden--who else would invent this but some kind of Viking?

Just pop the Nordic Rocks (in their charming leather pouch) into your freezer (or igloo) for an hour, then drop two or three into your cocktail. On the practical end, they help conserve water and prevent your precious booze from being diluted. Impractically, you get to walk around drinking from a glass full of rocks--whether you use the opportunity to play practical jokes or share your best Hagar the Horrible/Kirk Douglas in The Vikings impersonation is up to you.

I am fascinated by Mimolette. This bright orange French cheese is the size of a bowling ball. Its appearance is breathtaking. It looks like a giant cantaloupe. After I first tried Mimolette, I was struck by its firm texture and sweet caramel-like taste. In addition, I was intrigued by its remarkable similarities with many of the aged Dutch cheeses I've tried in the past. And so, after looking into its history, I was not surprised that it was first produced to model a Dutch cheese, called Edam.

The history of Mimolette -

During the 17th century, Louis XIV-the Sun King-had both a cultural and economic plan for France. The goal was to decrease all imports and increase all exports. The theory was that it would benefit French economy, because other countries would be purchasing French products. Culturally, Louis XIV wanted France to produce the best of everything, from clothing to food. France was to become the European trend setter.
How did these laws initiate and encourage the production of Mimolette?

Regions of France along the borders were culturally affected by the king's agenda. For example, in northeastern France, Flanders, people ate Dutch food. Their diet consisted of foods imported from Holland. In the northern French city of Lille, Edam was probably the most common cheese, the most popular at the time.

However, in response to Louis XIV's laws forbidding the importation of Edam, French people in and around Lille created their own Edam-like cheese – Mimolette. So what's the difference? The cheese is produced same way as Edam with the addition of annatto, a natural food coloring agent. Although they both have a spherical shape and same texture, Mimolette has a natural rind (no wax) and an intense orange color due to the annatto.

I hate the cold, so I have a hard time seeing why anyone would want to move to the island of Spitsbergen, about 300 miles from the northern tip of Norway. However, that is exactly what Kazem Ariaiwand did, and he had a very good reason for making the move.

Mr. Ariaiwand is an Iranian who had been seeking asylum in Norway. His family had been accepted, however, he was denied. As it turns out, Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, doesn't require pesky paperwork or residency status to live there. So Mr. Ariaiwand moved there as a temporary solution and promptly opened his kebab shop. It's become so popular that it has challenged traditional foods, like whale meat and seal meat, for superiority.

I can understand this man's motives, and I certainly see why a kebab shop would be so popular in the arctic circle. I've never had the pleasure of seal or whale meat, but it seems like a kebab would win me over pretty quickly!

According to a Swedish study that was just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it may be better for you to drink whole milk and eat full-fat cheese than to avoid them if you want to avoid excess weight gain. It also found that there was no benefit, in terms of the size of the waistline, to drinking low fat milk instead. This appears to be especially true if you are a woman, because the study looked at the eating habits of over 19,000 middle-aged Swedish women over the course of 9 years.

The problems with the study, although it is certainly encouraging for those who don't like to get their lattes with skim milk, is that it doesn't seem to take everything into account. For example, the women in the study were of average weight (meaning that they were not overweight) when the study began, suggesting that they might already have some healthy-eating strategies in place to compensate for intake of milk.

Lutefisk is one traditional Christmas food that often gets short shrift during a season when visions of gingerbread and fruitcake dance in the heads of foodies and nonfoodies alike. And perhaps with good reason. Who on earth would eat preserved fish that has a jelly-like consistency, much less reserve it for a holiday treat?

Norwegians and other Scandinavians, that's who. Lutefisk takes its name not from the Medieval stringed instrument, but from lye. Honest, it translates to "lye fish." This venerable holiday "treat" is prepared by adding lye to air-dried cod or other white fish. After the fish has been steeped in a noxious brew of cold water and lye it is actually caustic and must be soaked in several changes of water for almost a week to render it edible. Fans of the movie Fight Club will be intrigued to learn that if it soaks too long in the lye, the fats in the fish will render it into soap. Now, there's an item for a holiday gift basket, homemade fish soap.

In Alaska those famous flying reindeer are being served up for dinner. You can get Caribou steaks, roasts, and reindeer jerky and sausage- in mild and hot versions. Reindeer hot dogs are a summer time treat, as well as being served during the start of the Iditarod dog sled race every year in March. Caribou, also called reindeer, have a very flavorful and lean, healthy meat. To make sausage with it, you actually have to add fat from other sources such as beef and pork. It is sometimes hard to find but Ikea sells it all across Europe. So how about a nice spit roasted reindeer for the Holidays?

You can buy caribou and other game and exotic meats at some of the following places:

• Fossil Farms
• www.ExoticMeats.com
• Jamison Farms Elk Meat
• Elk USA
• Fisherman's Express
• Indian Valley Meats
• Alaska Sausage and Seafood
• Safari Snacks

The 2006 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony was held on December 10th at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden. The event is, of course, one of the most well-recognized celebrations of achievement in the world and prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, Economics and Literature were officially awarded.

In addition to the ceremony, there is a huge banquet - and we always look forward to hearing about what was served. This year, the three-course menu included a mosaic of salmon and scallops with Kalix bleak roe; herb-baked saddle of lamb, mashed potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes, olive oil-glazed vegetables and port wine sauce; and pineapple parfait with caramelized pineapple salad and mint. The wines served included Pommery Grand Cru Vintage 1996 Champagne, Veenwouden Classic 2002 Paarl and Château Haut-Bergeron 2003 Sauternes.

Kölsch is a German beer style that I began to explore late in my long and checkered career as a beer geek. Real late, as in a few weeks ago.

I'm not sure what took me so long. I'd tasted it before. My brewcrastination may be largely due to the fact that so many other big, flavorful German beers just shouldered the gentle beer from Cologne out of my palate's way.

My first real experience with kölsch was at a birthday party for my dear friend and fellow carnivore Josh Ozersky. Much meat and many glasses of Gaffel kölsch were consumed. I came away with the impression that I could easily quaff voluminous amounts of this refreshing nectar on a hot day in a biergärten. Dazed as I was by meat and alcohol, I still retained enough clarity to know that I needed to investigate this venerable brew.

While one would expect that diamonds are a big draw for thieves, wines seem like a much less likely target. Luxist reports that one of the top restaurants in Sweden had its entire collection of French Bordeaux wines stolen - over 600 bottles of wine. The reason that this particular collection is so significant is that it holds the Guinness World Record for the most unique wine collection in the world. It included bottles from the six Grand Cru vineyards: Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Haut Brion, Chateau d'Yquem and Chateau Latour. All totaled, the value of the stolen bottles is around $500,000.

It seems likely that the bottles will be resold gradually over time and because a bottle of Mouton Rothschild is probably more difficult to track than diamonds are, the restaurant may not be able to recover its collection.

Planning on doing some traveling this summer? Looking for a list of the dining hot spots that you should stop by for a memorable meal? Start with the go list from Food and Wine magazine, which picks out 376 restaurants chosen by "plugged in correspondents" from 50 cities around the world. They have the goods on restaurants like Michael Mina in San Francisco, Rockpool in Sydney, Ferran Adria's Fast Good in Madrid and Felix in Hong Kong, including a picks at both the high and lower ends of the price range.

Now, it's not possible that a list like this, even such a large one, would have all the great eats of any given city, but you aren't likely to have a bad meal by picking any of their choices. If you're traveling somewhere a little off the beaten path that isn't on the "go list," or are looking for something specific, it might be best to turn to another source of restaurant information. And the best resource, in my opinion, when traveling and looking for good eats is still Chowhound. Take some time to browse through their archives and look for recommendations, or pose a question on their message board if you're looking for something specific - like the best mexican food in Boise, ID.

The only Swedish whisky distiller, Mackmyra, has released a single malt. Coming from the countries only distiller means it is also the only Swedish malt whisky.

Preludium:01 is a blend of the premier casks of whisky made in the small-scale distillery in 1999, when it was founded, and the first ones from the new distillery, opened in 2002. Although, like scotch whisky the producers use ex-bourbon casks and ex-sherry butts, they have an added local feel by utilising new casks made of Swedish Oak.

They took the first first-fill sherry cask, the first first-fill bourbon cask, the first Swedish oak cask, and mixed it together and to get the volume. Adding the new distillery caks as well made a mix of everything they have produced.

Preludium:01is the first in a series of six that will be released during 2006 and 2007.

[From The Scotch Blog]

Sounds like heaven - a Norwegian woman turned on her tap and instead of water out pumped BEER!

"I turned on the tap to clean some knives and forks and beer came out," Haldis Gundersen told Reuters from her home in Kristiansund, west Norway. "We thought we were in heaven."

A bar two floors below mixed up the piping connecting a new barrel of beer to the Gundersen's flat. And not a cheap error to make either as beer in Norway is really, really expensive with a 0.4 liter (0.7 pint) costing about 50 crowns ($7.48) in a bar.

If it happens again she should request Bailey's!

[via Days that End in Y]

Danisco, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based producer of food flavorings, sweeteners and other ingredients, is exploring how foods release flavors and how humans perceive them. According to a recent Food Navigator article, they're using a process called proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry, or PTR-MS. The technology, developed in the mid-1990s, is also used to rapidly detect pollutants in air. The idea is to learn how different foods release their flavors as people chew, swallow and breathe, then use that information to develop or recreate other flavorings.

The flavorings that Danisco creates based on this information are known as "Commonsense Flavours." While Danisco has been working with their Commonsense Flavours for over a year, the PTR-MS information, taken primarily in the human nasal cavity, gives a better idea of how flavors are perceived by people, a Danisco release says. Basically, as I understand it, if you know what chemicals a strawberry releases when eaten, and how those levels rise and fall throughout the eating process, you have a better idea of how to design a synthetic strawberry flavoring to mimic that. I think.

I recently read an article about researchers in Glasgow examining how sugary sodas may help increase brain function and boost memory. Researchers gave test subjects sugary beverages and examined how well they performed memory based exercises such as remembering lists of words and letters. Those that drank the equivalent of two cans of cola did about 20 percent better than the non-soda drinkers. To my layman's understanding, this is because our brains need glucose (sugar) to function properly, whether it comes straight from a soda or gets processed from carbohydrates. Researchers hope to combat dementia from Alzheimer's with glucose supplements and also help younger bodies learn to use glucose more efficiently. I've always been told that using a burst of glucose from a soda or candy bar was a short term solution, however. Some people experience a "crash" afterwards and excessive soda drinkers often run the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The Franklin Institute Online has a detailed yet accessible section about this sort of brain chemistry. I suggest reading through that in addition to the Glasgow article.

You know those stacks of champagne glasses where pouring the champers at the top creates a waterfall effect to the bottom - well, some chap has just broken the world record.

Gert-Jan Stok, a Dutch businessman, landed himself the Guinness and the World record after building his tower from 35, 990 glasses. It stands 7m high and took over three days at 12 hours per day to construct. For both these records however you do not actually need wine in all the glasses; only the top few need to be filled for the record to be broken. Which is probably quite lucky for whoever has to pick up the cleaning tab.