"northern europe" news and stories

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!

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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.

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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.