Arctic Gourmet Cabin

March 5th, 2018

A few years ago, a classically-trained chef and his young family were trying to decide what the next stage of their life might be when they saw a derelict house on a lake in Swedish Lapland for sale.  The house was barely habitable---above the Arctic Circle with no central heating!---but there was plenty of land, and the couple had time and energy to take on the project.  They expanded and modernized the house, adding a professional kitchen, and built four additional cabins.  Two of them would house guests, one would house the sauna, shower, and bathroom, and a fourth would serve as a finishing kitchen and dining cabin.  The chef would hunt, fish, forage, and prepare meals every night for the guests.  They also installed an outdoor hot tub and an open fire pit near the dining cabin, where some of the food preparation would happen.  They called it the Arctic Gourmet Cabin. 

It is a short drive outside Kiruna, a mining town in northern Sweden.  We flew into Kiruna, rented a car, and drove there for our three night stay.  I suppose most people don't enjoy reading descriptions of meals as much as I enjoy writing them, but I have to offer some details.  The meals were extraordinary:  snow grouse risotto, moose tenderloin with a lingonberry reduction, reindeer steak with a stew of dried fruits and root vegetables, Norwegian cod on a bed of young spinach, roasted beets, and walnuts, thin waffles cooked over the open fire served with housemade wild blueberry jam and whipped cream---I could go on.

What a fantastic experience to stay there, but there was a lot more to Kiruna than just the food.  

There were a surprising number of activities in that area in late February.  We got lucky with the weather---the high temperatures had been around 0-5 degrees F right before we arrived, but warmed to near freezing while we were there.  The days were not particularly short---at this time of year they're gaining an hour a week.  Also, the sunrises and sunsets are very long due to the angle at which the sun moves relative to the horizon, and are quite spectacular.  We cross-country skied several times, only experiencing a small fraction of the trails available in the area.  We visited the Ice Hotel, which I discussed in the previous post.  We went horseback riding through the woods in search of moose, reindeer, and other wildlife.  (Yes, we saw them.)  We spent a bit of time walking around Kiruna and saw the spectacular timber church built there about a hundred years ago.  We would have been happy to go dog sledding, tour the mines, visit a Sami village, or do some more skiing if we had had more time.  

We learned an extraordinary fact about Kiruna.  The town is in the process of being moved.  Apparently, there is some valuable mining to be done beneath the current location of the town, so they're tearing it down and rebuilding it a few miles away.  Some of the buildings of historical interest, such as the church, are being disassembled and moved.  It's strange to think that if we ever made our way back to the area, the town would be in a different place.

I will leave you with a view from the window of our cabin, as the sun is starting its descent and the shadows are lengthening.