Chopped in The Arctic--Creative Cooking

At The Arctic Hideaway on Fleinvaer, there is plenty of room — inside and out — to be alone in the creative process. Studio space for artists and musicians, writing desks to pen narratives or poetry and a coastline with your pick of rocks or grassy nolls to sit with your contemplative thoughts under the midnight sun.

Then there’s the kitchen and dining space. Every evening it turns into the perfect Venn diagram of group dynamics, culinary creativity, cultural expression and gastromic experimentation and creative cooking is encouraged.

All meals are provided as part of the accommodation package at The Hideaway. Breakfast and lunch are informal with people making their own using ingredients supplied in the kitchen. The first person up for the day makes the coffee and hosts Harvard Lund and Melissa Davies always have fresh bread coming out of the oven in the morning.

Dinner, however, is a group affair with everyone here taking turns creating a Nordic feast. Or something close to that.

Planning often begins the night before with a guest saying they will make their tried and true recipe for fill-in-the-blank the next day. This pronouncement may or may not be made after the individual checks out what ingredients are actually available on an island more than 20 miles out in the Norwegian Sea.

That’s where creativity really comes in. The pantry — what those of us here jokingly refer to as “the store,” is well stocked with fresh caught frozen fish, ground meat, sausages, eggs, yogurt, cheeses, pasta, rice, a variety of flours and other grains, spices, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, canned goods and a surprisingly impressive amount of Coleman’s Hot Mustard. Oh, and those meats? Moose, reindeer and lamb.

However, rarely — if ever — is there every ingredient needed for your selected recipe. So you make do. I should note, this can be further complicated for some of us since all packaging and labels are in Norwegian and all measuring devices in metric. Basically, if you are a typical American such as myself with limited language skills outside of English and firmly stuck in the imperial weights and measures, it can all be a bit intimidating.

Frankly, watching people trudging up the stairs from the pantry to the kitchen, a box filled with whatever they could find for their evening’s menu, it’s like watching a live episode of the popular cooking show “Chopped.” Filmed in the Arctic.

The premise of the show is simple — four chefs are tasked with each creating an appetizer, an entree and a dessert using mystery ingredients. These ingredients are deliberately unusual (some would say downright odd) and revealed only when the timed cooking begins. They have 20 minutes to come up with something out of, say, pigs’ feet, mango chutney, kale and licorice. And that could be for any of the three categories. The least appealing — as selected by a panel of celebrity chefs — is chopped.

I’m happy to report the kitchen at the Arctic Hideaway is a judgment-free zone. And it is really fun — not to mention delicious — to see what people from around the world come up with.

Over the years many have hand written the recipes for their creations in a book kept in the kitchen.

Hideaway co-owner and host Hovard Lund likes to improvise his dishes, grabbing whatever is in reach. A popular Norwegian jazz musician, he’s used to improvising and after one recent creation he joked he’d “improvised away the need for utensils."

Co-host Melissa Davies is a genius at creating meals at the last minute out of seemingly nothing. When she has more time she prepares delicious thick fish soups and an amazing moose chile.

So far on my dinner shifts I have prepared reindeer stroganoff using plain yogurt instead of sour cream and carrots in place of mushrooms. It was well received and a bit of a new experience for my Norwegian friends who had never had stroganoff with pasta.

Twice I have prepared meals using the outside wood-fired grill. Once with a rack of lamb ribs locally sourced from a sheep herd on a neighboring island (in fact, I was here last fall when the lamb was slaughtered and butchered and Lund roasted an exquisite leg of lamb). All I did with the ribs was to create a spice rub of olive oil, garlic and rosemary and then slow cook them over hot coals. My second time at the grill was with a selection of fish caught just off shore. Supplied by islander Jin, there was mackerel (frozen from last season) and cod and pollack caught just that morning. It was a lot of fish and Jin, bless him, delivered them cleaned and gutted.

Fish that fresh does not need much to make it tasty. All I did was stuff the insides with lemons, salt and pepper and then wrap the cod and pollack in foil and place them above the coals. The mackerel I put directly on the grill. Man, was it good! The white fish was delicate and sweet. The more fatty and muscular mackerel was firm and meaty with the skin cooked to a crisp perfection. This dinner was accompanied by wonderful roasted root vegetables prepared by Stephanie, a guest here from Montreal. I also made biscuits to go with the moose chile and now know how to say “baking powder” in Norwegian. “Bakepulver,” in case you wondered.

The next night Stefano, a young musician from Italy now living in Oslo, prepared risotto from the leftover mackerel. Despite having no Parmesan cheese or white wine, it was a huge success. The secret, he said… butter. Lots of butter.

Then there is Jean who was here on holiday with her husband Thom. Jean made a great pasta dish with chorizo sausage and broccoli. But she hit it out of the park with her Pullas — Finnish cinnamon rolls. Sweet, feather-soft and bursting with spicy goodness, if I were to judge — she won the Hideaway Chopped competition hands down.