I ate Rudolph, and he tasted delicious.

   Hands down one of my favorite parts of traveling is eating. One of my traveler friends says that there are really only three things that you must do when you travel: eat a typical meal, have a glass of whatever the locals drink, and climb to a place really high up so you can see the whole landscape. I like his style.

I ate like a champ in Sweden. It was dark and cold and...no, I don't have any good excuses, I just like to eat. Good Swedish food is heavy with lots of hearty sauce, and this humble fare is surprisingly hard to find in Stockholm, which is a quite cosmopolitan city filled with Thai restaurants. When we asked where we could get some good traditional grub, Swedes wrinkled their noses and said, well, we eat that at home, so when we go out to eat we want something different. But one day we lucked out and fell into this little place that had Swedish flags all over and didn't have an English menu. Good signs.

We had the reindeer stew (yup, read that again. I said reindeer.) which was tasty and tender and was sort of like a stroganoff. Side of lingonberries (of course).

Then we had a classic Swedish dish of potatoes fried with sausages and meat, topped with an egg and with sides of beets and pickles. And the crown glory - you knew it was coming, right? - were the meatballs. IKEA, stand aside. These meatballs were divine. Dee-vine.

We also did a touristy thing and signed up to learn how to make meatballs from a Swedish chef. It was surprisingly cheap and we got to eat the meal afterwards, of course. The appetizer was thick wheaty crackers topped with something like sour cream, chives, red onions and pickled herring. The pickled herring smelled just about exactly like cat food but it tasted a lot less strong than I imagined it would be. I didn't go back for seconds though. It is, after all, fish from a jar, and when all was said and done it still sort of tasted like fish from a jar.

  

I hope you noticed that the pickled herring brand is Abba. As in ABBA, Swedish rock band. In fact, I asked our Swedish chef what makes Swedish meatballs different from other meatballs. He cocked his head to the side.  "You have to listen to ABBA while you make them."

And in fact, we did.