Cloudberries

I'm off on holiday shortly (hooray!) for a week in Sweden before going to visit my family for a week in New York. The Sweden leg is meant to be the relaxing one, with reading, swimming, sleeping, fishing, and berry picking being the most taxing things we'll do. After that is a week in New York (city and suburbs) visiting as many family and friends as possible; I suspect I have my weeks the wrong way around.

Part of my excitement about Sweden has to - naturally - do with the food. The house we're renting has its own boat and fishing rods, fruit trees in the garden, and the owner has given me maps for nearby cowberry picking. I was fairly stumped about what a cowberry would be, until Wikipedia informed me they're the same thing as lingonberries. I am gathering lingonberry recipes now (any lingonberry-usage suggestions you might have are very welcome).

From Chris Walton's/Philocrates' Flickr photostream

While figuring out what cowberries were, I mentioned them to a few people to see if they had heard of them before. Mike, a reader of Ambrosia and Nectar, suggested that I might actually mean cloudberries. Although it was another berry I hadn't heard of, I was confident I was dealing with cows rather than clouds. Cloudberries, however, are also a type of berry found in Sweden, and are a highly prized (and highly priced) commodity. Mike, being the clever sort that he is, works with someone who is involved in mapping, and working out patterns behind mapped data. He went on a cloudberry hunt at and looked at cloudberry picking in Sweden through this lens.

I'm intrigued by cloudberries now, and would like to find some, although their locations are kept quite secret since they are worth a good deal of money. Reassuringly, Wikipedia also informs me that cloudberries can be found on Long Island, so perhaps even if we miss our chance of intense berry picking during our laid back week in Sweden, we can work in some laid back berry picking during our intense week in New York. Sounds a fair trade off to me.