by Gabriela Schaepman-Strub

Kytalyk, July 1, 2013

It’s Illias second birthday today! Last year we celebrated his first birthday here in the tundra already. Lena, Illias mother and our cook, prepared a wonderful blue birthday cake for him last year and a lot of food for the whole group of people, some even came from Chokurdakh to celebrate.

Lena is probably the most important person out here. Days are long, right now it is still cold and people are getting tired and hungry. Luckily, we don’t have to come back from the field and cook for ourselves ….

We get breakfast at 9hrs. Not my favorite meal of the day – it’s Lena’s choice of pasta, oats, porridge, rice or some other grain cooked in sweet milk.

I am always eager to make it back on time at 13hrs for lunch – usually a soup, my preferred one with fresh fish from the Berelech (Rus: Бёрёлёх) caught the same day – much better than any fine French bouillabaisse! The dinner is usually some pasta or buckwheat (Rus: грейчиха) with a few spoons of canned meat. Some cucumber or tomato salad after the supply boat has been here, later on cabbage or canned vegetables. Lots of cookies and sweets, and that’s what is keeping us happy for most of the days. We could of course bring more fresh food out here, but the choice in the store in Chokurdakh is limited to very few fruit and vegetables, while bringing food from Yakutsk means paying CHF 6.50 (USD 7.00) overweight per kilogram! We are really very thankful to Lena – she is indeed a good soul staying out here with us the whole summer, cooking on a wooden stove (Rus: печка), making the best out of the simple ingredients she has got, and sometimes even spoiling us with fried pancakes or tundra-made reindeer (Rus: пельмени) (yes, including making the dough and folding 100 ‘ravioli’ out here!). Lena is getting the reindeer meat from the permafrost cellar, a deep hole in the ground with a small hut on the top. The reindeer legs are lowered down to the cellar on a rope, and we use the same system to keep our plant samples cool. This cooking story reminds me that we have to saw and chop wood tonight – floating trunks from the Indigirka that were transported to the station by a pontoon – to make sure that Lena has enough wood to cook during the next few days.

Lena – our fantastic cook – cutting reindeer meat (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).