Milky Caps in Vinegar ‒ Etikkarouskut

Yesterday I went mushroom hunting and got my backpack so full you'll be getting a fair share of mushroom recipes too. I picked one bag of yellowfoot, one of sheep polypode and one of rufous milk cap.

Rufous milk caps are a very common milk cap variety. In countries where it's not habitual to parboil mushrooms they're considered inedible, sometimes even poisonous. Technically speaking they are indeed slightly mutagenic but you wouldn't eat them raw anyway because of the burning peppery taste.  For many Finnish mushroom hunters they're one of the favourite species, especially appropriate for preservation and to be used in basic mushroom salad. Even Finnish officials notorious for excessive cautiousness when it comes to food or medicine consider them perfectly safe. Then again, mycologist David Arora speculates there may be some differences of edibility between European and North American varieties. I wouldn't know anything about that but this basic method fits perfectly well for any milk caps, as well as most other mushrooms you'd like to preserve.

- 2 l milk caps
- 1.5 dl white vinegar
- 1.5 dl water
- 1 dl sugar
- 1 small piece of horseradish or ginger
- 1 tbsp cilantro seeds
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 tsp salt

If your milk caps are large, cut them a bit smaller. In case they need parboiling, boil them in plenty of water for about ten minutes and rinse well.

Measure all the ingredients into a pot. Bring to a boil and then pour into a clean and preferably sterilized glass jar. The liquid amount here should be enough for parboiled milk caps but in case your mushrooms need more to cover them, just add vinegar, water and sugar all in equal amounts. I used a jar too big so it'll be easy to add more mushrooms since this is a species I can be quite certain I'll be finding all autumn.

Preserve in cool temperature. The mushrooms should be ready to eat within a few days and store well until the next autumn. They're especially great in salads or as an accompaniment on the plate. The broth brings taste into soups and sauces too.

Nutritional values / 1447 g:
energy 892 kcal
fat 5 g
protein 19 g
carbohydrates 172 g
fiber 19 g

Waxwing Nectar ‒ Tilhinektari

 

VeganMoFo 2013

This month is going to be busy in Mämmi. I signed myself to VeganMoFo, which is kind of like NaNoWriMo for foodies. Since we can't write a novel in a month, we instead blog about food every day during the month. I made the decision in a bit whim after I saw Mihl of the wonderful blog Seitan is My Motor planning to participate with the theme of classic German desserts. To the theme question I just wrote "Finnish seasonal dishes", though perhaps I should've thought about that more thoroughly considering that's pretty much the theme of my whole blog, but hopefully it does give some idea for those who haven't visited here before. At least that way I shouldn't be running short of ideas. And if this one goes well I promise to consider following a low-carb diet next year. Or perhaps blog about puréed baby food.

So, you can expect a lot of mushroom and berry recipes, along with root veggies and other new harvest treats. I guess this could be characterized as a budget theme too, unless I decide to drown them in alcohol, since most of my main ingredients are going to be completely free for me. I already made a list of 30 dishes I might post on the upcoming weeks, but some of them involve finding the right ingredient besides the regular not failing epically part, and then again I'll probaly find and thus cook something completely unexpected too. Oh, and I do have a reservation: there's a good chance our child is going to be born during this month. If that happens, you probably understand why you won't here about me for a while. :)

Apples, apples everywhere

As an opener, I'll tell about something that's so simple it really doesn't even need a recipe: juicing. This is the time when many Finns find their apple trees bearing so much fruit they don't know what to do with it all. So a friend of ours invited us to pick as much apples as we can carry from his backyard and told us to come again after couple of weeks. Now, I never buy apples during wintertime. Those imported apple varieties you can find from every store are huge in size, perfectly shaped and don't seem to taste like anything at all. But there are few better things in the world than fresh domestic apples. So we rushed there.

Only after having a sauna and getting back home did we start to wonder what we'd do with all those apples. Pies are great but even with them there's a limit of how much you can eat them. I've had this hope of making cider myself, but right now with the baby coming and all I wouldn't get to drink it myself. So making juice would be good practise and we surely wouldn't have a problem in drinking it all during the winter, if not even before that.

There are juicing stations in the city where they squeeze fresh juice out of the apples with reasonable price. But it would feel a bit stupid to go to those with only one plastic bag. Most Finns make berry juices with a steam-based home juicer called mehumaija, but those things cost and require a lot of space all year long. So I did a bit of googling and realised the oblivious: you can do juice just by boiling the apples on a normal cooking pot and then filtering the result. That worked out quite nicely. I also added some rowan berries I picked from the nearby forest with the apples since they are often mentioned as a well-balanced combination. Plus, rowan gives the drink a fresh orange colour.

How to

Just wash your apples and chop them into chunks. Remove the bad parts but don't bother to peel or remove the seeds since that way you're only going to waste precious apple flesh. Fill your biggest cooking pot and add enough water to just about to cover the apples. Cook for about twenty minutes, mashing the apples after they've got soft enough. Filter the bits and pieces with a cheesecloth, or with a regular sifter like I did to achieve a cloudier result with more fruit flesh. Press the mash until there's only a little bit of it left and discard the rest. Before bottling, make sure your bottles are well cleaned and preferably sterilized.

If you leave the juice untreated you have to freeze it or drink it right away. If you have too many bottles for that like I did, you need to add either sugar or preservative. I don't like my juices too sweet and sugar would also limit the ways I can use it in cooking, so I added some benzoic acid and sodium benzoate mix meant for this purpose. If you'd rather go with the sugar option, use 300–400 grams per litre.

Cucumber Relish ‒ Kurkkupikkelssi

The commonness of this side item is best described by the  many names it is referred by. In my personal vocabulary pikkelssi refers to specifically cucumber relish though basically it means any kind of pickled vegetables. Kurkkurelissi is used though that still sounds a bit foreign to my ears. The most common name I think is kurkkusalaatti, meaning cucumber salad, which is pretty weird nowadays that salad usually refers to fresh things.

Any way, a spoonful of the relish can be an accompaniment in pretty much any Finnish meal. It's especially common with fast food you can buy from small kiosks like hamburgers, french fries, lihapiirakkas, porilainens and such. It's one part of the holy trinity of cucumber relish, mustard and ketchup. Most people just  use store-bought versions but somehow they never actually taste good. I especially hate a certain brand sold in every store which only tastes sugary and where the cucumber pieces are soft as if they had gone rotten or something. Home made ones on the other hand tend to be delicious on their own, and usually contain a lot of onion too. I also added a bell pepper just for the colour, but that's not an important part in any way.

- 1 kg cucumber
- 300 g onion
- 1 bell pepper
- 3 dl water
- 2 dl white vinegar
- 2 dl sugar
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp mustard seeds
- dill

Wash and cube the veggies. Combine all the spices in a pot and let it come to a boil. Add the onion pieces there and cook for about five minutes. Add the cucumbers and bell pepper as well. Turn off the stove.

When the relish has cooled down, spoon it into clean and preferably sterilized glass jars. Move into a cool place, except the jar you intend to devour first.

Nutritional values / 2110 g:
energy 1011 kcal
fat 1 g
protein 12 g
carbohydrates 222 g
fiber 15 g

Lempo's Jam ‒ Lemmon hillo

I'm often told I'm a weird Finn for loving chili peppers. But though Finnish food culture is generally rather discreet with spices and my parents' generation rarely uses any other than salt and black pepper, younger folk tends to be more adventurous and a growing part shares the passionate chili relationship with the largest Finno-Ugric people, the Hungarians. There's even an organization for home growers and other enthusiasts and this event was just held here in Tampere with a broken world championship in Naga Morich eating (ah, Finns and extremes).

Well, I wouldn't take part in that but I do find chilis an excellent way to deepen the aroma of many dishes. This time I made some chili jam that is widely served in Finnish restaurants with the name paholaisenhillo, meaning "Devil's jam". I wasn't able to find any source about its origins and the English translation didn't give me any relevant search results either, so if anyone has any further information to offer I'd be happy to hear.

Based on several other recipes and especially their commentaries (typically "too sweet" or "not hot enough") I composed one to my own liking. Notice that I used the kind of sugar that contains pectin (hillosokeri) to make this a bit jellier. Since I added some lingonberries (in the footsteps of Flikka) as well and don't really believe in evil I gave my version a bit more Finnish name. Lempo or Lemminkäinen is the old god of fertility, sacred fire and passion who of course was later turned into the Adversary.

- 500 g red bell peppers
- 500 g crushed tomatoes
- 4-6 chili peppers of different types
- 1 red onion
- 2 dl lingonberries
- 1.5 dl sugar
- 1 dl red wine
- 5 garlic cloves
- 1 small bunch of oregano
- 1 teaspoon salt
- black pepper

Chop the peppers and the onion. Press the garlic and crush the lingonberries a bit. Put everything but the sugar into a pot and cook for half an hour. Add the sugar, let the mixture come to a boil again and remove from the stove.

The jam is terrific in unhealthy dishes like pizzas, hamburgers and pastas but also works in many salads.

Nutritional values / 1720 g:
energy 1029 kcal
fat 2 g
protein 16 g
carbohydrates 215 g
fiber 25 g

Pickles ‒ Suolakurkut

Hey who took the summer away? Didn't August used to be the most summery month or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Though I already opened the mushroom season yesterday I thought that before mushroom recipes I ought to post you something I got started two weeks ago: pickles. Finns love them on rye bread, as a sidekick and especially with fast food. There are basically four common variations that can of course be seasoned creatively.

1. Suolakurkku is pickled in salty brine. This is what I prepared after I got to watch some example from a certain lady from Eastern Karelia and realized how simple it really is.
2. Etikkakurkku is preserved in sweet vinegar brine. A common mistake is using way too much vinegar. Think this is the most common variation in the rest of Scandinavia.
3. Maustekurkku or herkkukurkku may contain both salt and vinegar but instead of them the taste should be ruled by spices. These tend to be on the sweet side as well.
4. Hapankurkku aka Russian suolakurkku is also pickled in salty brine but the pickles are turned sour, for example with a sour bread piece or some yogurt as a starter. I've never seen these sold in your average supermarket.

- garden cucumbers (as many as you can cram into your largest glass jar)
- enough water to fill the jar
- 25 g salt for every water litre
- for seasoning black currant leaves, mustard seeds, whole black peppers, garlic cloves, dill flowers and/or horseradish

Wash the cucumbers and let them soak in water overnight. In the morning, arrange the cucumbers into your jar together with the spices ‒ whole or sliced. If you're using black currant leaves wrap them around the cucumbers. Boil up the water and dissolve the salt. Pour the hot water on the cucumbers. Make sure that all the cucumbers are fully covered underneath the water since contact with air makes them rotten. Close the lid and move into a cool place. The pickles should be ready in about two weeks.

If you replace about ten percent of the water with vodka the pickles should better hold on to their beautiful green colour. For less traditional versions ginger and cinnamon also make nice spices. After you've eaten the pickles, the brine itself is an excellent basis for many soups.

Flower Marmalade ‒ Kukkamarmeladi

Smart people get their inspiration to make dandelion jelly when dandelions are at their full blossom and it takes ten minutes to pick them. Well not me. After seeing this article I got a desperate urge to try it out myself. So instead of the few withering dandelions I saw I picked some mouse-ear hawkweeds (that at least look like dandelions) and red clovers. What ever edible flowers you happen to have in hand, see that instead of a terribly intense flavour (like yarrow) they taste juicy and sweet.

- 4 dl flowers
- 4 dl water
- 2 dl sugar
- 2 tablespoons grapefruit juice
- 1.25 teaspoons pectin (or equivalent amount of other gelling agent)

First, the hard part. You don't want the green stuff into your marmalade so you have to pick out the yellow or red parts. This is most easily done by pulling them out with your fingers. (You can also use scissors but that way you'll only get the tips of the petals.) Put on your favourite record and sit down. This will take a while but can be quite meditative.

You should end up with about 2 dl petals. Boil them in the water with a lid on for about half an hour. After that you can either fish them out or leave in the jelly. Add the pectin, then the juice and last, sugar. Let it come to a boil and stir until it turns syrupy. In case a foam should emerge skim it out.

Pour into a glass jar and let it cool down a bit before refrigerating. Use like honey.

P.S. I have a really hard time trying to understand how the algorithm of that "Related" box works. A nice feature but most of the time rather, well, random.

Nutritional values / 570 g:
energy 680 kcal
fat 0 g
protein 0 g
carbohydrates 169 g
fiber 0 g

Birch Bud Schnapps ‒ Silmuviina

Although this is already starting to resemble more of a drink blog than a food blog...

Along with most plant roots, one of the first things you can forage after the spring has arrived are birch buds. They are a refreshing spice to many salads, sandwiches and drinks. The only problem is that there's only a few days time to gather them ‒ when they're still young and tender, just barely opened up, feeling a bit sticky from sap. The easiest way to preserve the characteristic taste is making a tincture. Save it for winter and you will literally taste spring.

- 1 dl birch buds
- 3 dl good quality vodka
(- 1 teaspoon sugar)

Put the buds into a glass jar and pour the vodka on them. Seal the jar. Let the mixture stand for 2-3 weeks in room temperature, shaking occasionally. Remove the buds or keep them as a garnish.

Enjoy chilled as an aperitif or use in cooking.

The same thing can be done with most herbs. Just remember that some of them (like dill) quickly develop a bitter taste so you should taste the stuff every now and then to decide when it's best to your liking.

Sauerkraut ‒ Hapankaali

Last Sunday I got to see a Unesco world heritage site called Sammallahdenmäki. It's a Bronze age burial site that was used for a thousand years. Nowadays it's a beautiful granite hill covered by colourful lichen species and a few dwarfy pines but in the beginning of the construction it must have looked completely different. The place used to lie on a seashore and the climate was subboreal, meaning the temperatures were much like those that Central Europe now enjoys. Pine hadn't arrived yet and nut trees were fairly common. Weirdly, we know more about the religious views and language of those people than such tangible things like what they ate. Judging from what was available it might have been much closer to what dietitians recommend than a typical nutrition of today, at least during the good years.

One food preparation method that was very likely used intensively was fermenting. And as a food enthusiast I of course want to learn how to do that myself. After all, fermented dishes are still something that everybody should eat on a daily basis and the commercially produced ones tend to be spoiled by pasteurizing. The classic to start with is naturally sauerkraut.

This doesn't really require a recipe but I'm going to tell you how I made it anyway. There are varying instructions out there and my chemistry knowledge is scarce so I can't really tell which ones are based on actual evidence and which are more like folklore. That's why I try to explain just the guidelines and leave the experimenting for you.

(That miserable greyness in the photo is by the way the view from my kitchen window at noon. That's the brightest it gets right before winter solstice.)

- 1 cabbage head
- 2 carrots (or other veggies)
- 1 tablespoon caraway (or other spices)
- 1 tablespoon salt

Grind or shred the cabbage and the carrots. Add the caraway and the salt. When the cabbage starts to sweat (because of the salt) start beating it with any mallet or jar available. The idea is to get so much juice out it covers the cabbage. If the cabbage has already seen it's best days it may be so dry that this never happens. In that case dissolve some salt into boiling water, cool down and pour over the cabbage.

Put the cabbage with its juices into a clean and airtight vessel (I just use glass jars with a weight on top). Press the cabbage below the juice level so it won't touch the air and rotten instead of lacto-fermenting anaerobically. Let your forthcoming sauerkraut sit in room temperature from 3 days to 6 weeks depending on how strong you want it to be. The reason for moving it into a colder storage place after couple of days in some recipes is to slow down the process. Notice the vessel will flood over unless there's a lot of empty space left. Sometimes mold appears on top but this isn't dangerous ‒ just peel it off.

When sauerkraut has stopped bubbling it should taste pleasantly tart. Don't eat if it has turned soft. The taste matures for about six months if stored well in cool temperature (like fridge). If you think it tastes too sore rinse with cold water before eating. Sauerkraut can be used as a salad, in green smoothies or even in hot dishes (though heating of course destroys the largest health benefits). It's a good habit to always add a spoonful on your dinner.

Nutritional values / 1730 g (counted from the ingredients, also see Fineli):
energy 534 kcal
fat 3 g
protein 19 g
carbohydrates 102 g
fiber 37 g

Spruce Syrup ‒ Kuusenkerkkäsiirappi

Somehow I managed to miss the time when birches grew buds. I may have to wait another year to make bud spirits but at least I was right on time collecting those gorgeous light green spring growths (kerkkä) of spruces for syrup. I'm planning to make a second round when they grow red flowers and present yet another flavour, perhaps this time for spruce beer or cough-mixture. Just remember that gathering a tree's annual growth means the tree won't grow its branches that year so you'll need a permission from the land owner.

- 1.5 l spruce shoots
- 2 l water
- 1 kg sugar
(- 1 vanilla pod)

Soak the growths overnight. Cook them in the soaking water for 2 hours under a lid. Filter. Add the sugar to the liquid (plus the vanilla if you want) and cook until the syrup has turned brown and sticky. That should take at least another 2 hours. If the sugar starts to form bubbles that look like pearls you're in the risk of getting a caramel paste (that will soon dry hard and solid). Put the syrup in an airtight glass jar or bottle.

If the syrup should harden in the bottle warm the whole bottle in hot water and add a dollop of water to prevent it from doing the same trick again.

This is unbelievably delicious for example on ice cream or pancakes. Many people like to make drinks out of it. Also try using it in a marinade for turnips or seitan pieces.

(The nutritional values I usually count come pretty much from sugar only.)

Mustard ‒ Sinappi

Some people will tell you to first read your recipes several times and then follow them rigorously. For me, this sounds very boring and lacking of personality. On the other hand, if you're making some dish for the very first time, it's easy to do a thing or two wrong and thus ruin the whole dish. I've solved the dilemma by always trying to find several recipes for the same thing. This way I can compare them, understand what are the essential parts and create food that best serves my own taste.

For example, yesterday I made my virgin flight for mustard, all Finn's favourite sauce. Borrowing from several sources I came up with a sweet mustard that mostly resembles the flavour of this company's mustards.

- 1,5 dl mustard powder (freshly grinded from seeds if you manage to find them)
- 1,5 dl brown sugar (which can be substituted with dark syrup)
- 2 dl oat cream (half of which can be substituted with coffee)
- 1 empty shampoo bottle

Those were the essentials. The following ingredients are only meant to add to the flavour and structure. Commercial mustards may also use chili or garlic.

- 1 tbsp potato flour
- 1/2 dl rape oil
- 1/2 dl vinegar (Some recipes only use as little as 1 tablespoon.)
- 1 tbsp brandy (Wonder if tar liqueur would do the trick?)

Mix the dry ingredients in a pot and combine with the liquids. Let the gunk come to a boil so it thickens up a bit, stirring the whole time. Take off from the stove. The mustard should thicken more as it cools down. A well-washed shampoo bottle makes an appropriate container.

Use on a soy sausage, with pea soup or in hamburger. Mustard also gives a nice flavour to sauces but that can be done with the powder.

Nutritional values / 500 g (without the brandy)
energy 1624 kcal
fat 91 g
protein 30 g
carbohydrates 170 g
fiber 3 g