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.

Gold Panner's Pots ‒ Kullanhuuhtojan ruukut

Things are really starting to look like autumn already, or at least like the harvest season. I accidentally emptied the market square in our neighbourhood. Only after that did I actually start to wonder what I could cook from all my beautifully golden turnips and stuff. The idea for this dish came from a bit different recipe, but I kept the name since the idea is still to feature golden-coloured ingredients. The place of gold panning in Finland is in the most northern part of the country, so they have a certain Lapland-theme. If you're serving a dessert, something with cloudberries would fit perfectly.

- 1 l golden chanterelles
- 2 turnips
- 300 g firm smoked tofu
- 4 shallots
- 2 dl oat cream
- 0.5 dl tar liqueur
- 0.5 dl rowan berries (sea buckthorn works as well)
- oil for frying
- pink peppercorn
- fresh chervil (or other mild herb)
- salt

Rye crust:
- 2 dl rye flour
- 1 dl water
- 1 dl wheat flour
- 1 tbsp oil
- 0.5 tsp salt

Start with the crust. Just mix the ingredients together with your hand. Move the chunk into the fridge for a while.

Plane thin slices out of the tofu. Fry on a pan with just a hint of oil until they've dried up a bit and perhaps curved from the edges. Peel the turnips, then chop them along with the onions and the mushrooms. Show them the pan as well, this time with a bit of more oil.

Mince the chervil and crush most of the rowan berries. Combine everything in a bowl. Divide evenly between oven-proof coffee mugs or other such serving-size pots (I got four of them). Add water to fill them up with liquid. Take the crust out of the fridge and divide into as many pieces as you have pots. Roll them into circles wide enough to cover the whole pot.

Move the pots into oven. As a precaution not to break the dishes, don't turn on the oven before this, so they'll get to warm up slowly along with the oven. Turn it to 200°C and leave them there for about half an hour or until the crusts look done.

Nutritional values /  1903 g:
energy 1917 kcal
fat 80 g
protein 89 g
carbohydrates 178 g
fiber 48 g

Rowan Fudge ‒ Pihlajatoffee

This time of the year you really notice how many rowan trees there are in the city center as they all bear loads of delicious-looking (and very bitter) red berries. Too bad there are almost as many cars so we can only use the berries for throwing them at friends or admire them with dignity. Luckily this pet of the Finnish thunder god grows in some more peaceful places as well. After all, it is the first tree you should plant on the yard of a new house.

The recipe is an adaptation from the lingonberry fudge in the cook book Härkäpapua Sarvista (Irina Somersalo & al., Multikustannus 2007). The amount of brandy I added is so small you can't really taste it but this is easy to fix if you wish. And with the same basic method you could prepare salmiakki fudge or even garlic fudge which was also suggested by the book.

- 2 dl oat cream
- 3 dl dark sugar
- 2 tablespoons margarine (or coconut oil)
- 1 dl rowan berries
- 1 tablespoon brandy

In a saucepan, heat up the cream, the sugar and the margarine, stirring often until the basic fudge mass is ready. It may take some experienting to figure out the right time between caramel sauceness and lollipop hardness. After about 40 minutes it should have turned into a dark brown pile of thick bubbles. If you drop a bit into a glass of cold water, it should form a firm bullet but not become rock solid yet.

See all your berries are clean. Crush them a bit and add into the mass in small batches. Add the brandy as well and let the mass come to a boil once more.

Spread as a thick layer into a casserole covered with parchment paper. Let it cool down and refrigerate for a few hours. Cut in pieces.

Nutritional values / 547 g:
energy 1381 kcal
fat 41 g
protein 2 g
carbohydrates 244 g
fiber 5 g

Fermented Rowan Tee ‒ Hiostettu pihlajatee

The easiest way to get herb teas is just drying up the leaves and flowers you plan to use. This summer I thought I'd learn a new method of finding some new tastes from familiar plants by fermenting. This is how green tea turns into black tea.

The leaves in the photo are from a rowan tree. I also mixed some bilberry and fireweed (which is by the way an excellent basis for any tee mixture) leaves with it. Other plants more than appropriate here include for example raspberry, black currant and birch.

When the leaves you plan to use are still fresh, crush them (between your hands or using a rolling pin for example) so they juice up evenly. Lay them fluffily in a large glass jar and cover. The process needs some oxygen so see the lid isn't too tight.

Place the jar in a hot place (40-50°C) for as long as the leaves have turned brown. You can for example cover the jar with a black t-shirt and leave it on a window sill on a hot summer day or put it in a polystyrene box with hot water bottles. Depending on the plant this may take only an hour (as in the case of rowan) or several days. Last, make sure the leaves have dried up as well so they won't mildew. (I spread them on a newspaper for a night.)

The aroma lasts longer if you store the leaves intact and crush them only a moment before usage.

Yule Bread ‒ Joululimppu

As I've mentioned earlier, here in western Finland soft bread or limppu used to be eaten only couple of times a year. One such important holiday was ‒ and still is ‒ Joulu or Yule. My idea of a proper joululimppu involves black skin, softness, sweetness and a lot of spices. Such taste needs some time to evolve.

My inspirations for this creation come mainly from mustaleipä ("black bread") of Åland islands and fairer looking but spicier joululimppu recipes. I also thought about throwing in some dried cranberries or nuts but totally forgot. Well, it's not like this would exactly need them. Ideally the bread should be baked couple of days before the actual eating but guess if I could keep my hands off for so long.

- 4 dl oat yogurt (or soy yogurt ‒ anything goes as long as it's sour)
- 3 dl rye malts
- 0.5 dl dark syrup
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3 dl rye flour

- 25 g yeast
- 3 dl wheat bran
- 5 dl dark wheat or spelt flour (This is how much I counted I'd need based on other recipes but it seemed to take quite a lot more. Next time I make this I promise to update the amount.)
- 3 tablespoons rowan jelly (just for the flavour, this can be dropped out if you don't have any)
- 1 teaspoon fennel
- 1 teaspoon anise
- powdered bitter orange peel
- some mixture of dark syrup and coffee for buttering

Mix together the yogurt, the malts, the syrup the salt and 2.25 dl rye flour. Sprinkle rest of the rye flour on the composition and cover with a towel. Leave in a warm place for a day (or two if it seems to bubble lazily).

Dissolve the yeast in a drop of lukewarm water. Add the yeast and the rest of the ingredients into the fizzy drink you made yesterday. Cover with a towel again and let it rise for 6 ‒ 8 hours.

Knead it into a semicircle or an oval. Let your loaf rise under a towel for ten minutes. Bake it 10 minutes in a 200°C oven. Butter with the syrup and coffee mixture. Bake 10 more minutes and rebutter. Wrap the loaf into folio, turn the oven to 150°C and leave the bread in there for three hours. Turn off the oven and take the bread out when the oven has gone cold.

Nutritional values / 1150 g:
energy 2705 kcal
fat 23 g
protein 77 g
carbohydrates 537 g
fiber 64 g

Sea Buckthorn and Carrot Sauce ‒ Tyrni-porkkanakastike

There are some ingredient combinations that are like made to fit together and bring out the best from each other, like turnip and tar, dark chocolate and red wine, strawberries and rhubarb or rye and bilberries. Well, the consort determined for carrots in the beginning of times is apparently sour berries. Sea buckthorn and rowan berries of course have a different taste, but with carrot they work the same way.

An ideal place to take advantage of such unions are often sauces. This one tastes rather sweet-and-sour and needs something with more substance than plain pasta to work, for example this.

- 1 carrot
- 1 onion
- 4 dl water
- 0.5 dl sea buckthorn (or rowan) berries
- 0.5 tablespoon apple wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons brandy
- 1 tablespoon potato flour (or other thickener)
- 1 tablespoon rape oil
- salt
- aniseed

Mince the onion and sauté it in oil. Slice the carrot and add into the kettle. When the carrot slices have softened, add the rest of the ingredients. Sift the potato flour so it won't clump. The sauce is ready when it thickens up.

Nutritional values / 5 dl :
energy 225 kcal
fat 7 g
protein 2 g
carbohydrates 21 g
fiber 6 g

Beer Pots with Potato Crust ‒ Olutruukut muusikuorrutteella

To make the best of those awesome colours of the trees right now I tried to imitate them for the perfect autumnal Sunday dinner. I've never really learned how to use pumpkin so I was going to put some into this. However, I only managed to find huge halves that cost about 10 euros a piece. That's a bit more than I'm ready to pay even for domestic veggies. So instead, I bought 3 kilos of rutabaga with one euro. We'll see where I manage to cram them.

Oh, by the way, the colours of these couple of last photos aren't that awesome. That's because I thought I'd just use my camera's inbuilt flash and filter the ugliest direct light with a yellow dishcloth. Getting the white balance even close to natural after that took me longer than preparing this dish. Maybe next time I understand to fetch a real flash even if the Simpsons is about to start.

- 1 small rutabaga
- 1 large carrot
- 1 celeriac
- 10-15 brussels sprouts
- 0.5 l beer, for example Sinebrychoff Porter or Fuller's London Porter
- 2 dl seitan flour
- 0.5 dl rowan berries
- 1 chili
- 1 dl nutritional yeast
- 1 dose of stock
- white pepper
- 4 potatoes
- 1 dl oat cream
- dragon's wort

Squash the rowan berries and the chili. Make a paste of them and the seitan flour. Add some as well water if needed. Cut the seitan and the vegetables into strips and sauté them. Add the stock, the yeast and some white pepper.

Cook the potatoes. Mash them together with the cream and the dragon's wort. Never apply a blender or other sharp blades to potato unless you want to get glue.

Next you'll need four small oven pots. If you're going to use normal mugs, first check that they're meant to last in the oven. Unfortunately, cheapest ones rarely are. Portion the veggie and seitan mixture into the pots. Pour the beer on them. Scoop the mashed potatoes on top. Put the pots into a 175°C oven until the potato mash starts to turn golden from the edges (about half an hour).

Serve with pickles and lingonberries.

Nutritional values / 1 pot:
energy 357 kcal
fat 7 g
protein 24 g
carbohydrates 36 g
fiber 8 g