Summer salad

Just a quick post to share this photo of our dinner tonight. We had a lovely salad I stole from a Finnish home furnishing magazine and some spanish style potatoes.

The salad had Oak leaf, basil, peanuts, cucumber, brie, melon and strawberries with a dash or two of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Unusually it was arranged in lines rather than mixed together. Recommended.

The Spanish potatoes were also very simple, boiled new potatoes in butter complemented with some rosemary, bacon and chopped chorizo.

The final ingredient is the weather but you'll have to look after that one yourself.

It is official

It is official. On October 1st the Kitchen will be moving to Turku in western Finland. It has all been quietly going on in the background but now it is in the public domain. So for all of you who never made it to the Kitchen in Helsinki, now you have a chance to come to the Kitchen in Turku. I am looking forward to being based on the west coast if Finland, there are a lot of places to see and explore and having the sea nearby will be a good thing. I am planning on learning how to sail as this is going to be a golden opportunity for that.

We have nowehere to live yet, but are searching the internet everyday and I am sure we will find something. If we can remain car free I think that will be a positive thing but I do not rule out getting one if we need to! I also want to continue to learn Finnish and my employer in the real world outside the Kitchen is also talking about 2 demanding courses it is interested in me participating in. So with a bit of luck I will have a newborn to look after, a wife to support, a language to learn, a new skill to master (sailing) plus two work related courses! Where will I find the time for all that? Oh did I forget to mention training for the Kuopio Ice Marathon? Still it will be fun I am sure.

Yesterday the boss & I went to the Kalevala exhibition at the Ataneum in Helsinki. It was billed as the most comprehensive Kalevala show in donkeys years and I certainly agree that there was enough mythical art on display to satisfy the most demanding Finnophile. The stars of the genre were all present but the boss & I were particularly taken with the art of Joseph Alanen (unfortunately a quick search round the internet reveals that most of the information on him is in Finnish so I am not offering an English language link). However here is a picture to give you an idea of his style.

Today the weather is not the best and the boss would like entertaining. My cunning plan is to march her up to the supermarket to buy some cranberry juice. Either that or get her to test me on the formation of the imperative in Finnish. Either way I suspect that she may be somewhat dubious about my definition of what entertainment is!

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We had a lovely sweet potato risotto on Tuesday evening with our friends and while I have the recipe I am not going to publish it for the moment as I think other blogs are so much better at that kind of thing, for example Vegan Yum Yum. Instead I would like to say that when I was cutting up the celery, onion, carrot and garlic for the soffrito at the start of the risotto I realised I had enough usable offcuts to make a drop (OK about 1l) of vegetable stock. So my tip to you is if you are making a risotto you can be smart and use some of the vegetables to make a drop of stock and even then you can still put the waste vegatbles on the compost heap. Brilliant!

You are cordially invited

When we awoke this morning it was grey and overcast. The first time in what seems like weeks. Then the rain came and cleared the air of it's oppressive heat. It wasn't a hard rain that scours the heat from the world but a gentle patter that wiped away the grime of the hot days we've all being enjoying here.

The boss and I used the change to be busy and to bottle the apple wine. A long overdue job and one that is good to get done. Now we have 15 bottles and one 5 litre container waiting to be enjoyed. At least one bottle needs to go to our neighbour who provided the apples last autumn. The rest? Well who knows.

As the sun is now shining again and the kitchen will be moving outdoors this evening and it will be our pleasure to offer

BBQ'd Entrecote of steak
Sweet potato baked in the coals
Greek style butter beans
& Tomato and feta salad

You know where to find us and there is still space around the table.

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Update 8.30pm. We went over to the neighbours to deliver the bottle of apple wine, stayed to help them move their old washing machine out of the cellar and put the new one in place and then we all together decided that we should expand our BBQ and have them over to join us. It was an excellent meal made all the more satisfying by its impromptu nature. I was happy to share the grill and we added corn, courgette, Finnish sausage with barley and grilled sweet potato pieces rather than baking whole ones. The company was excellent and the weather kind.

I had hoped to be able to post a picture of the sweet potatoes nestled in the glowing coals but as it never happened you will have to take my word that it was all good.

By the way I did use an old French trick on the steak: once the meat was cooked I sprinkled it with salt and let it rest before serving it.

Back from the lakes

We're back from an excellent week in the UK. I was lucky enough to climb another 11 of the peaks that make up my little project. So I have now been to the top of 75 out of the 451 mountains in England and Wales. I need to thank my father in law for indulging me, especially on our mental Monday morning stroll that had me crippled for 2 days! We went over Hellvelyn via Striding Edge and it was a glorious windless day that allowed us to take the path right over the edge as opposed to the more conventional path.

I was also treated to what would be (to normal people) an overdose of gooseberries and rhubarb but to me was just catching up! We even brought some gooseberries home to make sure we have enough until our own plants bear fruit.

This evening after work we had an excellent BBQ of Satay skewers, roasted red onion, corn, halumi cheese and new potatoes followed by Norfolk Gooseberry Tarts. The trick I managed this time was to get the portion control right so that we had just enough to enjoy and not so much that we were stuffed and it is amazing how the roast red onions and the halumi can be a great substitute from another damn supermarket bought burger!

Red onions - pop them on a skewer whole and let them BBQ for 15-30 minutes depending on size, then peel when they are cool enough to handle. How easy is that?

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Being back at work is, of course, a pleasure however the highlight so far has been listening to Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony on my iPod as I cycle back and forwards. It is just brilliant!

Holidays

I have had a good few weeks off, my list of things to do has been a partial success: I have read the Count of Monte Cristo, I have been very good at studying Finnish, I have swum in the Olympic pool we have been to Turku, we went to see the cherry blossom in Hertomiemi park (except there wasn't any but that is another story), we had a day trip to Tampere, we had a fantastic evening cruise with dinner in Helsinki's western archipelago with a friend who came to visit and maybe a few beers have been enjoyed in the sunshine along the way. We didn't make the Kalevala exhibition at the Ateneum or visit the design musem in Helsinki but that we can do at anytime.

Now I am about to start reading the very serious book pictured above, inspired mostly from our visit to the museum of occupation in Riga. Hopefully it will be an interesting and thought provoking read. Especially after the fluff of Mr Dumas' book.

Due to various things I have to do (eating Jam sandwiches being quite high on the list!) there will be no posting for the next two weeks so please come back in early July. Until then have a great summer.

The lemons from Helsinki railway station

Doing nothing can be quite time consuming. I started my holidays last week and find myself surprised to be here a week later with no idea where the time has gone. Please do not feel sympathy for me, especially if you have been at work, and please don't think I have wasted my time at all.

The weather over the weekend was marvelous and we had a BBQ outside in the garden. I have made mention on this blog of how BBQing food does not grant a licence to carbonise. The trick as ever is to be prepared and be patient. We had chicken, halumi and water melon skewers, corn, asparagus and courgette and some pork marinated in what I will call a Mediterranean fashion. The best bit was that for the two of us it was way too much food and the pork made its way onto a very tasty bruschetta with sun dried tomatoes for lunch a few days later.

On Saturday we were in Helsinki and we managed to find a large piece of the magnificently titled Merikrotti (Monkfish) and set about preparing to cook "Rape in Adobo" from the cookbook Big Flavours and Rough Edges. (If you are ever in London I recommend you eat at the Eagle if you can get a table!). The last ingredients we needed was a lemon. As we were walking towards the train the fruit stall in the station was selling bags of Lemons 2 for 1 euro! So we went home with a beautiful piece of fish that would do at least two meals and more lemons than we knew what to do with!

The Adobo was magnificent: it was a dry cooked marinade consisting of onion, carrot, garlic, parsley, thyme, olive oil and white wine vinegar. The fish was marinated for several hours and then rolled in flour and fried. We served it with some home made tortilla and a little salsa. The sun shone and we could have almost been in Spain!

However this left us with many lemons still to use, the boss stepped in with her usual aplomb and offered to make a lemon meringue pie which is delicious and I have made a lemon and asparagus risotto straight from Nigel Slater's excellent Kitchen Diaries. However that still leaves quite a few lemons in the fridge!

If all that is not enough I have also found time to go, explore and swim in the outdoor Olympic swimming complex in Helsinki, visit the Arabia museum of porcelain, the Kiasma museum of contemporary art, the Parliament of Finland, read half of the Count of Monte Cristo and do my Finnish homework!

We are also busy plotting a train tour around Finland in July with some friends and I manged to organise hotel rooms in Kuopio yesterday on the telephone in Finnish - a first - and find some reasonably priced, if still slightly on the expensive side, rooms in Savonlinna during the opera festival which most people tell me is impossible!

Here's to doing nothing, but to doing it with Lemons!

Swashbuckling in Finnish

It is official. I am on holiday. For the next 3 weeks there will be no getting up because the 6am alarm demands it or working late on Friday nights or even weekends. At this point I would normally have bags packed and passport ready to head off on the exploration of somewhere out of the way.

However this year the plan is radically different in a unintentionally ironic way. This is because there is no plan. We're just going to be at home chilling out. I hope to read The Count of Monte Cristo, make an odd day trip out from Helsinki, stay on top of my Finnish homework, drag the boss to Bar 9 to meet C and eat some lemon chicken (although neither of them know about that thought of mine yet!) and other stuff as it happens that doesn't revolve around worrying over the question "What are we going to do?" or more pertinently "What are we going to catch to eat tonight?" I know for many people what I've written above is the most natural and normal way to approach any holiday. My usual ideas of exploration and wearing myself out with strange wilderness experiences is akin to hell for many who have perfected the art of the pleasantly lazy holiday. Still it is new for me.

The challenge for the kitchen is now lunches for the boss. If I'm around she will expect to be fed by me. So while posting maybe light for the next few weeks it might also be a bit more lunch focused. However I have thought about using the time to make some more elaborate evening dinners which could provide some nice recipes and thirdly with the current weather in Helsinki I could also be returning to one of my pet themes: BBQing without compromise or carbon! Although in reality how much makes it to the blog remains to be seen.

Although having written all that my first task in a list of jobs provided by the boss is to move a huge pile of wood so that we can sit in a sunnier spot in the garden and then mow the lawn. Lazy summer anyone? Luckily there is a bottle of beer chilling in the fridge and the sun is shining so everything will be alright.