Adventures in the Monkey House Kitchen

Wedding bells

2010-04-08T08:20:00.003+03:00

Friends of ours are getting married this weekend and we will be spending as much time celebrating with them as the little one allows. She has been a little inconsistent in her sleeping habits recently, although 4am seems to feature quite highly. The kitchen has been busy with making easy meals to keep the sleep deprived parents going. It feels more like a petrol station than a kitchen right now. It will of course change in the future and is just a stage we all have to get through. The amazing thing is that the munchkin is still quite bright and happy all day long.

We did manage to make a lovely lamb recipe from Jamie Oliver's first cook book. It was very tasty but somehow it seemed to be very simple in a way that is maybe not good. Does that mean we've all come a long way with our expectations in the kitchen as to the authenticity of what we cook? I'd like to think so. Whatever the truth I'm not blaming Jamie (he will no doubt be relieved!).

More soonish

Twinkle twinkle little star

2010-03-29T20:10:00.002+03:00

While I was at work today the boss sung this song to our daughter. We decided to see if we had the chords in either of our two books of nursery rhymes as the baby seems to enjoy my guitar playing (at least for a while). The first one featured a tune which was not twinkle twinkle little star and the chords clearly did not work with the melody we know. So we tried the second book which came up trumps.

However it seemed to be in an unnecessarily fiendishy key (which on a guitar isn't so bad) and on top of that it featured some outlandishly complicated chords. I tried the usual trick of sending them back to their root but somehow it just didn't sound right.

So I started with Am7b5. This is more correctly written as "A minor seven flattened fifth" which isn't something to inspire confidence. Then on to the E° (or E diminished). Once I could play these chords fluently enough so the song could be sung and played simultaneously I was amazed at how beautiful, calm and generally tranquil they made the song. The baby seemed unimpressed but hopefully she will be one day.

Kanteleen kutsu

2010-03-21T20:17:00.003+02:00

We took the baby swimming for the first time today. I have to say I had a great time and it seemed that our little werewolf also enjoyed herself. She kicked her legs and smiled and then decided it was all so normal she started sucking her fingers. She didn't quite understand what was going on when I went under water but that will come as we learn to enjoy it. However as a starting point it was an excellent half hour.

For us parents learning to sing the welcome to swimming and bye bye songs in Finnish is a more immediately pressing challenge but that will come. Luckily our instructor spoke excellent English and we got the idea so I have a feeling that between all of us there will be muddling through resulting in the little one having an enjoyable time swimming!

Dinner tonight was salmon and lentils which was very tasty and quite made up as I went along. I'm not even sure I could write a recipe even if I wanted to. The thing is my menu planning seems to be being dictated by what we are feeding the little one. She needed some salmon poaching so I followed suit for us adults. Luckily I managed to make it tasty! We followed it up with some chocolate ice cream which I bought the other night on a whim. Very naughty but very nice!

Finally we hung some fabric in our stairwell this afternoon which looks amazing. The design is based on the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. You can see the full pattern here. The picture above is of our stairwell looking up. The boss is convinced the photo would have been better from the landing looking down, and she maybe right, but as the little baby has gone to bed I'm not about to start blundering about up there.

At this point it is worth while mentioning that we have been baby proofing the house. The strange thing is that I seem to be bumping into everything, whacking anything vaguely likely to give me a bruise and generally lumbering about the house like a blind cyclops. However today has (so far) been accident free. Now if I can only make it to bed in one piece...

The other good news is some friends of ours have asked if they can come and visit at Easter. It will be great to see them. We lived next to them in Helsinki and were occasionally known as the "Champagne Elves"...maybe Easter and good company would be a good excuse to open a bottle of bubbly?

Al Andalus

2010-03-15T20:27:00.004+02:00

Apologies for light blogging recently. Work has been busy, so has raising a family and we have been in Spain on holiday. We took the heir to the empire to Ronda which we found to be very impressive. Her verdict was to fall asleep in her pushchair. She was more impressed with the sea in a kind of, "hmm what is this?" kind of way.

The highlight of the trip was that she loved being with Grandma and Gramps and to see how they all played together was great. There were many shrieks of delight from Daddy's little werewolf (long story don't ask) which were lovely to hear. I hope when she goes to visit her Grandpa and Nanna in England next month that they all have as much silly fun together.

We shall start taking her to swimming classes this weekend which I am excited about, and a little nervous, mostly because I would like her to enjoy it and because the course comes with two pages of instructions in Finnish detailing what to do, when to do it and who to notify. It honestly seems more complicated than my tax return which can't be right. Our first challenge is to find her a pair of swimming shoes. Although as work is about to be super silly for the rest of the week with 3 commercial reviews and a day of meetings culminating in one about my future, when I shall have time to help in finding said swimming shoes is something only the almighty knows.

So it does mean that blogging will continue to be light for a little while.
Please do keep coming back, there will be more soon. I promise!

Cassoulet

2010-02-20T12:20:00.002+02:00

I am on a plane from Munich to Stockholm as I write this. It is about 8pm local time and darkness has fallen. As I waited for the seatbelt sign to be switched off so I could write about my week in Toulouse I looked out the window. As we climbed through the rain I watched the white lights at the end of the wing flash twice like a heartbeat every second. In the brief moment of illumination I saw a wall of rain drops that contained some water diamonds caught in the light. They were shining and moving in the strobe light effect. It was quite beautiful.

I have been in Toulouse with work and have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to enjoy some good French food across the week. Before I go any further I should point out two important things: firstly I love Cassoulet. Secondly Cassoulet comes from Toulouse. So long before I set out for this trip I have been on a mission to make sure I ate Cassoulet in Toulouse.

On Monday evening we ate in a Restaurant beside the hotel, our French host had arranged for it to be opened especially for us. There was only the choice of steak or fish. I opted for the former as did many of my colleagues. I listened, slightly depressed as my colleagues all asked for their steak to be well done. I know in Finnish there is no word for a ‘rare’ steak but I was in France now I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to order my steak Bleau. It was excellently cooked and raised the eyebrows of all my colleagues for my recklessness and of my French host who listening to us order had clearly decided we were gastronomic philistines!

On Tuesday evening we went for dinner in the local shopping centre beside our meeting venue. It was as drab and as soulless as all shopping centers tend to be. However the restaurant seemed to be trying to be better than its surroundings. The menu was standard bistro fare with a few extras thrown in. Unfortunately there was no Cassoulet. So I opted for the tripe. I had had some good tripe in Barcelona which had been served with chickpeas in a great tomato sauce so I had high hopes. When it arrived at the table I realized that this time I was literally being served a bowl of tripe. However it was tasty. I get the chance to eat tripe so infrequently it had to be better than ordering steak again. I also raised the eyebrows of my colleagues for what was now clearly my recklessness and from our French host who was beginning to think I might be unusual for a foreigner.

On Wednesday night we were taking for a cheese tasting at one of the oldest cheese shops in Toulouse. We were in a private dining room in the cellar behind the shop which stands in the Place Victor Hugo. The main wall in the cellar was actually the old city wall which had stood guarding Toulouse from the Middle Ages until the late 19th Century. The loo was also special as the tap for washing your hands was operated by a foot pedal.

The cheese tasting itself was amazing. 2 and a half hours of unpasturised artisan cheeses served with complimentary wines! I have never eaten so much cheese in one sitting! I went to bed very full. Our guide for the evening was the cheese shop owners son and he spoke with such passion that I joked at one point that if you substituted the word “Cheese” for “Our Lord Jesus Christ” you would think yourself in Church. I did learn that it is always good to cut off the crust on cheese. He even served us two British cheeses, Stilton and Cheddar. The highlight however was the Mont Cheese. He only sells Mont that is at least two and a half years old.

Thursday morning saw me unable to eat breakfast I was still so full and had to make do with a cup of coffee and a glass of grapefruit juice. Our meeting wound up on Thursday afternoon and some of my colleagues headed out for the airport. Due to flights I was staying over with about half the group. We acted on a recommendation from the night before and we managed to reserve a table at Emilie in the Place St George. I had been told that this was the Cassoulet restaurant in Toulouse and I wasn’t going home without eating at least one!

When we arrived at the restaurant I was pleased to see it was in the Michelin Guide. The place itself was small but nice, the staff were welcoming but this was clearly a place with a gourmet pedigree. We were seven people and six Cassoulets were ordered for a main course. I had oysters as a starter and I am pleased to say they moved when I added lemon juice and they tasted of the sea.

Finally my Cassoulet arrived. A hearty bowl with beans that were caramelized on top with a crispy piece of confit du canard in the middle was placed in front of me. I broke through the top and began to spoon it onto my plate. Under the top were pieces of pork and Toulouse sausages. The beans were creamy and the taste was amazing. The sauce gave it a richness without swamping the ingredients. I think I also spotted a few sly pieces of tripe in amongst the melee but there was no way you would know it was in there.

We had ordered a reasonable local wine to accompany the meal, however 2 of my colleagues labeled themselves as philistines in the eyes of the waiter and I by ordering Kronenburg beer to go with their Cassoulet!

Afterwards I could not contemplate a dessert but contained myself to a glass of malt whisky which turned out to be an extremely generous measure which was just as well when I got the bill!

The little I saw of Toulouse has planted the idea in my head that maybe I should bring the family for a holiday on the Canal du Midi, although with all the adventures we already have planned I am not sure when this trip would happen. However it is always good to have dreams. And an excel spreadsheet to keep them on.

Now I am flying home and I am on flight two of three. I will be home in the early hours of tomorrow morning. I am looking forward to seeing my family but I know I will be asked by the boss what I am cooking for dinner on Saturday night. Will I disappoint her if I don’t cook Cassoulet?

This is your destiny calling

2010-02-07T10:37:00.005+02:00

I have to admit how much I love Calvin & Hobbes. I found this one on the internet and it sums up perfectly what is happening to my life now with the little one. I am becoming Calvin's dad. I am not entirely sure this is a good thing.

It dawned on me that this process was happening when I was cycling to work in the snow and thewind on a horrible morning and being very happy with myself because it was such a healthy thing to be doing. At that moment I was hit by the thunderbolt of Calvin's dadness. I had to stop and laugh out loud, which on the street in Finland on a February morning is to risk a visit to the local psychiatrist.
The fact that I was dressed exactly like Calvin's dad in the cartoon above did not help.

Not content with this terrifying development I went cross country skiing yesterday. I though I was doing a gentle 7km. 15km later I was a tired but happy Calvin's dad. I have since heard of a 40km trail that goes over the sea ice in and around Turku Harbour. Sounds good, I should reach my optimal heart rate in no time and it is so good to be out on these cold days.

*Calvin & Hobbes is the work and property of the wonderful Bill Watterson. All images here belong to him. Except the ski track! Thanks to James for the song title.

Adventures in the Finnish Monkey House

2010-02-02T21:22:00.003+02:00

Our weekend in Tahko turned out to be a little more adventurous than first planned. It all started about 25 minutes after the bus should have left Tampere and we had seen no sign of it that we phoned the Tahko central booking office to be told our trip had been cancelled and unfortunately they had forgotten to tell us!

My brother & I gamely hired a car and drove 4 hours from Tampere to Kuopio in the worst winter in 50 years. The roads were not that great and for large parts of the journey there simply isn't much there. All in all most of the route is not a good play to come a cropper in winter driving conditions. However we made it safely to Kuopio by about 11pm. On Saturday we drove on up to Tahko and had a fabulous day's skiing. The weather was cold, around about -25C with the wind chill and we were fully kitted out in just about anything possible to wear that covered our face from the elements. It is not often I ski in (and I list in order): balaclava, powder mask, hat, helmet & goggles. The new skis were brilliant and I loved tearing down the slopes on them. In Finland this means 5 minutes on the lift going up and 30 seconds coming down which can be a too quick!

On Sunday we decided to head for Himos ski resort which is between Jyväsklyä and Tampere. This was an inspired move as the resort itself was excellent and we managed to be home at a reasonable time. Even better the slopes in Himos were steeper than in Tahko so I had some great fun turning the (wonderful) new skis on the steep.

All this being outdoors has made me realise that I am letting the best winter in 50 years pass me by and I need to get out and do some cross country skiing. I have a day off on Friday. Can I tear myself away from quality time with my 5 month old baby daughter to go and wonder around some frozen landscape on a pair of thin skis?

2010-01-29T08:30:00.002+02:00

Going skiing. Hoorah! Back next week.

The soup was excellent and I will try and post the recipe soon. It has been a lot of fun to have my little brother here, it is good to catch up.

Now I just need it to be warmer....should be -30C with the wind chill. Brrr.

Carrot & Celery Soup

2010-01-27T09:56:00.003+02:00

I made this very quickly and simply the other day. Hope you enjoy.

1 onion roughly chopped
5 or 6 carrots peeled and roughly chopped
1 head of celery washed and roughly chopped
1 potato, peeled and you guessed it
A bit of garlic (if you fancy)
A good dose of tarragon
Water
Salt and pepper

This couldn't be simpler - boil all the vegetables in the water, add the salt, pepper and tarragon. Once cooked, blend to a puree, return to the heat, add cream and cook for a little while longer, check seasoning and serve.

How simple was that?
A dash of cream

Day tripper

2010-01-26T18:47:00.002+02:00

The Kitchen is on paternity leave this week, which is a welcome change from work. Although the supreme being in the house has wryly suggested this means she gets a week off and I look after the little one, I haven't as yet put this hint into action. However we, as a family trundled off to the botanical gardens today. Even though Finland is enjoying the coldest winter in 50 years we thought at least the greenhouses would be open. If nothing else we reasoned, it would be an adventure.

Needless to say it was. We got off at the wrong bus stop in the middle of nowhere and had to walk the last mile and half to the botanical gardens, luckily for us the day was one of those days where the earth is covered in snow and the sun was shining, so despite the cold temperature it was a pleasure to be outside. When we got to the greenhouses I have to say I was impressed and the little one certainly went goggle-eyed as she saw things she had absolutely no comprehension of (gold fish especially!). However it is clear the Ruissalo is somewhere to explore in the summer and in the autumn and is a tiny piece of Finnish nature only a bus ride from our front door.

*****

My little brother arrives tomorrow and will meet his niece for the first time. I hope she doesn't confuse her daddy with the guy who kind of looks quite like him....

*****

The kitchen is currently blogging and making tea (or more accurately ignoring what is on the stove and hoping for the best). I am making carrot and celery soup with tarragon for no other reason than I have the ingredients. My inspiration levels have been at the functional for quite some time and I've been more successful at producing better than average lunches than dinners recently. However this week we have managed a rather delicious aubergine and lentil moussaka and now with this soup things are going well. I had an idea today that it was time to start making terrines.

*****

Finally the other project I have going at the moment is learning to play Day Tripper by The Beatles. I learnt it in F for some reason which seems incredibly complicated compared to using E in the 1st position. Now however I have gone with E and am sliding up to the 7th position which leaves me loads of time to sing the song and play the lead guitar line without looking like a total plonker. It is nowhere near polished yet but it is getting there and the little one is impressed if no one else is.

Backbeat

2010-01-22T20:20:00.002+02:00

This week the Kitchen has been in Hamburg, working hard by day and maybe, just maybe finding a quiet watering hole for a small beer in the evenings. I arrived early on Monday morning and headed for Kiel by train. The lady in the ticket office sold me a rover ticket which meant I could travel on any train in Schleswig-Holstein that day. Speeding over the landscape that was covered in snow a montage of images came and went as we sped along: The field shrouded in mist with roe deer standing and watching the train pass; the field full of sheep (it is strange to report but that was definitely a novelty); the sun burning through and coating the white landscape in a brilliant luminescence before we plunge into the dank cold of Kiel.

After that is was back to work in Hamburg and it was an intense couple of days that were challenging and rewarding in parts and deeply frustrating in others. However the evening with colleagues from around Europe were fun, although it seems that this lark fell in with a crowd of owls and learnt that hard way that "one more beer" is a German euphemism for 4 or 5!

We were also treated to a walk through St Pauli, it's history (Gaststätte Zur Ritze) and we were told how The Beatles are a Hamburg band. However despite that the enduring image of my night out in Hamburg was of standing down at the Elbe river with it's ice floes looking at Abramovich's yatch in dry dock.

However it is now good to be home and to marvel at how the little one has changed in only 4 days. I now have a week off and am looking forward to a little quality time with the family and in the kitchen.

Tears and inspriations

2010-01-16T21:13:00.003+02:00

Next week the Kitchen will be in Germany. I am travelling again and leaving the boss to fend for herself and for my daughter and heir while I have fun in Hamburg. I am not relishing the 06:00 flight but am looking forward to catching up with colleagues and working on the subject at hand for this session. And maybe, just maybe finding time to enjoy a small glass of German beer.

Work in the Kitchen has been a hotch potch recently and I must admit to having borrowed ideas liberally in order to keep myself and the boss fed. I haven't had the energy to be creative on my own. Instead I have been reliant on finding inspiration from others and then either following the recipe or more often than not using it as a guide and following my gut.

Today I have had a double dose of this just at the point when I can do nothing about it. However this does mean the boss can look forward to an Aubergine and Lentil Moussaka and some kind of Naan bread topped with aubergine, courgette, pine nuts, feta cheese and mint. The latter came from an home furnishing magazine I was reading at lunch today. It was only two years old and while it was in Finnish I understood what was needed to make the dish...so does half reading and half taking notice of someonelse's recipe written in a foreign language count as stealing it? I think the answer to that is yes.

Tonight our little girl howled at the moon in such apparent pain that dinner was at best just a fuel stop for two parents confused at their little baby going bananas on them. I started out by riffing on a Japanese dish of rice with 3 toppings: chicken, egg and green beans. Luckily once it was all cooked I was able to pop it in the oven to keep it warm until our little girl was convinced to sleep. Nothing seemed to work for her: even entreaties in English, Spanish, French and Finnish had no effect and that is unusual. Normally she finds Daddy cooing in French or Finnish to be very amusing.

So despite my best efforts to pacify an upset daughter with Finnish I am generally quite pleased with how my Finnish is coming on. Admittedly when a lady spoke to me at length about the Finnish pension system for entrepreneurs in Finnish this week I had to pretend I had a clue what she was talking about. I am just over the moon I have made the leap with the "Puoli" (meaning half) to extending its context to include the idea of a side (as in "this side" and "that side" or the Swedish side of the border). I can't yet use it in a meaningful sentence but I know my Finnish colleagues do so. It is little victories like this which keep you going with a language that is as alien to my English mind as Finnish. In a strange way I find it quite a beautiful language even though it frustrates me on a daily basis.

To come back to travelling the kitchen will also be in Toulouse in February and I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. Well first of all I am quite upset that I cannot get back on the day I want to due to flights but Toulouse is the home of Cassolet, one of my all time favourite foods in the world. While I am in Toulouse I wonder if I can eat Cassolet every night in a different place?

Do be do

2010-01-10T08:11:00.004+02:00

This weekend we took our first family trip to Helsinki. I had some paperwork to get sorted with the Customs office relating to my car (which is of course managing to be entirely logical and byzantine in its complexity, however I think we are almost there) which provided an excellent excuse to pack the family up and see friends in the big city.

I had gone into the railway station in Turku a week or so ago and tried in my best Finnish to book a special place for us and the pram. When we got on the train we found that the pram went somewhere other than our seats so we abandoned it and headed to our special family compartment. This is a little section of the train with 4 adult seats arranged in a semi circle around a window, a table and a small play area. It's meant for families with small children and it was perfect for us as in the carriage where we left the buggy 3 gentlemen decided that 9am was a suitable time to start drinking beer! The train ride up was great and the little one seemed to take it all in her stride and enjoyed sitting on my knee watching the winter world speed past. The boss took the photo above and I really like it!

Once in Helsinki my appointment with customs took less than 15 minutes (when dealing with Finnish bureaucracy it pays to have the original of everything with you!) and we were off to enjoy the weekend. We caught up with some friends who have recently had twin girls who arrived a little early. It was really amazing to see how small the girls were compared to our little monster and to see how well our friends were coping with the rigours of looking after such small babies.

Afterwards we went on to another friend who very kindly fed us and housed us! For dinner he cooked Salmon. However rather unusually he cooked it in the dishwasher. While it was an interesting experiment and the sauce (piquant dill sauce) was excellent, I cannot see how the dishwasher really added something to the finished dish apart from the theatre of the cooking process which was undeniable!

On Saturday we caught up with more friends just by sitting in the Ataneum cafe. It was very busy due to the enormously popular Picasso exhibition. However we ignored the crowds and just made ourselves comfortable in the cafe. After lunch I offered to change the baby and I learnt a valuable lesson: If there is an enormous queue for the ladies toilet and access to the disabled toilet is being guarded by a group of formidable old dears carrying a baby and engaging in a little bit of polite small talk about how she is the first Finnish member of the family will charm even the hardest of old dears. Especially if a) you do it in Finnish and b) the baby smiles at all the right times which our little one did brilliantly! Unsurprisingly the ranks of old dears parted and we were ushered into the baby changing room! Afterwards all the women at the lunch table were adamant that if they had gone with the baby they would not have got through the barricade!

Finally it was time to come home and I have to say we were "cream crackered" by the time we got home and put the baby to bed. I rustled up a lazy carbonara and we trundled off to bed as soon as was acceptable even if it was ridiculously early. However we have a full day ahead of us and we're off to buy skis!

Chickpea Ravioli

2010-01-06T21:15:00.003+02:00

Surprise me the boss said. I know she's not terribly keen on chickpeas, or if that is unfair there is at least some resistance to them in their whole form. In hummus, mixed with bacon and avocado there is no complaints, but otherwise I sense some hesitation. All this is good background information because in the cupboard a carton of chickpeas has been calling to me and I was resolved to do something with it. So when we were working on the menu plan I casually wrote down Chickpea surprise and passed it over for approval. She saw it and gave it back as a challenge.

So I went looking for something unusual to do with chickpeas and quite by chance I came across this blog posting on The Healthy Vegan Kitchen Blog. I read it, was intrigued and decided to do my own thing with it. However I do need to acknowledge my inspiration and thank Debyi for putting the idea in my head!

What can I say? This really works. You basically make a ravioli filling with chickpeas, cream cheese, chives, garlic, lemon juice and salt and you serve it with some good home made pesto. Pesto can be made more or less sauce like depending on how much olive oil you add. Here I used more than I would normally so that the pesto would be like a sauce for the ravioli.

*****

It is still cold here in Finland - the temperatures have been hovering around the -20C now for weeks really. There is no end in sight and we had one occasion in the last week where the temperature dropped so low that the cold water feed to the hot water tank in the garage froze. So to restore hot water, yours truly was up a ladder with a hair dryer thawing out pipes....still the boss and the baby appeared to appreciate it.

2010-01-01T09:09:00.001+02:00

Welcome to 2010.
Hope it is a good one.

Let thy servant depart

2009-12-31T12:44:00.003+02:00

So here we are at the end of 2009. I had hoped to finish the year with a post that is half written covering our Christmas adventures and our New Year escapades in the Kitchen. It is a post that also looked forward to the year to come and to the adventures planned and under consideration. As it is unfinished it will have to wait for another day to make its way here. Instead I offer this photo which is of a little bowl of wasabi I made from powder which I added to some Miso, Sake & Mirin and am using as a marinade for some steak which we will cook tonight.

The news of the shooting in a shopping centre in Espoo today has however sombred my thoughts and as I sit here surveying the winter wonderland of snow from the comfort and warmth of my living room I cannot but help feeling saddened by what has happened. 4 people killed for no reason other than shopping for groceries. What were their life stories, who is mourning their loss now? I guess I feel all this so keenly because of the precious gift the boss & I have received this year. They all told me parenthood would change everything. I didn't believe any of them at the time and even before this sad news I had already lost count of the number of times they had been proved right. This is supposed to be a time for hope. I hope my blind faith will be enough.

The woods are lovely

2009-12-20T21:00:00.003+02:00

Outside the snow is falling and the land is dark. I have had a busy day at work and am in a dreamy mood: the kind of mood that comes from the weather - tonight is the kind of night I remember from within myself: it is the kind of night that is made for walking across fields, through woods, beside rivers, canals for just being out, lost in the myriad millions of snow flakes falling falling falling.

I have done such nights many many times in my life and I hope one day soon I will take my daughter Frances out on such a night and introduce her to the beauty of a dark night, a snowy sky, a walk without a destination, the poetry of just being a traveller as a blot on an otherwise quiet world. As a teenager at school I would regularly escape into the snowy nights to wander, into the clear crisp winter nights to wander and see the constellations, into the summer nights to wander yet none of them moved me like the snowy nights when the sky seemed full of wonder falling falling falling. The wind, the dark, the snow, the sound of my feet crunching through fresh snow, the fields luminous and yet indistinct, the woods clear and yet closed and mysterious and the precious moments where the clocks disappeared from the world and the only thing that mattered was how long you wanted to go.

The kitchen will be closing for Christmas and I would like to wish all readers a happy Christmas. I will be back in the new year. I know the year ahead has many many exciting adventures planned. I just hope I will be able to put them all here.

Creeped out in Barkaby

2009-12-12T09:21:00.004+02:00

I've been in Sweden with work this last week. On Monday I found myself in Uppsala waiting for a train to Stockholm and found this book in the store at the station. "Let the right one in" is a tale of vampires, murder, mayhem and the less savoury aspects of life in Stockholm's western suburbs during the long dark Swedish winter. Where did I get off the train and start wandering around in the dim light of dusk? Stockholm's western suburbs. Did it freak me out? Hell yes!

The 500 pages of the book only took a few days to read as it was a compelling read. Somehow it took various aspects of the Vampire mythos and turned them on their head in a refreshing way. It then also added to the mix several other normal story lines and characters and let them all begin to converge in a way that moderately predictable. The ending managed to be slightly surprising in the way it unfolded although thinking about it for 10 minutes told me exactly where the clues were. I'm avoiding a precis of the plot as it works on many levels and let us face it and 200year old vampire befriends small boy isn't your average premise for a book. The fact that it jumped into other genres as well; crime, low life, romance only added to the enjoyability of the read.

As I am travelling a lot at the moment I am keen to find books that pass the time away, don't demand too much attention and yet are above average quality. This book fits that criteria and it was better vampire book than twilight.

So now I am kicking around looking for a new book, preferably still in the Vampire genre which seems to be where my head is at right now.

*****

While in Stockholm I was lucky enough to have a traditional Swedish Christmas dinner on a boat cruising the archipelago. While it was a huge meat and drink fest which has all the staples of Scandinavian cooking (I felt like a herring the next morning) this one included some of the less often served dishes which I was keen to try: pigs trotters. I understand the whole mind over matter thing and I almost chickened out before the first mouthful however I can recommend them! Of course they are not as good as other bits of the pig but do not be afraid! They are quite fatty and there isn't so much meat on them but they are like eating ham to all intents and purposes and that isn't so bad is it?

Tabbouleh winter

2009-12-04T15:50:00.003+02:00

It is getting colder in Turku, there has been a hard frost and today the first snow has fallen. What does the kitchen do in a week like this? Cook like it is summer time! We started the week well with some tabbouleh and chicken which with it's lovely parsley freshness really seemed to pep me up from the slumbering darkness. It was remarkable simple to make and I cannot for the life of me think why I haven't made it before. I used the recipe in Leith's cookbook as a guide and towards the end let me taste buds guide me as I added salt, pepper and lemon juice.

I think it is an indication of the power of food to evoke memories of times, places and people gone by a long time ago that eating that tabbouleh in a kitchen in Finland put me in mind of a visit to some Lebanese friends of my parents called Sammy & Theresa and how at their house I was given tabbouleh for the first time and eating it again this week was a reminder of how wonderful it was.

The other thing to note is that tabbouleh will be a staple in the BBQs that will be a feature of next summer. So easy to make, so good to eat - can I praise this stuff enough?

Writing of BBQs my day job is about to launch a frying pan designed specifically for a BBQ, this has me very curious as I have only seen a bad photo of it and it looks like it has lots of holes in the bottom of it. I look forward to seeing it closer up!

On Wednesday evening we dabbled with Spanish food - here I used pimenton, sherry vinegar and garlic as a flavour base and added it to onions, pork, tomatoes, mushrooms and chorizo and let them stew. As I served it up with potatoes I realised that if I should have used chickpeas to make it even more authentic.

This is a perfect supper dish that demands minimal attention and any left overs can be turned into soup the following day as we did this afternoon for lunch.

Tonight we will be making a hearty macaroni cheese, I had thought about burying some asparagus in there to make it more summery but that seems to be trying too hard and maybe on this cold and darkening evening the best thing to do is to make the macaroni cheese as thick and as gloopy as I can manage so that it makes your insides so warm the cold will not touch you.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans

2009-11-30T16:02:00.004+02:00

So said John Lennon and in one sense I really agree with him, you need to live each and every day. However the boss & I have been making plans today and I am rather pleased with them. OK maybe plans is too grand but decisions from which plans will spring.

Initially we had decided to have a holiday in the Peak District next year but have today decided that we will be based somewhere in Sussex or Kent.

I am of course sad to be losing out on opportunity to add 3 more mountains to my list but as I was out posting a card to some friends who have just had twins a happy thought occurred to me: With a 9 month old daughter in tow the most arduous thing that will be required of me on this holiday will be to sit in an english pub garden and supervise her. Now just imagine if that pub served Harvey's bitters....

*****

We're also going to be in Gotland with friends in August. Am quite excited about this, there is something about watching the sun set over the Rauks on the northern part of Gotland that captures my imagination. That together with a simple cabin and plenty of BBQ's and time to relax and unwind with friends that makes me feel these last few weeks of increasing darkness will be manageable and the corner of the year is not as far away as it seems.

Moussaka

2009-11-30T09:42:00.003+02:00

Last week I did a strange thing: I volunteered to make Moussaka. My wife could be described, without exaggeration, a being something of a moussaka fiend. She loves it. I am somewhat ambivalent about it, mostly because I don't get aubergines. I know people rave about them, and I know in Southern Spain they deep fry them in batter and serve them with honey and they are lovely, but somehow the ones we buy and cook here in Finland seem to be missing something. Or maybe how I am cooking them is wrong? I should qualify further and say I love how they look - they are definately one of the cooler vegetables but somehow there is something lost between the time I begin chopping them and when they arrive on the plate.

However to come back to the moussaka, I was pre baking the aubergines in the oven and I had sliced them in the mandolin but they were too thin when they were finnish cooking. So my tip to myself and to whoever reads this is to be brave when making moussaka and slice thise aubergines thicker than you initally feel is wise.

******

Today is a day off and I have some serious menu planning to do. There is, of course, this week and as an extra I have to organise next week as well because I will be in Stockholm with work. She will have her hands full with the baby but will still need to eat while the chef is away! I cannot let her eat her standard Pasta Surprise for 4 days for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So I will use this week to make some good food that can be used next week. I suppose that one advantage of not speaking the language of the country you live in is that is makes her ordering take away pizza by phone nearly impossible...

*****

We have some cracked wheat sitting in the cupboard so I think I am going to have a crack at some tabbouleh as hopefully it's Mediterranean flavours will freshen up the dark days we have as we wait for the shortest day. I think that will be the theme of the menu: sunshine and warmth.

Thursday musings

2009-11-26T11:17:00.004+02:00

I have a bottle of Hoisin sauce my father bought when he came to visit a few weeks ago and it is calling to me, wanting to be used. Life has been busy and opportunities to use it have come and gone. Other things needed eating up, I fancied making other dishes, you know how it is. The balance between work and life have been muddled (what else is to be expected with a 10 week old baby in the house?) so the bottle has been left alone.

The thing is I don't know what hoisin sauce is, what it is used for and why you might want to use it. As someone who loves to scratch cook I even enjoy making my own sauces and stocks so am innately suspicious of shop bought sauces like this. I even bought and used, in extremis, some minced garlic made by the same company and found it to be disgusting and lacking in any kind of garlic taste. And yet. And yet the hoisin calls to me still.

So we have a situation where I don't know what to do with it and I'm not sure I like it anyway. It's going to be a great meal when it comes out! This is the essence of the kitchen, getting the best out of what you have around you to feed body and soul.

Wish me luck!

Bacchus and the meal

2009-11-22T11:05:00.006+02:00

Finally a story. When we lived in Helsinki a neighbor of ours told us about how the people who work in the Alko are trained to give recommendations about which wines can go with which foods but most of the time they only get to point people to the Korsenkorva. He then went on to relate how he went into his local Alko and the sales assistant's eyes lit up when asked to advise on wine. So I decided to put this to the test.

I had sketched out doing something with chicken and chili and inspired by my neighbours tale I went into the alko and got my recommendation despite delivering one of my worst performances ever in the mangling the Finnish language. The recommendation was this Allora pictured above.

Needless to say I never cooked anything with chili and chicken and the bottle was just enjoyed at some other time that seemed right.

*****

Two months later I decided to see if this wine really went with chili and chicken, did the lady in the Helsinki alko get it right?

*****

Serves 2
1 bottle of allora negroamaro (Alko product code 409797)

1 chicken breast cubed
3 dried red chillies crushed, flaked or otherwise made small and bitty
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp green peppercorns
Sesame oil
1 dash of sake

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and marinade for the whole day. When ready stir fry in a hot wok and serve immediately.

To serve I decided to cook some sticky rice and peas and a little side of yellow peppers and mushrooms with chopped ginger stir fried. You can increase or decrease the amount of ginger used to taste but I decided to do this because ginger does have a heat that compliments the chili. The only other thing to note is I served this side in a little dish separate from the main to make sure the flavours had some integrity.

The result? Excellent, the wine held it's own against the strong chili flavours. It was just a shame that our daughter decided to cry her way through the whole experience meaning that we ate with more of a hurry than such a simple and straightforward yet pleasing meal deserved.

So if you are ever in the alko looking for a bottle of wine you should be confident that the staff will be able to recommend a bottle to go with your ingredients.

Across the universe

2009-11-16T20:10:00.004+02:00

Cycling home from work tonight was like tumbling effortlessly through time. The rain and the wind pushed against me and yet the bike moved almost by itself as my mind allowed itself to wander. The weather was the catalyst for the strange place I ended up in. Although I actually managed to be on my way home before 4.30pm the dark and dank nature of the world made it seem like much later and by the time I got home one hour later I felt like I was awake in the middle of the night.

The original plan for tea revolved around a squash, some lemon grass and coriander and none of these were available in the supermarket today when the boss reported the results of her foraging expedition. So cycling home I decided to drop into the swankiest department store in town (Stockmann's for any Finns reading this) and while I found all three the recipe called for 250g of pumpkin and all they had was a 5kg pumpkin costing 18€! Next I tried the Kauppahalli but there was nothing and finally the eco shop which was just as fruitless. So I got home feeling like I had travelled much further across space and time than was usual.

However a little baby and her mother helped me back to normality but we still had the challenge of dinner, so here is a simple way to save a Monday night supper using one pan. It is based on the gypsy eggs idea.

400g tomatoes
400g large white beans (this is cooked weight)
1 small red onion chopped
1 small red chili deseeded
Half an aubergine
1 carrot chopped
1 potato chopped
200g chorizo
Water
Thyme
2 eggs
Olive oil
Salt & Pepper

Warm the olive oil in the pan and gently fry the onion, carrot, chorizo and chili.
Add the beans and the tomatoes
Add water to take the liquid in the dish up to where you want it (less more a meal, more it's closer to a soup - it is your choice)
Add the aubergine and potato, herbs and salt & pepper.
Put the lid on and let it simmer for 20-30 mins
Break 2 eggs into it and let them cook in the juices
Serve

I sprinkled a little pimenton over it when I served it up which was a nice little touch. I recommend a lovely apple crumble with thick custard as dessert as well.

Vampires, Danes & Grandparents

2009-11-08T21:14:00.006+02:00

I'm just back from a long long long wait at Copenhagen airport that stretched interminably. It got so bad that I bought Twilight and have been addicted to it ever since. The last time I checked I am not the target group for this book - 17yrs old, nope, female, nope....and yet and yet. I have to say it is for the most part poorly written but there are odd flashes of a well turned phrase and it did its job of keeping me amused as the hours rolled by as the story was well paced. The concept is also a good one. The question now is whether I go on and read the rest....as I have several encounters with Copenhagen airport coming up I fear I already know the answer.

Update:
This morning I have decided not to bother with the rest of the books but my curiosity did get the better of me and I read the precis of the rest of the saga on the internet. I have to say that what I learnt only confirmed to me that I made the right decision.

I have been thinking about this some more so this is kind of a second update here and I have to reflect back to when I read Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice many years ago and then went on to read other books in the series which were increasingly batty and bad. The law of diminishing returns applies. I think the same will be true of the Twilight saga.

*****

My parents have been staying with us, spending time with their new grand daughter and as today is Fathers Day in Finland we made a lovely dinner of

Lamb shanks cooked in vermouth and cream with leek and mushrooms
Mashed potatoes
Honey glazed carrots and an onion sauce

This was followed by

Bread and butter pudding which with the addition of Baileys was quite magnificent.

It sounds kind of a simple Sunday dinner and in many ways it was but it was rich, and filling and the perfect thing to eat on a grey Sunday. We hadn't done much at all, enjoyed the baby's company, I had raked all the leaves up in the garden and we had all walked to the local cemetery to look at the graves in the late autumn light. Somehow the quietness of the day was balanced by the full, rich food as we all sat around the table. It was a meal as a moment, a meal as a celebration and a meal as an everyday happening. 3 generations, one table, one meal, one moment. How good is that?

Annotations

2009-11-02T09:05:00.002+02:00

Generally I am dead against writing in recipe books. Whenever I follow a recipe I only pay the minimal amount of attention to it, using it as a guide and not as something that must be adhered to at all costs.

However last week we dipped in Harumi Kurihara's Japanese Home Cooking to make her Tofu and Aubergine gratin. The six tablespoons of Miso paste left an incredibly salty taste on the final dish that I am moved to change my mind on writing in books and making a note so that I will enjoy the dish next time I make it.

However that is the point about cooking isn't it, especially when you use a recipe as a guide, trial and error. That may also be the strongest argument for making notes. Time to get out the pen.

*****

Last weekend we went to the Herring Market in Turku. It was nice to wander along the banks of the river, eating freshly cooked herring and buying 3 day baked black bread from the Åland islands. There is something about food and travel that stir the mind in the right way, especially when the air is cold and the food is warm.

2009-10-22T10:09:00.002+03:00

Our daughter is asleep upstairs and I am taking the opportunity to post a short update. We have moved house, town and job(s). Acquired a beautiful daughter who sleeps sometimes and life is slowly getting back to normal.

Our cooking has, by necessity, been basic and fast. Our daughter seems to specialise in being extremely awake between 7pm and 10pm and so we have been eating in shifts and with varying degrees of simplicity. However we are still cooking but between home life and the new day job there is just not enough hours in the day to blog as well.

However my enthusiasm to blog is increasing again and I am tempted to try a more vignette style approach for a while.

*****

Elizabeth David, doyenne of postwar British culinary writers and still relevant today. Her Moussaka which was free of the all smothering bechemel sauce, was a case study in simplified excellence: aubergines, mince, tomatoes and a tomato garlic sauce. Baked slowly. Eaten hungrily amid the babies cries. Sometimes she watches us from her high chair. Either way, we are not alone.

The end of the beginning

2009-08-22T10:55:00.003+03:00

It is a lovely late summer's Saturday morning here in Finland as I start to write this. Quiet and still. The blue sky is almost cloudless and the garden in bathed in dappled sunlight. The house is quiet as well. The boss is upstairs busying herself with some task or other before our friend from Norway arrives tomorrow and I've just finished the hoovering.

Last night was a landmark in the kitchen as we reached the end of the third bag of charcoal consumed in one summer. In the end it was a close run thing, there was just enough heat from the coals to roast a foil wrapped loin of pork that had been rubbed with salt, pepper, fennel seeds, sesame oil and soy sauce. You can't really go wrong with this kind of cooking - put it in the coals, put in on the grill it doesn't matter, 15 minutes or 45 minutes it doesn't matter either so long as that foil is tightly wrapped so none of the juices can escape! However there wasn't enough heat to boil a pot of coffee in the embers. Maybe next summer I will manage to enjoy that little pleasure.

We served the pork with a huge bowl of sticky rice and a spicy aubergine and noodle salad that I took directly from Harumi Kurihara's Japanese Home Cooking. It was simple to make and very tasty, not to mention surprisingly spicy for the use of one chili that has been hiding in a bag with a load of other chilis in the freezer for a few months. Maybe freezing intensifies the zing a chili brings? I feel an experiment coming on! Our neighbours came and joined us with their little boy and we had an excellent evening.

However it is now time to put the blog on hold for a little while. There are two reasons for this: the first is that when the blog started I had hoped it would be a medium for food and life related musings. In a sense it has been and in a sense it hasn't. There are better food blogs out there and there are better musing blogs out there. I feel that I am falling between the two stools and my conclusion is that I need to be clearer about how this blog will go forward. I took a decision early on to exclude politics from my blog and I don't intend to change that. Now it is a question of refreshing my frame of references for myself. With the above mentioned score for the summer this post feels like the perfect point to take a breather. The second, and more practical, reason is the imminent arrival of a "mini me" or a "mini boss" into my life. I've never been a dad before and while I dream of carrying on more or less as before I am not so daft as to believe there isn't going to be a major realignment in the rthymn of my life. In fact I am looking forward to it tremendously. I cannot wait to get to know the little person. Although indications so far seem to suggest he or she has inhereted the currently complimentary stubborn streaks the boss & I possess.

Finaly as it is such a lovely day & I have nothing to do I am going to enjoy it by listening to Test Match Special from the Oval on the BBC. Might I recommend the same to you?

Hornets and Rum

2009-08-15T19:14:00.004+03:00

I was cycling home from work this afternoon in time to watch some of the fast jets of the Finnish air force strut their funky stuff as part of the Helsinki Air Show. Despite a small run in with the police relating to where I was choosing to ride my bicycle I somehow managed to end up at a point just outside the airfield perimeter fence next to a rather unassuming lampost that the fighter jets seemed to be using as their fulcrum point. Consequently I can tell exactly what it feels like to be standing in the middle of an open space while a rather fast jet fighter bears down on you. While this was happening to me I was merrily watching a pigeon and wondering what Blowers would say. I have to say the planes were very impressive and the Finnish disregard for health and safety meant rather expensive military hardware was pulling rather interesting manouevers at insanely low heights over a built up area at speeds approaching stalling point!

*****

Last night we met some friends at Pikkulintu for a beer or two. I started the evening on the Caribbean Rum Stout which was blacker than night and a mind bending 11% alcohol. It was lovely. Deep, complex, tasty, sweet, coffee, rum, tar, coal, smoke flavours all colliding. It took me ages to drink my 33cl and actually made for a civilised evening as opposed to a session which is always a good thing. I did notice in their current beer list that they have an IPA at 21%. The mind can only boggle...

Come into my parlour

2009-08-13T15:10:00.006+03:00

The kitchen has been in Turku for a few days house hunting and is now back in Helsinki. It was a very successful trip and we found a house to move to once the autumn begins. We spent a few days driving all over the city and saw big places, small places, odd places, far away places, some places we didn't find, and some places we found by accident. At the end of it all though we did find a nice new place, in a great location and have signed the contract and have the keys!

The kitchen is a good size with three fridges and a chest freezer. We couldn't work out why this would be needed until we walked out into the garden and saw the mature apple trees laden with fruit, the two large clumps of rhubarb and all sorts of berries and currants growing. The final bit of good fortune is that there seems to be a fruiting cherry tree in the garden as well. We're also lucky that the garden will get afternoon sun which in the warm Finnish summer will be wonderful and the BBQ opportunities it gives makes me a happy chef!

Location wise it is perfect for cycling to work and also easy and convenient to meet friends off the train from Helsinki and farther afield! It is a short stroll into town and there is a lovely park only 5 minutes away. Couldn't be better really.

The final thing is that the sauna is a firewood sauna which the Finns prize very highly. I am looking forward to a winter of warm warm saunas as the year becomes dark and cold.

*****

I thought I would put up this link as we made this for lunch and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sometimes it is nice to follow a recipe and not think too much.

BBQ summer

2009-08-09T09:57:00.002+03:00

There has been a lot of noise in the newspapers back home about how the Met Office got their forecast for the summer so wrong. The promised BBQ summer has been drowned by the wettest July on record. It seems odd that this year in Finland the weather has consistently allowed me to set up the kitchen outdoors on an almost weekly basis after the washout of last year.

Yesterday the Boss and I had a fairly quiet day at home. We've got things to do but decided not to do them. Instead there was the very serious job of sitting in the chair in the garden doing very little. I am sure that once the baby arrives moments like that will seem strange and remote, but who knows?

As the day was a lovely one we planned to BBQ, we knew that we would be having potato salad as the Boss has dropped hints to me this week that I have been letting her down in the provision of potatoes!

Our challenge in Finland is mayonnaise. The shop bought stuff is shockingly bad. I would ordinarily make my own but with the Boss building us a baby in her laboratory I need to cook all the eggs in the kitchen. So we cheated and mixed in some mustard which meant that neither really tasted bad. We then added hard boiled eggs, broad beans and some bacon lardons to give it flavour.

For the main we put some cubed pork in a marinade of soy sauce, mirin and sesame oil for a few hours and then put it on skewers with leek. The idea was to make it dead simple, look attractive and taste good! They only took a few minutes to cook and so afterwards we put a bit of wood on the BBQ to make a fire and sat out into the evening chatting about nothing in particular.

Aggers

2009-08-04T20:15:00.003+03:00

House hunting is a current obsession in the Kitchen. I think I have personally sent oikotie.fi's stat counter through the roof this month. While this has the pleasing effect of ensuring their marketing department is thoroughly perplexed by the data it has not as yet provided me with a new base for the kitchen and somewhere to house the boss and the baby.

With trying to make sure the loose ends in Helsinki are tied up before the move it seems the day job has been intruding on the important work in the Kitchen. So rather than offering up some tasty tips I might just mention some ideas that have worked and one we're going to try tomorrow night on a friend.

Last night the boss made a quite superb roast red pepper tart which I am afraid to say was actually even better today as my lunch at work. We bought the peppers from the grocery stand from Malmi railway station and while they weren't the prettiest they were very cheap at 1€ for a bag.

Tonight was my turn to offer pan fried salmon with lentils and vegetables. This was mostly good weekday evening food, the vegetables, once drained were given a little bit of butter and a smattering of fennel seeds which just elevated them above the humdrum.

Tomorrow we will doing something that is along the lines of black pudding and pork paella. I am not sure in my own head how this work but the boss assures me from her extensive googling that the Spanish make morcilla paellas so I can't be too far off the mark!

The other thing that has dragged me away from the kitchen was listening to Test Match Special on the BBC. I must admit that I've been quite ambivalent about the cricket for a while now however when I stumbled across the TMS commentary on the Internet I was happy to be sucked back in. I am looking forward to the 4th Test from Headingly at the weekend especially as I have the weekend off and can sit and listen to both days. All I have to do now is to convince the boss to sit still so I can play TMS to her belly so that the foetus can start its conditioning process before birth!!

Into the fire

2009-07-27T09:14:00.005+03:00

It is at times like these you wish you had an organised food/life blog. On Saturday night some friends came around and we BBQ'd again. If I had been organised there would have been photos. As it is you will have to use your imagination.

This summer is definitely turning into a personal best for getting into the garden and cooking stuff over the coals. It has also been a summer virtually devoid of burgers and sausages. It seems the more we BBQ the more we work with normal everyday food and all that is different is the heat source.

Anyway this time we took about 300g of boneless pork loin, marinated all day in olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary and thyme. When we ready we simply seared the outside on the hot coals, them we put the meat in some foil, poured over the remaining marinade, wrapped it all up tightly and popped it right in the coals. Carried on cooking all the other stuff and about 20 minutes later is was perfect. Still wonderfully moist. So easy, so good.

It's almost getting to the stage where I'm about to dispense with the grill part of the BBQ and start popping pots into the coals to boil something away and sticking vegetables onto stakes and letting them cook that way. I can see that the next challenge will be to do this while out camping. Bring it on!

Today the sun is shining and I think it might be time to make the first gazpacho of the season for lunch!

****

Update: the gazpacho was lovely if I say so myself! Best of all it was easy. However no recipe this time because I didn't follow one and just went with a bit of this and a bit of that attitude.

After lunch we were feeling rather full so we went for a walk and we found the pea field.

Now before I go further I should explain this. The taxes we pay to the city of Helsinki are in part spent on farming and one example is the fields of peas the city grow and you can just go and pick them. For free. As a Brit living in Helsinki I laugh every time I imagine this being done in the UK. People would think the council were mental.

So anyway, we came home with a bag full of peas and well they needed to be eaten so I put them in with some cooked rice and served it with some nice pork chops cooked in a ratouille of vegetables. My secret ingredient was to fry the onions in some sherry vinegar and olive oil and they kept their sweetness all the way through. Even better it was a two pan supper so washing up was easy!

Kalakukko

2009-07-23T21:16:00.004+03:00

We were away at the weekend on a much-anticipated Finnish odyssey. Our grand plan was to take the train from Helsinki to Kuopio, the boat from Kuopio to Savonlinna and then the train back to Helsinki. The flaw in the grand plan was that it required early mornings but this is summertime in Finland so at least they are light! So with a pregnant wife in tow I set off on an adventure that was suited to her tastes and pace.

This was our first trip to Kuopio and I have to say we liked the town, my only gripe is the quality of beer was appalling. It is a Carlsberg town! On the other hand it is the home of Kalakukko. This is a traditional finnish food which is essentially a loaf of rye bread with fish baked inside it. While it may sound odd and even unappetising I can assure you that tasting it is another matter. It was a revelation. Ours was made with Perch and was beautiful.

As the weather was beautiful we did skip some of Kuopio’s indoor attractions and instead concentrated on walking our way up to Puijo and the famous tower. The views from the top, were excellent. It is to be recommended. The only thing to note is the lifts have limited capacity so time your trip to miss a busload of tourists!

The following morning we headed off early on the boat to Savonlinna. The journey takes 10 ½ hrs and travels through some of the loveliest and quintessentially Finnish Lakeland scenery to be had. Luckily for us the day was divine. The sun shone from journey’s start to journey’s end. We sat on deck and just let the world pass us by. It was a slightly strange trip insofar as we seemed to be the only non-Finns on board so we encountered some of their stranger cultural quirks. The most obvious was the family boat trip where dad starts on the beer before 9.30am in the morning and nobody blinks an eyelid. I have been known to enjoy a beer now and then but even I remember quite clearly my lessons on knowing when the sun had crossed the yardarm!!

Our arrival into Savonlinna was dramatic as we raced past the castle in the fast flowing narrow channel as the sun turned the stone walls red. We were unfortunately too late to get to the opera festival so consoled ourselves with a trip to the excellent Gastropub.

Sunday morning dawned early again and we headed off to the train station. Our train whisked us along the famous Punkkuharja esker towards a small village of Parikkala (population seemed to be no more than ½ goat!) but is bizarrely has a railway station that serves as a major jumping off point in the Finnish railway system.

Safely back in Helsinki on a hot day we wandered down to Pikkukoski swimming beach and I enjoyed a refreshing dip in the river Vantaa while the Boss (aka pregnant wife in tow) watched my madness from the side. The water temperature was described, as 21C and I have to say it was lovely. There was a much colder current running through the mid stream but if this is swimming outside in the Nordic countries in summer then I want to do it again.

The other thing we learnt on our return to Helsinki was that our washing machine had died while we were away. All our efforts to revive it were in vain so on Monday we headed off to get a new one. In this we were successful so we headed off to the Savoy restaurant to celebrate! OK this is not true as anyone with even the smallest knowledge of restaurants in Helsinki will know that this one is just in the toppest most top top tier. We were there on a special value menu and were trying to enjoy the high life for a normal price. If money is no object we recommend this place. The sommelier is excellent and his wine list will turn a humble cook like myself green with envy. Such is life. We did finally come to an agreement that did not involve me paying 250 euros plus for a bottle of wine and I very much enjoyed washing their dishes for them!

We enjoyed our dinner very much and headed home, tired but exhilarated by our trip around Finland. The thing about a list of adventures is it is never done and as this was probably our last trip before the baby arrives I look forward to making sure the adventures don’t stop here, rather that the fun increases! Right off to see if I can convince the boss about another one of my bright ideas…..

Summer salad

2009-07-13T20:40:00.004+03:00

Yesterday evening we had a lovely salad in the back garden. After a day of rain it brightened up and we were able to escape before the rain resumed again.

I had found an unusual salad in a Finnish home interior magazine which blended leaf, basil leaf, cucumber, melon, strawberries and brie topped off with peanuts, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We accompanied it with some Spanish style new potatoes which means adding fried chorizo and bacon and plenty of rosemary.

The salad was excellent and the potatoes were also very good. I was also told that the potatoes were even better the day after as lunch.

Today it has rained and rained again which scuppered any idea of eating out so instead we raided Nigel Slaters' Kitchen Diaries and made his excellent Courgette Fritters. He uses dill but as we didn't have any we used coriander. Although I was initially sceptical about mixing feta and coriander I have to say that it wasn't a bad combination after all.

It is official

2009-07-09T10:51:00.003+03:00

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!

*****

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

2009-07-03T16:17:00.003+03:00

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.

*****

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

2009-06-24T21:01:00.003+03:00

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?

****

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

2009-06-12T14:30:00.003+03:00

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

2009-06-04T08:47:00.004+03:00

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

2009-05-29T08:55:00.002+03:00

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.

Nainen vailla varjoa

2009-05-21T14:34:00.004+03:00

Last night we went to the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki to see the above titled opera. It is more commonly known by it's German name of "Die Frau ohne Schatten" or in English as "The woman without a shadow." We had decided to go firstly because we wanted to see the inside of the opera house (noble I know), then we chose to go last night because today is a Holiday in Finland and therefore nobody would have to get out of bed early. None of us had any knowledge of the opera itself or opera in general.
I am not really sure what to write from here? How do I make any kind of reasonable summary of a 4 hour opera that veered between sublime and ridiculous, homaged Star Wars & Snow White & the 7 dwarfs, had a plot that made Pokeman look understandable, astounded me that opera could be this good and was not at all a difficult art form, let me read Finnish & English surtitles and yet still, finally, make the point that a woman's role in society is to bear children for her husband? Having done a little reading on the Internet it appears that the opera is a nightmare/challenge to stage and to sing and despite the fact the whole production had more than a small dose of weirdness about it I came away quite exhilarated and determined to go to the opera again in the autumn.

This pleases me because when I mentioned to a work colleague who is heavily involved in classical music here in Finland that I was going to see this opera I received a sceptical eyebrow and a forlorn good luck. Yet the experience was anything but one to mourn over. It was an affirmation (as if it were needed) that an open mind will lead to enriching discoveries, that a willingness to explore your home town will throw up unusual experiences and that a Grandmother who plays her uncomprehending grandson opera at an early age will have the last laugh when he goes to the opera house and experiences something of a revelation.

The cave of swimmers

2009-05-18T11:19:00.005+03:00

The English Patient is one of my favourite books. It is one of only a handful of books I have read multiple times. It is one of the few books that I like to see on my shelves. It is also a good example of where a film and a book compliment each other. I write this because the night before last we sat down and re watched the film for the first time in a long time and found it to be a rewarding experience.

I know one should be instinctively suspicious of a film with a stellar cast and 9 Oscar wins but this an exception to that rule. With the benefit of having read the book many times and not seen the film in a long time I was able to see subtleties in the performances of Fiennes and Scott Thomas that were not immediately obvious first time around. In adapting the story to the film I also enjoyed the counterweight provided by Hanna & Kip’s story to that of Almasy & Katherine’s. Like the book, the film does stand up to repeated viewing. I must also confess that I liked the circular nature of the film beginning as it does at the end and then setting off around again to reveal the many facets of its story.

It is also good to bring up the merits of this film and the book it derives from as we were at the movies this week to see the franchise reboot of Star Trek. First of all the good news: It is a silly romp through a culturally familiar set up that will entertain if not overly analyzed. It also looks good. However the bad news is that some of the old bugs remain in the system: the plot requires a universe in mortal danger from an unstoppable enemy that can be resolved by our hero where all have been blown to smithereens. Why does the bad guy do it? What is his motivation? It in invariably of the "Milkman ran over my cat by accident and now I will destroy everything and everyone" variety. It just doesn’t warrant the destruction of the known universe. Therefore the actor doomed to play the bad guy is forced to go down the “I must finish my unfinished symphony” brand of absurd madness. This is the problem. We’ve seen it all before and no matter how deft the reboot these fundamental weaknesses remain.

When the movie finished we went and saw the Walt Disney and Western Art exhibition at the Tennispalatsi museum. It was there I found out that Peter Pan says “Second star on the left and straight on till morning.” I thought it was Jean Luc Picard of the star ship Enterprise. In fact it was Captain James Tiberius Kirk “Second star on the right and straight on till morning.” So franchise weaknesses apart it is at least nice to see some deft references to Walt Disney who was himself such a liberal referencer in his own works.

However if there is a choice between Star Trek, Peter Pan & the English Patient I hope you will find me with an old copy of Michael Ondaatje's book.

Something quick for supper

2009-05-18T11:11:00.004+03:00

This post was written a few weeks ago but never made it in the correct chronological order. So belatedly here it is. I should say that I am always surprised when artists hold onto pieces of their work for years and years and then suddenly put them out. Thankfully this is only 3 weeks behind schedule but I remember my lack of comprehension when I read on a Bruce Springsteen album sleeve that one song had been around for 11 years. Hopefully I won't be that bad!

I did not wish to infer that I am some sort of artist. I just hope you enjoy making this recipe.

*****

It wasn’t to be like this. The boss & I were going out for dinner tonight with a friend. However they changed plans on us and I found myself hurrying home from Helsinki with a packet of diced pork in my bag and a mission to feed the hungry person at home.

As the “I” train made its way through the sunny afternoon I knew I had time for a quick marinade and to wash the rice. I thought it would be nice to give it a little bite with some chili.

Then I got home and was taken with inspiration. I really only used what I had to hand and didn’t stop to think about it and it was very tasty. So here is Asian influenced pork with rice.

Serves 2
100g diced pork
3 teaspoons of Sambal Olek
Soy sauce
Sesame oil
Chinese 5 spice
Vegetable oil
1 thumb of ginger chopped finely
1 sliced onion
Bamboo – slice it if you need to
Frozen Corn
Frozen Peas
Rice
Salt & Pepper

First of all marinade the pork in a little of the sesame oil, soy sauce, the sambal oelek and the Chinese 5 spices. Cover in cling film and put in the fridge. Depending on the cut of meat you may need to marinade for longer.

Heat some vegetable oil in a wok and cook up the onions and the ginger. Add the pork and the marinade. Then add the peas and the corn. Put on a lid and turn it down and get on with cooking the rice.

On this occasion I had washed the starch out of the rice to make it sticky. Then I cooked in my normal way. This means a 3:1 ratio of water to rice. Once in the pan bring to the boil and let it boil hard for a couple of minutes turn all the way down and put on the lid for about 10 minutes and then remove from the heat for 15 minutes. Serve.

A mother in laws epic

2009-05-14T12:50:00.003+03:00

I have just finished reading "Beowulf" for the first time. I found an old copy on our bookshelf and thought I would give it a try on the basis that it is something you should have read. The boss has identified the copy as probably belonging to my mother in law.

It was a surprisingly good read. I had no expectations of what it was about. I had a vague idea that there was a monster called Grendel but that was about it. It is a short read as it only took a couple of days to finish just by dipping in while waiting for the bus. I have to say that I really enjoyed it. However I was left with the feeling that I had just read something special.

For those interested in history, mythology, the links between ancient Britons and Scandinavia and Norse Mythology this short epic poem will probably already be familiar. For those who have only read as far as The Lord of the Rings you will find much that is familiar. For me and with the books I have read recently it is the similarities between Beowulf and the Kalevala that strike me most.

I don't wish to suggest that the two works are the same and I am looking beyond the "epic" format of both. I am even trying to go beyond the thematic similarities that bind them together and reaching more into the appreciation that epics in most European cultures, both ancient and modern, show a commonality that has contributed to the world I meet around me everyday.

It is this aspect of History that causes me to think: that where we are today is just the latest in a long line of toppling dominoes and from certain places the line backwards is clear. That is not to say I can thread a path back to great uncle Beowulf, I also appreciate the escapism of the epic itself.

We had some friends over from the UK at the weekend and we had a wonderful time with them. Catching up with people who have been in and out of your life over a number of years is rewarding and I did laugh to myself a little when I remembered our university selves as I watched us all play with their lovely one year old daughter. The thing with dominoes is you can look back and make sense of how it happened. It doesn't work the other way. I laughed precisely because I knew at University I never imagined we would be grown up enough to be parents.
Luckily for us we had a few nice days weather wise and were able to take a boat trip around the harbour and see most of the main sites in Helsinki. However the weekend was over far too quickly and I hope we will see them all again soon. I know that Polar Bear sends his best wished to Catherine!

This afternoon my Finnish classes begin again I must admit to being a little nervous. However I think this is due to the fact that I have had a 5 month lay off from studying the language and it has been progressing organically at work and I am worried that I will have to have my bad habits beaten out of me!

Riga

2009-05-06T20:21:00.005+03:00

The Boss & I recently spent and excellent weekend in Riga. For those of you who haven't availed yourselves of the Latvian capital it is to be recommended. However a proviso: 2 days is enough. If you plan on going for longer make sure you have a day trip out of town organised.

We left last Friday from Helsinki and the short flight was blessed with wonderful weather and clear visibility that gave us excellent views of Helsinki, Tallinn & Riga. Getting into town was simple and we found our hotel without any problems. Then we set off on out adventures.

For those of you who know us you will know that we can pound the streets and pound them we did. If it was worth seeing we went there, normally via a strangely circuitous route and then went off in an unexpected direction. It was as if we wanted to see everything Riga had to offer, and the more we got off the beaten track the better. The Jugendstil architecture lived up to the billing. Even more so in my eyes because eye wateringly extravagent buildings were plonked shoulder to shoulder to wrecks and tenements which lent the streets and sometimes shambolic but never boring air. We even managed a boat trip on the river which as anyone who knows me will tell you is a must for me when visiting anywhere. I love boat trips.

We also visited the Latvian Museum of The Occupation which will leave you depressed. One of my golden rules for myself on this blog is that it doesn't do politics. Yet in this museum History and Politics are mixed up in an uncompromising way. The narrative is that Latvia was illegally occupied by both Nazi Germany and the USSR for about 50 years. I have visited concentration camps in Poland and have studied Facism in Western Europe in the 20th century at school and university. I know that the emotions the subject engenders is part of the current political landscape in parts of Europe and this is true of Latvia today. The image its politicians choose to make of the land is a reaction to its recent past and to that end the musuem is a piece of propaganda. However for the casual visitor to Riga it is important to breathe in this sorry tale of a small country and how it has suffered. It is important not to forget that these things happened. It is also important to have a plan ready before you go into the museum on how you will cheer yourself up when you leave.

Many people say Riga is a dodgy town and certainly the Helsinki Sanomat has been coincidentally running stories suggesting the same. However we paid cash for most things and found that if you don't go chasing skirt it is a nice town. We were of course blessed with fabulous weather so were able to sit outside and enjoy a drink in the street rather than venturing into dodgy dark establishments.

We were there for 3 and half days so made a detour to the seaside resort of Jurmala via Latvian railways. All I will say is that if you can find which window to buy a ticket from in Riga central station, find your way to the platform and then find out which station to get off at (due to the lack of station signs) you must be a native Latvian and a railway enthusiast to boot!

We were also enthusiastic in our attempts to try Latvian cuisine which consists of pork and potatoes and dumplings. Yes it was stodgy and yes it seemed to have the same aversion to spices that is prevelant in this part of the world so please don't expect massive things of it but when you are in Riga give it a go. The Riga Balsam on the other hand is something I have no qualms about recommending avoidance.

All in all I can say that Riga is a place I would be happy to suggest others visit and I look forward to visiting Vilnius soon.

Tomorrow our friends arrive from the UK and I am really looking to showing them a little of Finland. The weather forecast is good for Friday so maybe a BBQ picnic on Suomenlinna is in order.

*****

By the way I was reading another blog post and the issue of who owns what on the web came up. Therefore I would like to point out that I found the photo of Riga from a Google search and if the owner would like acknowledgment I would be more than happy to oblige. This also applies retrospectively to most photos on this blog and my apologies for lack of credit, no harm was intended.

An unusual supper

2009-04-20T21:05:00.003+03:00

It is funny isn’t it? I was cycling home from work this afternoon and wondering whether it was time to put the blog on hold for a few weeks. I was feeling that I did not have the motivation to write about all the things that are happening around me in a way I would want to publish.

It is of course that time of year: Spring is on the way and that reinforces the inbetween-ness of now. One set of adventures are over and the next set are still coming. Nothing is inherently wrong with the above state of affairs and there are still plenty of things getting me excited on a daily basis but somehow the blog was not one of them. I'm not sure how to convey my pride in putting up the washing line outside in a way I would think was interesting to the world. Maybe it was a sense that the blog had fallen into a routine and I did not and do not want that.

However as is the way with this life this evening’s dinner was a triumph of coincidence and made me want to start typing away this evening.

The seeds of this are to be found in our habit in the kitchen of planning our menus for the following week somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday. Last week for the reasons mentioned above I had used the Potatoes, Pasta. Pulses, Rice formula to get myself going and written in my diary was Salmon & Potatoes without any elaboration. However when I came home and looked through the fridge I found we had half a box of bean sprouts that needed to be used. For some reason inspiration struck and I quickly adapted my plans and decided to do an Asian style Salmon & Potatoes. After all they eat potatoes all the time in Asia right?

I have to admit that I had a degree of trepidation with this Asian inspired fusion as it could easily be a step too far. However I decided to carry on regardless and I am pleased to say that it worked.

So here is a midweek supper of Asian style salmon and potatoes.

Serves 2
2 salmon fillets
1 onion sliced
As many potatoes as you want thickly sliced
Fresh coriander chopped
Soy sauce
Sweet chili sauce
Sesame oil

I used a ridged grill pan for this recipe and if you have one you should use it too.

Pre-heat the oven to 150C
Put a little sesame oil in grill pan and medium heat on the stove top.
Begin to gently fry the salmon and onions. I “basted” the salmon with sweet chili sauce while cooking and seasoned with soy sauce
Meanwhile boil the potatoes in salted water until they are just done. You do not want to overcook them
When the salmon and onions are cooked put in an ovenproof dish and place in the oven to keep warm
Turn up the heat on the grill pan and fry the potatoes until just crisp on the outside
Add the bean sprouts and quickly fry them
Put it altogether on a plate and sprinkle with the coriander
Serve

On the road again

2009-04-12T10:43:00.003+03:00

Who, in this day and age, actually makes New Years Resolutions which do not fall into the narrow vein of I must conform to what society deems is beautiful by eating less x or I must be more sober by a factor of y?

That would be me.

This year I sort of stumbled across a desire to complete my travels to the Baltic capitals somewhere in mid February. This led to the organising of a weekend in Riga in April which I am sure will be as good as the weekend in Tallinn last year. This then left Vilnius unaccounted.

Yesterday I was searching for flights to Vilnius for 4 people at the end of May. Although the flights cost 200€ the taxes were 571€. This I felt was not OK so it got me thinking of alternative routes to Vilnius and I got carried away by the whiff of adventure. I admit it is an odd phrase in this context. It would sound so much better if I was offering the chance to carouse your way around the Caribbean with Captain Jack Sparrow. However I am holding out the chance to take a bus from Tallinn to Vilnius via Riga. I'm offering the hypnotism of the open road. So we will be setting sail from Helsinki, and will overnight in Tallinn and then busing it down to Vilnius. It will be good to see the countryside of the Baltic states as it is one thing to city hop from the comfort of an airplane at 30,000feet. The best part is that travel for the whole trip should cost less than 120€ per person.

The thing with me is that once one idea is out another usually joins it and here I had a rash in quick succession. Before I had even booked us a seat I was already wondering about camping holidays in the Baltic states, imagining what it would be like to visit and talk with the Livonian people of Lithuania. With their Finno-ugric language would they understand my Finnish (as bad as it is)?

Then I wondered why I was neglecting Finland itself and all the sights this country has to offer that we haven't even begun to explore. Last year we took a boat trip around Savonlinna and I wondered whether there were longer boat trips. Sure enough there is the possibility of a trip from Kuopio to Savonlinna which instantly became a plan in my mind. The wonderful thing here is there might be the chance to do them both (camping will have to wait).

All of these travel plans are now possible because the year has gone far enough along that it is desirable to be outside again. Gone are the days when the purpose of going outside was to get to the next place that was indoors or gather firewood and get back indoors again. I know this because I inaugurated this year's BBQ season on Friday. It was a gathering of good people and good food. Once again in a BBQ setting Moro East provided some sterling inspiration and a couple of recipes were followed to the letter. I was particularly taken with their Syrian Fattoush. It's odd that a cookbook that on first inspection was given such a big thumbs down has proved to being such an enduring winner. I also managed to buy some cheap lamb ribs from the butcher and marinaded them in olive oil, garlic and loads of fresh oregano. Finally we made some pork burgers which gave a Caribbean jerk marinade to and served that with a kidney bean and mango salad.

These plans are also possible because part of my brain has escaped into the fantastical world of Peter Høeg's A History of Danish Dreams. Where the everyday and the mundane somehow becomes something more. Is it escapism? Absolutely. Does that bother me? No. Instead I am struck by the echoes in the world he is constructing that reminds me of the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. How strange to find a Colombian and a Dane sharing the same realm and to have my imagination running riot somewhere in the middle. If that doesn't signal that spring is here I don't know what will.

Into the light

2009-04-05T16:42:00.003+03:00

So the Kitchen closed for a week to allow me to go and play in the French Alps. The weather was mostly as per the photo and with the added bonus of plenty of fresh snow when we woke up each mornings. I had rented some Salomon Lord skis and was lucky enough to have more than enough opportunities to ski in deep fresh powder most mornings and relax with a glass or two of red wine in the evenings. We managed to ski in all four valleys during the course of the week. On one safari all the way to the other side of the ski area I noted that Courchevel 1650 looks like the perfect resort for teaching a young family to ski and maybe tempting the boss back onto skis.

Back in Finland spring is definitely on the way, we've seen the first snowdrops and there are signs that the bulbs are coming up in the garden. Best of all though the snow is melting. The temperature has been stable above freezing and the change in the clocks has made a big difference to the light. Our moods have turned towards the possibilities to come rather than the winter behind.

On Friday night I participated in the great Finnish Beer test which was a "scientific" effort to show that Finnish beer isn't all that good. It was organised by Dave and involved 15 of us sampling various beers and trying to find the least bad. It was an experiment in so far as the beers were organised to be comparable, there were rules for drinking, groups were organised randomly and we weren't free to get mullered at our own pace. However despite these restrictions it was a good night and everyone was in good spirits. Despite proving that Finnish beer is not the best in the world I would add my own observation that some of it is miles ahead of the Kronenbourg we were drinking in Val Thorens.

Coming home has also got the Kitchen going again. Maybe it was the break, maybe it is the extra light but I feel we're finding new variations and cooking new things again instead of falling back on old standards. A good example is the simple lunch we had on Friday.

I think this would make a great Saturday/Sunday lunch

A knob of butter

1 slice of brown bread

1 mushroom chopped finely

A few leaves of frisee

Half an avocado sliced

A handful of cashew nuts

Olive oil

Salt & pepper

A handful of fresh thyme chopped

Heat the butter in a frying pan until it melts.

Fry the mushrooms and when they are about 3/4s done add the frisee and the thyme.

Place the avocado on the bread so it covers it, put the frisee on top, sprinkle with the cashew nuts, drizzle a little olive oil and add salt & pepper.

Enjoy!

Then on Friday night we had some roast onions and sweet potatoes served with couscous with chick peas to which we added a few, whole cherry tomatoes, some chopped red pepper and a handful of beansprouts.

Today has been mostly about getting through jobs and we're doing well but it's getting to the point where I want to read my new book, Peter Høeg's "A History of Danish Dreams". Have I ever said on this blog that I love the letter "Ø"? The way it looks, the way you write it. I never ever thought I would have a favourite letter but I do and this is it. I first remember seeing it in Denmark years ago and it caught my imagination then. Now having lived in Norway where I made a point of writing it everyday I have moved to Finland where I have to be content with the equivalent letter "Ö" I can say that I miss it. Now why do I feel like a sesame street character all of a sudden?

Looking ahead to the coming weeks the Boss & I will be hosting the first BBQ of the season next Friday whether there is still snow on the ground or not. Then we will be going to Riga to continue our exploration of the Baltic region and we will be welcoming some friends in early May for a visit. Their weekend did coincide with the Helsinki half marathon weekend and while I have been tempted to take part in it I have no decided not to as they had booked that weekend long before I knew of the race and it's not fair to drag them all this way and then run 21km just to prove my stupidity! Finally it looks as though the trip to St Petersberg in late May will be without my parents all that remains to decide is whether the boss & I will go anyway or explore somewhere just as exciting like Tampere.

Singer sing me a song

2009-03-19T20:41:00.004+02:00

Last weekend we had a visitor from the UK and on Sunday we took her out to the Akseli Gallen Kallela museum just out of Helsinki city centre. Gallen Kallela seems to have cornered the market in Kalevala art. The exhibition we saw was sketches for his grand project (& ambition) to be the national Kalevala artist. Something he has arguably achieved even if the project as he imagined it was never completed. The Musuem is housed in his old studio and was built in that period of the late 19th/early 20th century which gives it a suitably garnd scale and then factor in the eccentricities of an artist (he had a monks cell installed in the tower) and you have a wonderful space, full of light and slightly dotty.

The exhibition was really interesting, especially now I have read the Kalevala and know the stories. There was one in particular which was a very geometric version of the defence of the Sampo which really got my attention and although I've been searching for it on the net I haven't found it. However during my searches I found this portrait of old Väinämöinen which I really liked.

Our friend is a vegetarian and we enjoyed cooking proper food without meat. We made a lovely Miso soup and served it with rice on the evening she arrived, then we cooked a Thai red curry with tofu on Saturday night and had a lovely pasta with tomatoes, olives, chili and spinach on Sunday. All very simple to make and easy to do on a evening after work.

This week I have been out a couple of nights and finally last night the boss & I made some fajitas. It was an object lesson in the fact that shop bought stuff is not as good as cooking it by yourself. Yes we were pushed for time and lacked motivation and yes we bought the simple shop ready ingredients. The guacamole was the most disappointing and we have now learnt our lesson anew (the hard way) that good food is home made food.

Tonight we had some home made chips baked in the oven and some steak with red onions and mushrooms. Lovely.

Tomorrow the kitchen closes for one week as I am off skiing in France. Service will resume in early April.

Cookamungaphobia

2009-03-16T18:02:00.000+02:00

Time for some opinions

2009-03-08T21:08:00.006+02:00

I've been busy reading recently and catching up on music so I thought I would take this blog post to give you some opinions on the music I've just got hold of and a book I've just finished.

No Line on the Horizon by U2. The first time I heard it I really had nothing good to say about it: maudlin, death by mid tempo, lacking focus, really poor production, ersatz, trying to hard to be clever, is that your idea of a melody? Second time I actually picked up that a few songs differed in tempo but I still am not convinced. It all seems to be a bit of a blur as one song blends into another. Maybe this will be a grower and won't let the casual listener in but that is on the evidence so far the most charitable conclusion. I have read some gushing reviews on the web which I have to disagree with. I think I'm also annoyed that the hype coming from the band seems to be so at odds with the final album. If this is the their third masterpiece then they are doing a good job of making it difficult to spot.

I'm not sure how I got into the Killers, I think I bought their first CD on a whim one day in Bristol after work and played it over and over again. It was, and is that good. I think their second album was even better if maybe not as memorable. By that I mean it lacked the big immediate classics of the first album but is still a good listen. Now I am catching up with their new album. I have to say that this is an odd one. It beats U2 by a mile but at times it sounds like most of the tunes (and especially the rhythm parts) are the pre programed tunes that come on a cheap Casio keyboard. This is the key to this album they seem to be going towards dance music and in the vein mined by the Scissor Sisters. I kind of miss the guitars. However it does work. Curious.

Like the Killers, Franz Ferdinand seem to be turning more dancey in their third effort and while I am not a massive fan this is probably as good as the Killers.

I am becoming aware as I write this that somehow all of these albums have failed in gaining my instant acceptance. That they were all downloaded at the same time and listened to on the bus backwards and forwards to work over the course of a day or so may mean my views are more linked to my world than their worth. Or it may mean that I am right in my opinions. You listen to them and you decide.

Which brings me to Barack Obama's book. Hmm what to make of it. Well here it is: how can a man who claims to want to change so much of the political landscape around him sound so like the politicians he says he wants to change? Only when he spoke about race did I get the feeling his passion took flight and I found myself wading through chapter after chapter where he spoke of his desire to be different and then marched himself through every imaginable focus group tick box there was.

The good news is that today has been a beautiful day in Helsinki so I took the boss and my mother in law for a walk over the frozen sea. We were not alone as many Helsinki residents took the opportunity to ski, walk, run, ice fish under lovely spring skies. This is one of the reasons we came north to do this and to be out under blue skies on days like this. It may be hard to get through the dark winter months here in Finland but you feel it is worth it on days like today. Maybe I should go give that U2 album another listen?

A full stop

2009-03-03T19:58:00.001+02:00

Pork rolls with Mozzarella, Spinach & Garlic served with Beans

This was an idea for a Monday night super that occurred to me on the bus on the way home from work. I had jotted down in my diary “beans” so had popped a mixture on to soak the night before. The problem now was I had no idea what to do with the beans. I had planned to read my book but wasn’t in the mood to take in Obama’s pontificating so was idly staring out the window when I hatched the plan.

It is a recipe that seems to fit into what the Kitchen does best. We take midweek food, the stuff you eat everyday after work and try and give it a little bit extra. What we also do is plan what we eat and when so that we save money and don’t waste food. I have always made a conscious decision to leave my opinions on politics and religion out of this blog but on the subject of people in the west wasting huge quantities of food I have to say it is a sin.

Serves 2
2 pork fillets thinly rolled out like a pancake
100g of blanched spinach – you will need to adjust this depending on how big (or how flat) your pork fillets are.
50g of mozzarella chopped up
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
Salt & Pepper
Olive oil
Butter
Vermouth

250g of mixed beans

Put on the beans to cook for about 1 ½ - remember do not salt them until cooked
Meanwhile on the flattened pork place half of the spinach, mozzarella and garlic
Roll up the meat so it looks like a slightly fat tube
Pin the meat together with cocktail sticks

In a pan warm some olive oil, them melt a knob of butter into it and add a dash of vermouth
Place the 2 pork rolls into the pan and put a lid on
Cook for about 20 minutes on a medium heat
Keep an eye on the liquid in the pan you don’t want it to evaporate

When the beans are done season them with salt & pepper. If you want to add some extra spinach to them it will be very tasty.

Finally when the meat is done serve up and enjoy.

We had some left over spinach today because the only bag in the supermarket yesterday was too big to use in one go so I popped the rest of it in with some mushrooms and served it as a side to some Salmon & Rice.

Kathy I'm lost I said though I knew she was sleeping

2009-02-26T16:07:00.004+02:00

Thurs 26th February 2009 and it is snowing in Helsinki. A day off and a proper snowy day. Not as cold as the ones we have been having for the last few weeks which is a welcome change. There has been something about sitting in the living room watching the snow come down that has been feeding my obsession with giving my posts a title taken from a song. If you know the song, you can get an insight into the mood of the falling snow.

The year is turning, the days are lengthening and we have had some excitement recently in the back garden when we thought we had some potential Lynx tracks in the snow. On closer inspection it proved to be from another as yet unidentified creature. However as this is the season to see them, and they have been spotted only a few kms further into the city from here, we remain hopeful that we might still see a Lynx in the back garden. I wonder if they like cat food?

Cooking wise the Kitchen has been busy. We made a lovely roast vegetable and cous cous dinner last night. I built it around some fennel I had bought in the supermarket. I used the fennel and other vegetables I had to hand (beetroot, onion, courgette), chopped them all up, drizzled olive oil over them, seasoned them, added a few whole cloves of garlic and then I tried to balance it with some chili. Then I covered in foil and roasted the vegetables for just over an hour at about 180C. To the cous cous I just added some mushrooms and some sun dried tomatoes. It worked well and was simple.

On Monday night I poached some salmon in miso soup. I simply got an ovenproof dish, put the two pieces of salmon in it, covered it with the miso, added a few vegetables like mushrooms and peas, seasoned with a little soy sauce and sesame oil, covered it all in foil and baked it. I served it with some fried rice and it was a very satisfying and easy supper.

In other parts of life I have been busy reading and my current book is The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. I haven't made up my mind about it or him yet. He seems to talk a lot about being different while ticking all the boxes that confirm our cynical perception of modern politicians. I keep asking myself is he for real? It is however good to take a detour from fiction.

The last book I finished was Revolutionary Road. Which I enjoyed despite the bleak terrain it covered. I am going to see the film this evening. Hopefully it will be able to live up to the book and a good film to follow last weeks excellent movie.

Update: The film is a bit of a curate's egg. First the good, the acting is terrific, especially Di Caprio. However the screenplay has sacrificed too much of the book's detail about the characters and who they are and how they got to where they did to really make sense. For casual viewers of this film you will not care about these people. The other sin the screenplay makes is to make the first part of the two part ending obvious which wasn't the case with the book. So all in all I would have to say if you have read the book you will be kinder to this film than if you have not. Either way it will be a depressing night out.

Next week we will receive a visit from the UK: The boss' mother is coming for a week and we're currently planning some nice meals and activities for her. There is some lamb in the freezer that has been waiting to be used up so we will definitely treat her to that, we are also thinking of making some spring rolls for her and a mild Japanese curry. On the activity front there will probably be visits to the Winter Gardens and the Botanical Gardens but hopefully we will also get a tour of the Finnish parliament as well. Should be fun.

Deja Vu

2009-02-22T10:26:00.005+02:00

Those of you who have read some of my earlier posts will remember reverie on a theme of skiing in Finland here. Well yesterday was the day of the big race and boy did I get my comeuppance for that posting!

I was up at 6am, having my breakfast, a last banana and waxing my skis. I was collected at 6.45am and after collecting one other competitor we were off up to Lahti. Everything worked smoothly in terms of finding my numbered bib, where to put the stuff I wouldn't be needing until after the race, where was the start etc etc. I even managed to get a little union jack to put on my bib!

Then race time came along and we were off!! I have to say that going to Paloheinä and training is completely different from racing. There were lots of people to compete against yesterday. On top of that the terrain was a lot harder. I had no watch on so had no idea of how I was progressing until the last drink stop 5 km out. I found out then that I was on course to exceed even my hopes for the race and I set off with renewed vigour. However those last 5kms were meant to separate the weak from the strong with endless dips and steep climbs and by the final 3 kilometres I was running on empty and discovering hitherto undiscovered reserves of bloodymindedness. Then finally the last 1km sign came upon me just in front of the towers of the Lahti ski jump and I began the final tuck into the stadium.

And then it happened.

On entering the stadium the Finn in front of me fell over and legs screaming in pain and hanging on for dear life I somehow avoided him and squeezed myself over the finish line.

Poetic justice? I would like to think so.

Then it was done and I swore blind I would never ever do it again. However here I am the following morning thinking "hmm...maybe I could do the longer one next year". As the boss has correctly pointed out: I am crazy.

For the data nerds: In my first Finlandia race I was placed 267 out of a field of 802. My time for 32km was 3 hrs 4 mins and 58 seconds including the wait at the start. The fastest person was 1hr and 19 mins! There's a goal to aim for....

Time I had some time alone

2009-02-13T19:44:00.003+02:00

On Wednesday night this week the boss & I did culture. We went to the Finlandia Hall to hear the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The excuse months ago when I bought the tickets was no more sophisticated than to get a chance to get into the building and the tickets were reasonably priced and the programme offered the possibility to hear Sibelius' Symphony #4. However a late change in the programme meant we were actually treated to Tchaikovsky's Symphony #4 in F Minor instead. It is a piece of music I have known for a long time and have loved. Researching it post concert well I read that structurally it is an awkward peice of symphonic composition I have to say that as a piece of live music it was simply wonderful. The Orchestra did a wonderful job and I have slightly more idea what a conductor is for.

Much later that night as I was in bed and not quite asleep and not quite awake the memory of Caspar David Freidrich's "Wanderer above a sea of fog" came to mind as a partner to the symphony. It seemed to encapsulate and speak of the same themes. Given that both works originate from the same time it is not unreasonable to think of them in the same breadth. I cannot begin to describe how that painting has been a direct influence on me and it feels natural to see the wonderful symphony we saw been linked to this painting.

Then on Thursday night I went out to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". In a strange way Brad Pitt's subtle performance (with one or two exceptions which I am generously waving through as a playful nod to David Fincher's advertising past) seemed to mine a similarly forlorn romantic vein that gave the two evenings an unexpected but not altogether unpleasant resonance.

At the end of the movie people applauded which my Finnish colleagues at work told me is unheard of in Finland. Personally I think this movie deserves all of it's 5 Star reviews. It is no flawless masterpiece but that I think in a way adds to its charms. It does however continue the trend of movies which feature the impossibly beautiful Cate Blanchett being, well not as beautiful as she is.

Now I have to figure into all of this the reading of Revolutionary Road which I have found to be surprisingly gripping tale of Suburban Americana. I just hope that it falls off the rails in the way it is always promising to do.

Updating this post a few days later I can assure that this book has fallen off the rails in the most harrowing of ways.

Now amongst this strangely comforting mix and fusion of Romantic late nineteenth century art & music, 1950s America and 21st Century movies the kitchen managed to produce some passable food this week.

Chicken with Taragon and Capers

This is not a French recipe but it does give a generous and respectful nod to their cuisine. We used frozen chicken from the freezer making it even easier to cook on a busy weekday.

Serves 2

Olive Oil

2 cloves of Garlic
4 assorted pieces of chicken thighs and wings
1 tin of tomatoes
2 stalks of celery finely chopped
1 good lug of red wine vinegar
Plenty of tarragon
2 tablespoons of grainy French mustard
1 tablespoon of capers
100g of mushrooms
Salt & Pepper

Heat the oven to 180C.
Put everything in a heavy bottomed pan
Put it in the oven for 3 hours plus
Serve with sweet potato mash

Simple hey?

Monotanssi

2009-02-09T19:57:00.002+02:00

The boss & I have come back from Tahko after a great weekend. It was another first in terms of our exploration of Finland and we had a great time with good company and excellent skiing conditions. Our bus left Helsinki at 4pm on Friday and we got to Tahko some 6 hours later.

On Saturday morning I went and got my lift pass and my hire skis and met up with the others to begin skiing. We had a great day exploring the mountain. The weather was a rather brisk -15C but it was a dry cold and there was very little wind. Eventually this Englishman was coaxed into taking on the jump park which after my initial worry that I was embarking on a suicide bid turned out to be quite exhilarating. We finally called it a night after darkness had fallen and we had sneaked onto the slalom slopes the resort had prepared for the following days competition.

The final surprise of Saturday night was a visit to a bar on top of the hill. I have now seen Finnish culture in all its glory! It goes something like this. Take several million Finns, give them a ton of beer to drink. Then stuff them into a small shack in the middle of nowhere not quite big enough to swing a cat. Play loud music and let them dance on the table. Preferably in ski boots.

On Sunday it started snowing and we were on the first lift up to enjoy the fresh powder. After a little while we spotted an Atomic test centre & I had a chance to test ski the Atomic SX 12. Oh my dear lord they were quite simply the best skis I have ever put on my feet.

Now only two weeks to the Finlandia ski race and then 4 weeks to the Tiger Ski Tour in France. It looks like the winter isn't over yet!

Serendipity

2009-02-06T09:43:00.005+02:00

At work we have the same music going round and round on a loop to such an extent that it can drive you crazy, numb you senseless, provide an excuse not to concentrate or simply be a minor distraction. Shortly after my last post I was walking through the Kitchens before opening and was just under a speaker when Squeeze's "Up the Junction" burst out of it and onto my awareness. I haven't heard this song in ages and with it's masterful opening line "I never thought that it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham" I was suddenly yanked back to the time during the mid 1990s when I lived in Tooting and was regularly up the junction with friends, just passing through, going to work, taking shirty phonecalls from Bob Geldof and getting run over by Julia Ormond (I kid you not on the last two but they're fleeting minor stories and not great ones). I must admit I stood there and listened to the whole song before getting on with my day. It seemed and seems to be some kind of serendipity that I should hear that song so quickly after putting up the picture and title of my last blog post because both songs belong to that era. More than that though I love that songs can pull memories out of your head so that they are so strong you remember things you didn't know you had noticed. Wonderful.

I have just finished reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink and found it to be a very impressive book. It is sparely written and while it deals with it's subject in a factual tone it never strangles the emotions associated with the subject matters out of existence. Next I will start Revolutionary Road and hopefully finish it before it is the subject of Movie Night.

Today is a day off and the boss & I will shortly be off to Tahko to go skiing for the weekend. Correction I am going skiing and the boss will have to be dragged hissing and clawing out of the warmth of the indoors very much like a cat doing everything possible to avoid being put into a box and taken to the vet. I think I might get a scratch or two. Should be fun.

And the silicon chip inside her head

2009-02-02T19:55:00.004+02:00

The home crowd are waiting expectantly for their Hero to enter the stadium to claim a momentous and historical victory, reaffirming national pride in a small Nordic nation's sporting success. Finally the racers come around the corner in the classic ski tuck position.

The stadium is eerily quiet. The champion is not in front. He is in 3rd place. Amazingly the Finnish number 2 skier is in the lead but his lead is being eroded far too quickly by, unbelievably, the Brit.

The stadium is mesmerised as the drama unfolds. Inexorably the Brit is overhauling the leader. Suddenly the Finnish number 2 and race leader catches an edge and wipes out right in front of the Brit, denying him an unlikely victory and the Finnish champion skis into the history books.

That was the scene for me on the final shush last Sunday after 22km. I was into the last 200m, tired and straining to finish when the skier in front decided to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a speeding Brit!! Somehow I managed to stand up at high speed and step around her and claim that famous victory the Finnish champion behind me didn't deserve!!!

Skiing 22km was quite a milestone for me. When I started training in the new year I could barely manage 1.8km without needing to stop and recover and now I can manage 22km without stopping. Hopefully this means the actual race (32km) should be fun. In any case I can always construct elaborate fantasies of sporting glory to keep me going.

Once I had got home and cleaned up to the point that the Boss would consent to be in the same room as me I was straight into the kitchen. Here are a couple of meals we have cooked this week.
All quantities are for 2 with leftovers.

Pork, chorizo stew with potato and carrot mash
Half an onion finely chopped
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
200g stewing pork
100g chorizo
2 carrots chopped
100g broccoli
1 400g tin of tomatoes
A good handful of pearl barley
100ml water
50ml vermouth
Thyme, oregano and sage

Heat the oven to 180C
In a casserole pan add some olive oil and warm through
Gently fry the onions and garlic
Add the pork and chorizo and continue to fry
Add the carrots & broccoli
Add the tomatoes, water and vermouth
Add the pearl barley
Season with the herbs, salt and pepper
Cook in the oven for 2hrs plus
Serve with mashed potatoes and mashed carrots that you mixed together with a big knob of butter
Enjoy.

Lemon chili chicken with noodles and oriental cucumber dressing
Vegetable oil
2 chilies
2 chicken breasts sliced
1 small piece of ginger roughly chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
Handful of beansprouts
Noodles

Dressing
1/3 of a normal sized cucumber grated
1 large piece of ginger really finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic
Soy sauce
1 handful of freshly chopped coriander
Sesame oil

In a frying pan heat some vegetable oil and gently fry the chili and ginger
Add the chicken and bean sprouts
Pour over the lemon juice
Cook for 5 minutes
Meanwhile cook the noodles in boiling water and drain when cooked.

To assemble the dressing mix all the ingredients in a bowl, you can be pretty cavalier in terms of how much cucumber and coriander you add but you need to keep the ginger, garlic and soy sauce in balance. Finally less is more with the sesame oil.

To serve
Noodles onto the plate first, then the chicken and finally the dressing.

I have to acknowledge my debt to some strange cooking programme the Boss has found on one of our local TV channels. The basic premise is a bunch of South Africans drive around the countries of southern Africa cooking but more often drinking. The main presenter can clearly cook in all sorts of places, vehicles and contraptions that do not resemble kitchens and furthermore he appears to be able to do so in many varied states of inebriation. However I personally don't like his style. However he was on a boat and he made a version of the dressing I set out above. I remember nothing about it except a proportion of the ingredients. So I just riffed on it.

In other news I went to the supermarket this evening and my card was refused at the checkout. I paid with the credit card and went down to the car park only to discover that the car wouldn't start. My professional opionion is that the car is dead . Consequently I want a new one. C you need to call me when you read this and sell me a car!!!

This week we have the Pub Quiz on Wednesday night, I'm working late on Thursday so will miss the movie which is Tom Cruise's Valykerie which I have to be honest should maybe described as a lucky escape and then Friday we are off (downhill) skiing in Tahko with friends for the weekend. Should be fun.

The dark and stormy sea

2009-01-25T20:14:00.002+02:00

Last night I was in The Gallows Bird in Espoo for their real ale festival. I arrived a little too late as by the time I got there they had run out of real ale! However I did enjoy one or two glasses with friends who were on good form. I did however have a Cinderella moment just before midnight and suddenly left before the bus or I turned into a pumpkin! On the way home I plugged in the iPod and listened to some good music. There was something very peaceful about watching a snowy late night Helsinki pass me by through the window to the soundtrack of some cracking songs. If I woke any neighbours with my singing as I walked the last 500m I apologise.

Today I was out skiing (again) only this time with Tom & Hanna who showed me round the back of Paloheinä so weather permitting tomorrow I should be able to ski for several hours without ever having to repeat myself.

This evening we dipped into Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries which we have used as a source of inspiration for the last two years and made some chicken patties. I got into trouble with the boss for leaving out potatoes from the finished dish but I enjoyed the chance to serve the patties with some leeks fried in butter and thyme and some steamed vegetables.

I was trying to finish the Kalevala this evening with the TV on and a salad dressing caught my attention. I think the ingredients were ginger, garlic, grated cucumber and soy sauce. If I missed anything it is close enough for me to work with. The question now is when will we eat this salad? The menu for next week is written and so far no salad. I might solve that problem wandering down the road at 1am singing for the benfit of the neighbours.

Handbags and the Gladrags

2009-01-23T17:52:00.003+02:00

We left the UK two and a bit years ago and came to live and work in the Nordic countries. Part of what I hoped we would experience was a proper winter. The first two winters were memorable only for their lack of snow and how dark and vaguely depressing they were.

Yesterday the boss & I were out in Helsinki visiting the Natural History Museum and it started snowing. Really snowing. This snow was on top of a good base of ice and a few centimetres of snow we already have. After we finished in the Museum (free on a Thursday between 16:00 – 18:00) we headed off to the Nanking restaurant on Kalevelakatu. I had heard good things about this restaurant through www.eat.fi and was keen to try it. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised and slightly disappointed. Firstly the good things: the service was friendly, the restaurant was clean, the rice was tasty and plentiful, the price of my bottle of Tsingtao wasn’t exorbitant and my chicken noodle soup was really really tasty. However my main course of Beef with chilli and garlic was a disappointment. Not because they packed it full of interesting vegetables that added to the dish but because they had altered the dish to suit the taste buds of the Finns so it lacked any hint of garlic and chilli. The boss had a citrus chicken which while it was too sweet for my tastes managed to be both crispy and full of citrus flavour and quite wonderful. My over all view is that I will give it another go but talk to them about wanting a more authentic version of the dish on the menu.

This morning when I got up I realised it had snowed a lot during the night so I took myself off to Paloheinä to do some training for the Finlandia race next month. I thought I had done well yesterday when I skied over 14km for the first time in my life but today in fresh snow I took myself off alone through the snowy forest and went around the 7.5km track a couple of time and stopped after 2hrs and 18km. I have to confess that it was very tiring as the track I was following was a very hilly course but to be alone in the silent forest, making the first tracks on fresh snow made me so very happy to be out in the world and I have to say that my tired legs seem a small price to pay for the privilege of being outdoors on such a day.

After getting home I wrote myself a spectacular jobs list so as not to get under the boss’ feet and while I was busy doing them (including washing a sheep fleece rug….oh my goodness that is a job I recommend you avoid!) I put together a dish that is currently cooking in the oven that we’re going to enjoy in an hour or so.

Slow cooked oven Lamb shanks

I have to say that when I started this, I did so without a recipe, just a basic idea of slow cooking some lamb shanks in the oven in some garlic, rosemary and red wine. A couple of times when I spoke to the boss I mentioned other ingredients like pearl barley and when I came to preparing the dish I had some Spanish dried peppers out on the countertop as well. The point I want to make is that sometimes with these dishes that look after themselves it is as important to decide what to leave out as it is to decide what to leave in. I hope you enjoy the recipe.

By the way I bought the Lamb shanks in Hakaniemi kauppahalli and the four or five butchers there are the real deal. They know meat and they have most of what you want. I have even heard rumours they can get fresh blood which means home made black pudding which would be amazing. Anyway back to the recipe.

Serves 2
2 lamb shanks
3 cloves of garlic
2 good sprigs of rosemary chopped
1 red onion chopped
Half a courgette slices
1 red pepper chopped
2 large mushrooms sliced
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
Half a bottle of red wine
Olive oil
Salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C
In a heavy cast iron pan heat the olive oil and brown the lamb shanks.
Once they are mostly browned add the chopped garlic and rosemary. If it looks like they might burn add the wine, if not, let them brown a little and then add the wine.
Add the other vegetables and then the tin of tomatoes. Fill the tin with water and add that to the dish.
Season with salt & pepper
Put on the lid, let it come to the boil and transfer to the oven.
Cook for 3 –4 hrs or longer if you wish.
When serving add some more freshly chopped rosemary.

I am going to serve this with mashed potatoes and broccoli. However I am going to roast some garlic in the oven and add this to the mashed potatoes to give it a pleasant extra little taste. I hope you enjoy it.

Tomorrow I am back to work during the day but then off to a real ale festival with some friends that I have been bad at catching up with (sorry!) in the evening & then I have another couple of days off to practice my skiing. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

In deep water

2009-01-18T14:06:00.004+02:00

The Finlandia ski race is getting closer day by day and yet my week seems to have revolved around Swimming and Basil. The lack of skiing is bordering on the embarrassing but then so is the lack of snow. Due to physical illness and unseasonably warm weather I have been a lazy toe rag all week. However today I was feeling much better so went to Paloheinä at 11am to have a good ski only to find it overrun with rug rats and parents all competing and the track reserved until late into the afternoon. Thinking quickly of a plan B I headed off to Itäkeskus swimming pool. I've always been curious to swim in a giant bomb shelter and the opportunity to work on some fitness and stamina for the big race seemed like a good combination. I managed to swim a kilometre and a half before cramp claimed both my calves mid length but it was a satisfying start considering the lane was helpfully being used by two ladies who were so slow you had to go round them every length which made for a very stop start swimming experience and probably explains the cramp. Just what a peak athlete needs to get in shape!! That was a joke.

I've come home to the smell of banana and carrot bread baking in the oven. Wonderful! I think an afternoon of good movies, tea and cake is coming my way.

Away from the pool and the ski track I made a lovely pesto sauce this week which was so easy I want to encourage you all to do it. The trick is the order everything goes in:

1) Garlic

2) Basil

3) Parmesan

4) Olive oil

5) Pine nuts

Use a pestle and mortar and just add one by one and go gentle on the oil to get the right consistency. I find if you add too much oil you can repair the damage by adding more cheese. If you live in Finland I am going to recommend buying two of the basil plants from the supermarket as one is just not enough to make a really wonderful quantity of tasty, vivid green pesto.

So in the week ahead there will be skiing every night after work and a beer festival on Saturday night. Should be a good week!

Sometimes

2009-01-13T14:19:00.003+02:00

Sometimes you need a supper to cleanse the soul as well as to clear the sinus' so you can breathe again. My cold has dragged on and become interminably boring to myself and those around me. However I am now seeing sense, have stopped training, taken a day off work and slept like a log. I did however manage to play in the kitchen long enough to assemble this delightful broth. It was the kind of soup I would hope to find on some street in South East Asia when I get there.

No apologies for lack of authentic flavours, this was just cooking with whatever came to hand.

Serves 2
1/2 Pak Choi sliced
1 red chili chopped
1 red onion sliced
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 piece of ginger finely chopped
Soy sauce
Mirin
1 Pork steak thinly sliced
1 packet of Udon noodles
750ml of chicken stock

First marinade the pork in the ginger, garlic, soy sauce and mirin.
Fry the onions with the chili, once they are done add half the pak choi
Add the pork and the marinade mix and continue to cook until the pork is done
Cook the noodles in the chicken stock

Place the noodles in the bottom of a deep bowl, spoon over the chicken stock and then add the pork, onion and cooked pak choi. Finally add the raw pak choi and serve.

Easy and best of all tasty.

Time for action

2009-01-06T10:20:00.003+02:00

Has it already got to the 6th of January? Have I been sleeping though Christmas and New Year? Seems like it though the truth is, of course, that I have been at work. So much so it seems that my boss (at work) told me I was working too much and to make sure I took some time back. My challenge of course is when!

The time off I had over the Christmas/New Year break has been good, I have done a lot of reading: Scarlet & Black was finally finished and can be much recommended. Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks was a let down to anyone who has read and enjoyed even one of Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels. Now I am plunging straight into the Kalevala, the Finnish National Epic and so far so good. I was lucky enough to receive a pile of books over Christmas so I need to keep up the pace so that I keep on top of them. That last sentence is, I think, a great thing to be able to write. It's good to have books waiting for you.

The Kitchen was busy over Christmas, of course. We were very organised and planned all our food before hand (on the back of an opened envelope). So much so in fact that we are still living off the food we bought and only one avocado has been wasted in the process.

This is what we had
Fri 19 Pasta Carbonara
Sat 20 Thai Red Curry
Sun 21 Cous Cous (Which we took to Quinn's leaving do not realising she was going to invite herself to our house for Christmas!)
Mon 22 I was working late so the boss made herself Pasta surprise
Tue 23 I did the same as Monday and so did she
Wed 24 Home made leek and potato soup
Thu 25 Roast Beef with Yorkshire pudding
Fri 26 Left over surprise
Sat 27 Bulgar wheat with aubergine
Sun 28 Chicken ramen noodles
Mon 29 Boss' pasta surprise
Tue 30 Lamb chops and potatoes
Wed 31 Fennel, Cannelleni Beans and Gnocchi
Thu 1 Roast Pork Loin with pomegranite

The basic idea was to build the Christmas New Year time around 2 or 3 big dishes and then have something lighter on other nights. We plundered Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries and Moro East for inspiration. Drew up our shopping lists, tried to remember we were only feeding two when thinking about quantities and then went out and foraged. We enjoyed the experience of standing in Hakaniemi Kauppahalli on the last Sunday before Christmas as all the Finns came to collect their Hams. We were the linguistically challenged foreigners tried to explain what pork loin was to the butcher amidst all the enormous hams flying over our heads like airplanes! At least they have decent butchers here in Helsinki, it was so much more challenging in Trondheim.

Last night we had some pan fried tuna steaks with some rice and roast butternut squash. Which was lovely. The Boss worked up some kind of Fennel seed, Coriander seed, Garlic, Salt and Olive Oil rub which gave them a lovely extra dimension in flavour. The best thing is we have left overs now and can decide if we do ravioli or risotto. The agony of choice!

Today should be a quiet day, I have had a cold but now am better and want to get outside. I am entered into the Finlandia ski race next month and I need to start training. The weather has been very cold for the past fortnight and hopefully today will bring the snow. In the meantime the Boss & I will try and explore over towards Itä Keskus and the mad underground swimming pool that used to be a bomb shelter (Helsinki City Council's website still proudly says it can be converted into an emergency shelter!). All I know about this place is that it is a bomb shelter big enough for 3 swimming pools and one of them is 50m long!

Apart from exploring and reading I need to start my training for the aforementioned ski race but before I begin I want to share my one and only resolution for 2009:

Not to move out of Helsinki.

The end of a chapter

2008-12-31T18:02:00.003+02:00

I have finally finished reading Scarlet & Black some 16 or 17 years after starting it. I think this is some sort of personal record and a good way to bow out of 2008. I recommend it to anyone who wants a challenging yet satisfying read (and who has the time to read it).

I have a feeling it will be slightly difficult to celebrate a new year in a fitting manner when you emerge blinking into the 21st Century from the pages of a romantic French novel from 1830 and find yourself surrounded by Finns. However I intend to give it a go!

I won't offer any opinions or historical revisions to 2008 or any predictions for 2009. If you want those they can be found in many other places. I will just thank those who read the blog and wish you all the best for the future and if what we've made in the kitchen for the party tonight is good I will show you where I found the recipe!

Tonight was going to be me and the boss at home with a nice meal and a couple of bottles of champagne. This will have to wait until tomorrow night now and I cannot say how grateful I am that, while I am working on Friday, there will be no early alarm call as I am working the evening shift.

Plus ça change?

Carrot and bean soup

2008-12-07T20:50:00.004+02:00

Winter is slowly becoming the norm in Finland. We still lack snow but the temperatures are now properly below zero and sticking there stubbornly. Yesterday was Finnish independence day and therefore a day off from work. Myself and the boss had a quiet day, we took a trundle down to Munkkiniemi area of Helsinki and just walked around for half an hour. Very nice and one to explore again in the summer. Alvar Aalto had his house there and his studio. You can visit both but at a price; 17€ per person. Maybe if we get a committed architect come and visit us we will take the plunge. Apart from that we might confine ourselves to just looking in from the outside.

Today it was back to work and it was a busy day. I was back on the bike & it was clear that I have been a bit of a waster recently and that stamina and fitness quickly drop away if you don't keep it up.

Once I got home and got myself cleaned up it was time for tea. This evening we made a rather nice white bean and carrot soup. This is a very simple to make supper and can be taken in many different ways. Enjoy.

White bean and carrot soup
150ml dried white beans, soaked overnight and cooked, drained with the cooking liquid reserved
3 large carrots chopped, boiled in salted water and drained
Chicken stock
Red Onion chopped
3 shallots chopped
2 cloves of garlic
Balsamic vinegar
Chorizo chopped

Gently heat the chicken stock in a saucepan
In a blender puree the carrots and all the beans apart from a handful
Add the pureed vegetables to the stock and mix together
In a separate pan fry the onions and chorizo, while they are frying give them a good dousing with some balsamic vinegar. Mine had lovely bits on the bottom so I deglazed the pan with some vermouth.
Once cooked add the onions to the soup
Season with salt and pepper
Serve

Heat up and serve with a sprinkling of freshly chopped basil or a swirl of olive oil.

*****
I have to make sure I give credit where it is due and my sous chef prepared the beans to perfection. Obviously without this the soup would not have tasted as good. Thank you sous chef!

Turkey leftover risotto

2008-12-02T20:13:00.002+02:00

Our thanksgiving dinner was excellent, we all had a great time, the food was good and the company was better. A few days later we are still working our way through the left overs. The carcass was duly boiled for stock and before we start to freeze it up we decided to make a risotto as it is a wonderful combination of stock and rice.

While I was idly preparing the soffrito I heard from the TV someone (OK it was Anthony Bourdain) talking about Moroccan cooking and the use of Paprika and Cumin in their cooking and being a suggestible fellow I immediately added these two ingredients to our risotto taking it off in an unexpected, but gutsy and pleasant direction.

Please remember that you have to careful with these two spices in a risotto: less is definately more here and as the result will be rumbustious this dish is best suited to a winter's day when you need food to warm you to the core. I am also taking huge libertys with a risotto here, but it is a dish I love to make and to eat and it's ability to be many different things is one of the things I love about it. Right, speech over. To the food.

Serves 2-3
1 Onion finely chopped
2 celery sticks finely chopped
1 garlic clove
1/4 of courgette finely chopped
100ml risotto rice
Dollop of vermouth
Leftover turkey roughly chopped
Warmed turkey stock 350ml
A dollop of double cream
1/4 white cabbage roughly chopped
1 small dried chili
Handfull of chopped chorizo
A good handful of freshly grated parmesan
A knob of Butter
Salt & Pepper

1) Make the sofrito,
Put a little olive in a pan and warm it through, fry the onion, celery, garlic and courgette. Fry gently for a few minutes until the onion is translucent. Add the rice and fry for a minute further. Then add the vermouth and let the alcohol evapourate.

2) Add the first ladleful of stock, stir constantly and as it reduces down top it up with more warm stock. Keep adding the stock until the rice is cooked. Towards the end add the turkey.

3) In a separate pan fry the cabbage in a little olive oil, chorizo and chili.

4) Once the rice is cooked, combine the cabbage with the risotto. Remove from the heat, add the butter and cheese, put the lid on and leave for two minutes.

Serve.

Of course there will be left overs! Enjoy.

Chelsea Girl

2008-11-21T21:32:00.004+02:00

A few weeks ago we were at C's for some knitting and food. She was working her way through CD's alphabetically and we were treated to what could charitably be described as repition therapy to persuade us of the merits of A-Ha. However she had also discovered that she had a few duplicate CDs and I came home with a copy of "Celebration" by Simple Minds. I have to say I haven't listened to their early work for many years now. Readers of this blog will know that as a teenager their work from 1979 to 1982 was part of my life.

So despite it being a few weeks since dinner I finally had a few minutes to myself the other day and popped the CD into the computer while I was messing around at home on my own. I have to say that after a gap of many years some of it has dated. However I defy anyone who listens to Chelsea Girl not to come out of it with a big stupid grin on their face. How did a punk band produce such a great pop single as only their second single?

I was also amazed at how well the song "I Travel" has lasted. It is such a shame that they went so bad by 1985.

In other news life in Helsinki is good at the moment, OK so the economy has gone to hell and that brings loads of stress at work but there is Moles Beer to drink in town and the car is working well and there is a little bit of snow on the ground. All we need is the temperature to get above freezing now, which isn't forecast until well into next week and maybe not even then. Good that the firewood for the winter is coming tomorrow.

Tomorrow evening we're going around to T&H's for dinner and meeting Charlie the dog. Apparently he's old enough now to have visitors, why do I think we might need some help?

Moles

2008-11-14T18:30:00.005+02:00

Moles beer has finally come to Helsinki. When I came to Helsinki a year ago I had an afternoon before my interview to wander around. I was lucky enough to find a pub called Black Door that had real ale on tap which after the beer desert of Trondheim was wonderful in itself and as I enjoyed a beer I noticed that on their wall several Hand Pump Tags from the Moles brewery. Now after a year of waiting for it to put in an appearance it has finally come back. Happy happy days!

Yesterday was meant to be a day off but I ended up at work for most of the day, however in the late afternoon I managed to escape in town, did some foraging in the oriental supermarkets in Kallio and as I was heading home I popped into the Pullman Bar at the Railway station and had a pint of Moles Landlord's Choice. It was excellent and tasted as good as I remember. The even better news is that the brewery has obviously sent a few barrels over as I have seen that it will be featured in a couple of other pubs that sell real ale around town so I know it will be a good few weeks!

Afterwards the Boss and I went to see the new Bond film. While I enjoyed it I have to say that 24 hours later I find myself refering to it as "The Bourne Redundancy". I still enjoy Daniel Craig as Bond and I approve of his hard portrayal of the character but in this film it seemed as if he kept the character in too tight a straight jacket and it eventually served to make him seem less of a man and more of a terminator.

So today has been my catch up day off and a chance to play in the Kitchen. We've been out and foraged successfully and I feel inspired about all the opportunities to cook again. I think I suffered a bit in the week after Barcelona in respect to cooking. If you have to eat out every night, coming home to a Kitchen can be a bit of a come down. Especially if you get caught in the circle of the same ingredients prepared in the same way. Sometimes it can be comforting but last week it was a bit of a dead end. However this afternoons dinner put paid to that.

Tuna steak with deep fried julieened leeks & red pepper served with sticky jasmine rice and a pea and mint puree. When I write it out it sounds very posh but trust me it wasn't actually very complicated to put together.

It takes about an hour to cook everything so maybe it is not a weekday supper but it isn't so difficult to do.

Serves 2
2 tuna steaks
110g rice
4 handfulls of julieened leeks
half a red peper sliced into strips
Seasoned flour

Pea & mint puree
250g peas
1 sprig of fresh Mint
A pinch of sugar
Creme Fraiche

Boil the peas in water with a sprig of mint and a pinch of sugar until just cooked
Puree
Add a few spoonfuls creme fraiche until you get the consistency you want
Add salt & pepper and a spoonful of freshly chopped mint

To cook the vegetables, dust with seasoned flour and cook very quickly in oil heated to about 140-160C

Cook the rice

Cook the Tuna on a hot griddle, max 3 mins pers side but it will depend on how thick it is.

Once everything is done arrange on a plate and enjoy!

I had loads of pea puree left over so will be using it in some soup in the next few days.

Barcelona

2008-11-09T16:22:00.005+02:00

Our week in Barcelona is over and we are home. I had a fabulous time with the boss. We spent a whole week in the city and certainly feel that we got more from it than is possible from the usual long weekend. We ate, we drank, we walked, we saw, we talked, we stayed up late, we walked through some of the seedier parts of town, we looked in the windows of some of the most expensive shops, we admired achitecture from many different epochs, we drank beer by the sea, we climbed hills, we laughed, we were silly, we were always curious about what was around the next corner and we always tried to take the road less travelled.

We came home with many many photos, some are classic tourist photos and some are a little bit special, some were taken by me and some by the boss. The best may even make it onto the wall at home one day soon.

I think over the next few days we will begin to coallate a few favourite moments and add a few more photos to Flickr. Life will return to normal and we will get ready for the coming winter.

Two questions are on my mind as I get ready to go back to work tomorrow: Where next & when?

*****

Update. I think I owe an explanation for the photo above. I took it in a quiet back street in the old city on our last afternoon just wandering around and in quite a bit of pain due to a sore back. It was an impromptu shot because I liked the shape of the people in the sunlight. I took two photos pretty much without thinking about the composition, I just checked the exposure settings. As soon as I saw it I know I'd struck gold. I am very proud of this one. The best of the photos are now up on Flickr. I will continue to add to the set on it but am being as critical as I can so only the very best of the 300+ we took make it up there.

Scoundrel Days

2008-10-26T15:32:00.004+02:00

A wet sunday afternoon in Helsinki, the day after the night before. The iPod is playing the Doves, the boss is knitting and I've been learning how to conjugate Finnish verbs. At times like this you have to believe that the fun never stops in the Monkey House Kitchen.

Last night we were at C's for an excellent evening and a made up Japanese style dinner. It was a lot of fun but we did experience at first hands C's decision to listen to all her albums alphabetically. I have to say, her commitment to the ordered nature of alphabetism is remarkable as only a true devotee can go from "A flock of seagulls" to "A-ha". Unfortunately this is where my particlualr problem kicks in. Having waded through 5 a-ha albums I feel like a walking compedium of all their music and I had a hard time kicking their music out of my head last night. The extra hour in bed was hijacked by the 3 boys from Norway playing on heavy rotation. Even our act of rebellion late in the evening by jumping ahead to S and the excellent Floodland by the Sisters of Mercy didn't/hasn't prevent(ed) an ongoing outbreak of A-haness.

Anyway in the Kitchen we cooked a chicken, greenbean thing. Very easy so enjoy:

Serves 4
2 chicken breasts
250g of green beans, topped and tailed
2 garlic cloves100ml soy sauce
100ml rice vinegar
50ml sake
1 hard boiled egg per person
Rice

Gently brown the chicken so that it is about 2/3rds done, add the beans and garlic and continue to cook. Add the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sake and eggs. Cook until the sauce has reduced to about half. Serve with sticky rice.

Today we have sat inside watching the awful weather and the film Once. It was very nice and managed to avoid being twee which is a good thing. Definately one for a wet sunday afternoon. I have no idea what we're eating for dinner tonight but I have a feeling it could be some egg fried noodles. I aslo have a whole chicken I'm going to cut into pieces and some friends from the UK are going to call on skype this evening. Then it is back to the grindstone of work this week for 2 days and then I am away on a "living in change" course. It should be interesting but I have already noticed that the only constant in the universe is change so I hope I get some deeper insights from the course than that. Once that is done then it's time to pack and head for Barcelona. Yay!

Sangria in the park

2008-10-25T11:13:00.005+03:00

Yesterday was a well deserved day off. Although the weather wasn't brilliant and we slept in we decided to take a road trip to Hämeenlinna anyway. I am really pleased we did. Late October is not the most obvious time to be a tourist in Finland and we seem to be masters at avoiding high season. The town of Hämeenlinna is about 100km from Helsinki up the main highway to Tampere. Nice easy driving through the same unending scenery for little over an hour brings you to the town and its castle. The guidebook we have lists other things to do in the town but we decided to visit the castle and go onto the village of Iittala. The castle was excellent and well worth a visit. Iittala was less so although the factory shop there does offer some excellent bargains.

For me though the best thing about it all is the sense of making the most of our time here in Finland and of not falling into the trap of being lazy arses.

The photo above was taken in one of the rooms in the castle. I love the simple white wash of the walls and the contrast with the tiled floor both in terms of colour and geometry. I also took some black and white versions of this while lying on the floor but they were not as good. Just as well we visit places in off season as all the other tourists probably wouldn't appreciate a ginger haired english man sprawled on the floor getting all arty in the quest for an interesting photograph!

Today the kitchen will be on location in Tapiola. The original plan to cook some fancy Thai food is fast being dumped as it is getting too complicated to carry a heavy pestle and mortar and food processor round Helsinki while hunting for authentic ingredients! We may retreat to the simplicity of something Italian but I like the idea of chili and rice today so who knows what we'll be cooking. The chef certainly doesn't!

Sunday night and pasta

2008-10-19T18:20:00.004+03:00

I've written about pesto before. It was last year and I was experimenting with Avocado pesto which was an excellent. As I'm blogging twice in one evening I'm going to make the assumption that you've read the earlier post and know we had a load of basil leaves to use up.

The trick with pesto is the order: Garlic, basil, cheese, oil & nuts. Elizabeth David says it is OK to use butter instead of oil but I remain an unbeliever and as yet have not experimented with it. If you have and it works let me know.

We made plenty of pesto, after all if you're going to make a small quantity you might as well make a large quantity right?

That is only part of the story. I was also pleased with what I did with it so here is my sunday chicken, pesto and pasta recipe.

The trick here is to cook things gently. It is really important.

Serves 2
Olive oil
2 chicken breasts cubed
1 chili
1/2 onion finely chopped
1/4 red pepper chopped
1 large mushroom chopped into small pieces
Penne
Pesto

In a frying pan heat some olive oil and gently fry the onion and chili
Add the chicken and continue to cook.
Then add the pepper and mushroom.

Put the pasta in a pan of salted water at a rolling boil.
When al dente, drain, return to the pan and add some olive oil.

I served it by putting the pasta as a base, adding the chicken and putting a huge dollop of pesto on top to allow the diner to choose how to use the pesto. What made the dish for me was that the pesto had all the requisite flavours, the chicken was nicely cooked and every now and then there was a little bite of chili that came in and out to add to the flavours of the dish.

Enjoy.

Pasata sunday

2008-10-19T16:14:00.006+03:00

Thank goodness that is over. The major international review has passed without incident. I came out the other end still claiming to have a grip on my sanity and have had the opportunity to relax with the aid of alcohol. It was an illuminating week and the old adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true. However it is over and thank goodness remains the key feeling. The reason is that I hope to reduce the imbalance in my life at work and away from it.

So last night we invited the neighbours around for dinner and had a very pleasant evening feeding them typical English autumn food. We served a cottage pie with cumin carrots followed by an apple crumble. The recipes for the main course came from Tamsin Day Lewis' book Simply the Best. I'm not sure I approve of the awful title of the book and sometimes her prose is overwhelming however it is a book that has proved its worth time and again. The carrots were even grown in tins in our garden this year and apples for the crumble came from our neighbours tree.

Today has been an equally busy day as we have finally harvested the plum tomatoes the boss has been growing in the Finnish Monkey House Kitchen Garden and made some pasata from the same recipe we used last year. Lucky this time we managed to get two jars instead of last years solitary jar. One important ingredient in a pasata is basil and the boss was sent to the shops with the imprecise instruction to get 'a lot' of basil. This she duly did but with only two jars worth of pasata we are left with a glut of basil left over. This is of course a gift as dinner tonight will now be some gently grilled chicken served with some fresh home made pesto and accompanied by some pasta. Maybe there will be a vodka gimlet served with it, to make it all grown up.

The week ahead should be relatively straighforward. We're off to movies on Thursday and I have Friday off making a nice long weekend. I am wondering whether we will try and make a trip to somewhere like Hammenlinna on Friday or we will just be enjoying being in Helsinki. After that our week in Barcelona is coming up fast, we've been good today and sketched out a first rough itinerary. I do not want to have a relaxing week ruined by an excess of pre planning but a little thinking in advance will mean that we should use out time well. If there comes a time to tear up the plan and head off on an unscripted adventure well who cares?

Fennel Pasta

2008-10-12T21:23:00.003+03:00

This evening the Kitchen was lucky enough to put together this little Sunday evening delight.

1 fennel bulb
Half an onion
A couple of sticks of celery
1 dried chili
Mushrooms
200g cherry tomatoes
Basil
Oregano
Pine Nuts
Salt & Pepper
Olive Oil
Vodka

Spaghetti
Chopped coriander

Set the oven going at about 175C
Chop the fennel, celert and onion
Pop in the tomatoes, mushrooms and pine nuts
Add a some basil, oregano and chili
Give it a dash of vodka (white wine or vermouth is also good)
Then add in plenty of olive oil
Finally add some salt & pepper

Pop it all in the oven for at least an hour

Then put the pasta in a saucepan of salted water that is at a rolling boil.
Once it is al dente, drain and add the coriander.

Serves 2.

*****
Life has been busy of late - too much work and not enough cooking. However today has been a nice day off where we have done very little. We swept the deck for leaves which looked great for about 2 seconds before the trees in the garden took the opportunity to cover it all again. We planted some bulbs in the lawn which should make the garden look pretty next spring. We also took a drive around Helsinki which was looking pretty in the late autumn sun this afternoon. There has been cheese and sweet chili sauce while reading Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries which has provided some much needed inspiration for next weekends dinner when our Finnish neighbours are coming for dinner and we would like to cook them something English.
We also started planning our trip to Barcelona. I picked out museums and design shops to see, explore and experience. The boss chose a bar that serves Gimlets. Hmmm.

Next week is the big work review. It's been a long few months getting ready but it has been really nice to actually take a day out and just relax. All the preparations are done and there is no point in stressing anymore. Actually the only approach is to go out and enjoy the week (if such a piece of positive claptrap is actually possible...). Ask me on Friday.

After that I'm looking forward to getting back into the Kitchen, getting out to the movies again and enjoying life in Helsinki.

Hiroshige

2008-10-02T21:21:00.008+03:00

Last night the boss and I went to see the exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints at the Ateneum in Helsinki. It was the one evening the exhibition was free and while the star of the exhibition was "The Great Wave" we were particularly impressed with the many prints that make up Hiroshige's "100 views over Edo." For the record there are 116 views.

Today while out shopping for the Boss' birthday next week I found a book in Stockmann's Akademisk Bokhandel containing all of them in a beautiful volume for the giveaway price of 33 €. I have on occasions in my life come across beautiful things that for one reason or another I have decided not to buy and later regretted. I actually put this book down and then came back to it and let me tell you I am so glad I did. If you live in Helsinki you have to see this exhibiton. Then go and buy the book! I do think that the 13€ ticket price to the exhibition is expensive (probably explains why it was so packed) but it is worth it. Go. Open your mind.

After I left the boss to go to her knitting group I made my way up to Hakaniemi to the Asian stores as we needed a few bits. Although it was getting close to closing time I was lucky enough to get to the market and find a squash for Saturday. Quinn is coming over while I am at work and staying for dinner. Cooking for vegetarians is always fun as it is a good challenge to make a balanced meal from a broadly similar range of ingredients. OK without unduly igniting the debate I think it is pretty obvious that cooking with meat gives you another clearly different element whereas cooking without meat forces you to be more creative. The boss has sugested some kind of spicy roast squash which is an excellent idea. All I need to know now is what we serve it with and how.

The kitchen has been busy and this evening dinner was a simple affair using leftovers in a good way. A few noodles fried with garlic, chili, mushroom and courgette. Then a little beaten egg and some soy sauce to make a tasty and quick supper.

I extended our lease on the house today for another year. I guess we're not going anywhere. That is a good thing!

A postcard on autumn

2008-09-28T15:58:00.006+03:00

Autumn is well and truly here in Finland. The trees are turning yellow and we are enjoying bright sunny, breezy days that make it a pleasure to be outside. The Boss and I went off towards Sipoo today and have spent an excellent few hours pottering around the forest finding edible mushrooms. We got a good haul compared to our last few outings. We have a box full of Hedgehog fungus a couple of chanterelles and some suspected wood blewits and millers. The last two need testing to confirm our guess but otherwise all will end up in the pot this evening!

Last night there was a staff party which involved quite a lot of (free) beer and I enjoyed myself a lot. I had been quite quiet during the day and had been feeling the party might be a bit of chore but in the end there was a good atmosphere and I relaxed a lot.

At work it has been busy and in the kitchen it has been busy. We've been using the usual mix of everything and left overs. The chilis are ripening nicely and so are the tomatoes so I expect lots of them will be used in ever more inventive ways over the next few weeks.

Blogging will be light for the forseeable future as we have a(nother) major international review at work in 3 weeks time and I intend to be a very focused work bunny until it comes to its (successful) conclusion.

******
After performing spore print tests on the unidentified mushrooms we are able to say the blewits are definately not blewits. The Miller remains unidentified as the spore print was so poor.

The water knows

2008-09-12T07:47:00.003+03:00

It’s been a busy few weeks since the last post. I am within a couple of pages of finishing Ovid and finally after wading through all the incest and homosexuality his final flourish appears to be to promote vegetarianism. Odd. Yet rewarding.

We had a fantastic weekend in Tallinn. The old town is as impressive as it’s reputation. It is full of old buildings and narrow streets that provide a real contrast to Helsinki. It was slightly interesting in that I was lucky enough to be in Tallinn as the only boy on a girls knitting (& drinking) weekend. The price I paid for such a blessing was to accompany the girls to every knitting shop in town. The most bizarre was the one out from the centre which was two floors up a dingy staircase and guarded by a thick metal door that was accessible only by buzzing and being OK’d by the CCTV. Needless to say I am now an expert on the best bars beside the best yarn shops in Tallinn!! My facebook friends can see the moment I snapped in a Greek restaurant full of burly Russians here.

Then this week we were lucky enough to see REM. I love this band and they did not disappoint. I first heard their music while I was still at school (sometime after 1985). I finally got my first ticket to see them on the Monster tour and after queuing for hours on a Sunday morning to get the best seats in the house. That concert was cancelled and then fate has conspired against me until this week. As I said they were excellent. The weather did us no favours as it rained incessantly all day and all the way through the concert. I was dressed for a day on the Brecon Beacons in January than a gig but they played some great songs that were treated to my very special form of dancing. I was asked before the concert by Cecilie which songs I hoped they played and I duly managed a list but I cannot believe I didn’t mention “Find the River” which is my all time favourite REM song. Thankfully the band saved me and performed a cracking version.

The support bands were good: I had heard good things about the Editors and while I enjoyed their set I worried at times that they were veering dangerously close to Coldplay territory. Their lead guitarist has appaling taste in knitwear but there is something there that warrants closer examination. The Disciplines were excellent, lunatics and very "rawk". I loved them.

Due to the demands of work I have been slacking in the kitchen and the boss has been doing sterling work providing fantastic food. However I hope I made amends tonight by creating out of nothing a lovely little Spanish dish – perfect for a weekday.

1 chicken breast cubed
1/3 of chorizo sarta sliced
3 garlic cloves finely chopped
A pinch of pimenton
A couple of large mushrooms chopped
A couple of small onion sliced
Some peas
A glass of red wine
A glass of peas
Olive oil

Heat the olive oil gently in a frying pan
Cook the onions slowly
Add the garlic, the chorizo and the chicken
It may get a little dry depending on the chorizo so don’t be afraid to add a splash of red wine here if needed.
Add the mushrooms and the rest of the red wine
Continue to cook gently
Add the peas

When it’s all done serve. I used a few boiled potatoes as an side this evening and was pleased with the results.

I also managed quite a nice Asian style noodle dish using some left over duck this week. As with all Asian dishes you have to pay attention to how you cut up the ingredients so the final dish looks as appealing as it is tasty. I am struggling to remember what I did but I know I used an unashamedly strong combination of ginger, garlic and chilli. Then I had some left over duck that I shredded, sauted it all up with some courgette and mushrooms towards the end I added in some roast beetroot, which worked really well together. I made some scrambled egg and cut it into the noodles. The best thing it was all made from left overs from other dishes we’ve been making.

Tomorrow we're going to take on Coq au Vin in a serious way and on Sunday we should be out collecting mushrooms in the woods weather permitting.

Ch-ch-changes

2008-08-29T20:38:00.001+03:00

So where has the kitchen been recently? I’m still working my way through Ovid; I’ve managed to get past the part where he suddenly takes a detour into incest and female homosexuality. Interesting to note that in Ovid’s world it is OK for boys to love each other and gods to marry their sisters but it is wrong for women to love each other or desire their brothers! However the way that this world view does not sit comfortably with our own more “enlightened” 21st century views has been good for me as at it has prompted me to question my own blithe assumptions on a range of subjects about what is right, wrong or socially acceptable in this world.

When theoretical philosophy hasn’t been claiming my attention I have been in the kitchen. We did manage to steal a BBQ last Saturday. It was excellent to still get one more chance to eat out as the year wanes before us. Indeed our lucky and opportunistic al fresco dining was balanced by a Sunday indoors watching the rain come down. We cooked some steak, some pork skewers and some prawns. The pork was marinated in some soy, garlic and chili and worked very well. The meal was topped off with corn which is a staple at our BBQ’s as the Boss is very fond of it.

I seem to be drifting towards voluntary quasi-vegetarianism which is an unusual place for a lover of meat. I only ever order my steak rare or blue and see no problem with killing an animal in order to eat it. If that is what it takes I can do that. Meat is meat there is nothing wrong with being willing to kill the animal you want to eat. However having set up that straw man we can return to my growing vegetarianism. It should be clear by now that it isn’t ethically driven, it is more to widen how I see food and what I want to cook. I make no claims for any systematic exploration either, I am afloat in the stream and going with the flow, my journey is no more than that.

So what have we been cooking? We seem to be working towards a cycle of pasta, potato, pulses and rice which gives us a variety of things to play with. This week we have enjoyed vegetable moussaka and a fine miso soup using home made dashi stock and some carrots from the garden that needed thinning out. I’ve commented before on how soups can make excellent quick evening meals as they can be as chunky or as light as you want them to be. We made so much Moussaka that it was good enough to eat two nights on the trot and then we played with some sweet potatoes and lentils as detailed below.

Although last night was movie night and I did want to start going again we never made it to as the weather was atrocious and by the time I had finished work, been drowned riding my bicycle home and dried myself out I just wasn’t motivated enough to go out to the cinema.

So despite all I’ve said about not eating meat above this is what we pulled together the following elements to make a satisfying dinner for 2.

*2 small baked sweet potatoes
*About 150ml of red and green lentils cooked and seasoned with salt, pepper and butter
*A small frying pan of mushrooms and bacon sautéed with some chili, cayenne pepper and oil.
I think we will have a lazy weekend, I’m certainly feeling the need for it. Although there are plans afoot to try and make some duck spring rolls or something along similar lines.

By the way one thing I discovered last week was triangular tofu. It is of course just a case of cutting up a normal block of tofu in a clever way but it adds something to appearance of the dish and that is also good for the soul. If it looks good you will think it is good and it will be good. Positive claptrap as the boss would say.

Metamorphoses

2008-08-21T20:39:00.004+03:00

Classical literature. I'm reading Ovid's Metamorphoses at the moment and it is a curious thing. God's change their names mid sentence and keeping up with who is who and changing into what can be a challenge. A repeating motif is the (male) God who falls in love with a human beauty, deceives her in some way to get his wicked way with her, leave her with child and leaves. Later the God's wife finds out about her husband's infidelity and wreaks revenge on the girl. How morality has changed in a few millenia! However it is an enjoyable romp through classical mythology which is filling in the gap in my knowledge. Afterwards the Finnish national epic the Kalevala is next on the reading list. Maybe after that I will turn to something more contemporary.

However the constant nature of change that Ovid chose as his theme is apt as I noticed the sun was lower behind the trees that stand behind our house this evening. The year is clearly marching on. Yet it still time to be a vintage one.

At the weekend we were in France and had a great time out at a house called La Rogiere. We camped in a field next to our friends house. We lived off pain au chocolat, BBQ sausages and red wine. I ended up running the BBQ for 45 people on saturday night including Monsieur et Madame Le Mayor. It was great fun to cook over half an oil drum filled with a large bed of coals.

I think it is not duly unkind to describe La Rogiere as very close to derelict. To the casual observer it doesn't look so good. However on closer inspection the roof beams have been completely redone and are ready for the new tiles. This would be a major step towards being a watertight building. Then can come a real kitchen and the serious work of decorating the inside can begin. I have volunteered (in all seriousness) to go back next year and to put the roof tiles on. It should be fun.

While we were out and about we discussed where we could go on our adventures. So many places came out: Avingnon, Carcassonne, Rioja, Sevilla, Namibia, New York, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan and the list goes on. I notice that Finnair is offering a special deal to New York this week. Tempting. I also want to go skiing next spring and am trying to convince the boss to go on a road trip round the USA.

The kitchen has been doing well, I made a chili sauce for some tofu last night and served in some noodles. It was good although I could have made a bit more sauce. I cut the tofu into triangles which was an innovation for me. I was pleased with how it looked. Then tonight we made a simple tomato and bacon sauce with basil and served it with some pasta. Maybe if the weather is good over the weekend we can squeeze one more BBQ out of the waning year.

Let the days keep rolling.

Behind the corner

2008-08-11T19:44:00.003+03:00

It's all been too busy, too fast. I had a horrible hissing fit in the Fazer cafe when it all got too noisy and chaotic on friday. Last week was the work week from hell where I did too many hours, didn't get enough sleep, drank too much and got up the next day and tried to do it all again.

That's not to say it didn't have highlights: Visiting Kallio church for the first time, getting a great bargain when buying mushrooms at Helsinki Kauppatori, wandering around the woods on Sunday, a nice glass of wine and some lovely egg fried noodles.

Tonight has been another chance to relax in the kitchen and the chance came around to cook a risotto. Tonights version was

Chanterelle and Pea risotto

This is one advantage of living in Finland: fresh peas and fresh chanterelles in the market. No one in England is going to be able to make this dish so improvise.

I cooked the mushrooms slowly in a little olive oil and garlic and added the fresh peas to cook them lightly. Once done I set aside. Then I made the risotto in the usual way except I added sme chilli to the sofrito which it must be said should only be used in an extremely limited way as it can easily overwhelm everything else. Then I added a good dollop of creme fraiche towards the end and a small handfull of fresh mint from the garden. This could have been a lot bigger especially I was borderline generous with the chilli. The result was very pleasan and very easy.

*****

There's a list of movies building up to be seen - one disadvantage of being so busy is you just don't go often enough.

*The Dark Night. I still can't stop laughing everytime I think that the Finnish title translates as The Night Knight.
*Once
*Wall E - I wasn't interested but the reviews have been good so maybe I could do with a bucket of schmaltz?
*X Files - yes a trip down memory lane and a guilty pleasure. Anyway David Duchovny was always nice to look at.
*The Clone Wars. I'm of that generation. Full Stop.

However with movie nights back on a Thursday I'm not sure when I'll get to see any of these. Hmm. A puzzle.

****

Am off to France at the weekend and hope to be able to drink some nice French wine and maybe bring a few bottles home....

The choice is made

2008-07-29T21:24:00.006+03:00

I feel kind like some sort of Ghostbuster this evening. I am not standing on top of a smoking New York building ready to face down the apocalypse armed only with a sarcastic sense of humour and a funky coloured laser. However the parallels are apt. For a while the boss has been dipping in and out of a book called "Japanese women don't get old or fat: blah blah blah." It's not a bad book in itself. It offers a few points of interest on the differences in our diets, lifestyles and how they affect health. No rocket science here but no hokum either. Anyway there was an article in a British newspapre recently about a book in a similar style about Chinese food. I remember very little about it except that it said rice was important to the Chinese and that it was OK to have a vegetable as the main course. (I suspect many vegetariams may have grasped that point but us omnivores are a little slower). As soon as I read it I thought "some green beans and rice would be nice." A bit like the fateful choice that brought down the apocalypse in the shape of the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man and our brave Ghostbusting heroes.

That was last week sometime. Since then I have not lost sight of that dish in my head but time has got in the way. I have been to England, seen friends, family, visited my grandmother's grave (or the hillside where her ashes are scattered and it was a good feeling to be there). I ate some good food, I drank real ale and came home tired but pleased. I finally got my chance to make my dish this evening so here it is and enjoy. It only took as long as the rice takes to cook so it is a perfect after work weekday meal.

To a certain Norwegian friend of mine I have to admit now that this is not a recipe for dry fried beans but I blame you anyway, in a good way, for my chinese green bean thing.

Green Beans and Rice (Serves 2)

300g green beans

3 cloves of garlic finely chopped

1 knob of ginger finely chopped

2 chillis finely chopped

1 small onion finely chopped

50g rice per person, washed thoroughly

Vegetable and sesame oil

Instructions

Parboil the green beans, for 1 and half minutes, refresh immediately in cold water. Shake off the excess water and dry with a kitchen towel.

Put water (approx 2 and half times the volume of rice ) into a saucepan containing the rice and bring to the boil. Boil hard for 2 minutes, reduce heat for about 10 minutes, put the lid on and leave off the heat without touching the lid for about 15 minutes. The aim is that if all the starch is out of the rice it will be nice and sticky.

Heat the oil in a pan, gently fry the onion for about 5 minutes. Add the green beans and stir fry. I kept them moving as much as possible. After a few minutes add the garlic, ginger and chilli. Cook for a further 5 minutes or until you are satisfied with the texture.

Serve with soy sauce.

If it is nice and spicy a nice fresh mango will make an excellent desert.

We cooked way too much rice so now have 3 lunch sized portions. On Thursday night we will be experiencing the delights of a Helsinki Island restaurant and trying fresh crayfish for the first time. Should be a good evening. Hopefully we will also get the chance to catch up with friends so blogging might be light.

Ship ahoy

2008-07-21T19:46:00.003+03:00

On Saturday, under glorious skies we took the boat to Porvoo. Getting there took a couple of hours and it was enough to enjoy the company of friends, talk, drink a beer (or two) and just contemplate the ocean, the sky, the world or whatever. I enjoyed being able to dip in and out of my own company and into the company of the usual suspects who were all on good form. Unfortunately the Cathedral was closed in Porvoo (that is the second time in two vists) but the weather more than compensated. The return journey was also a pleasure and despite the excess of drunk Finnish people in the same confined space as me it was enough for me to be out, under a warm sun and on the water.

*****

On Sunday we did some experiments in the kitchen and we can confirm the following

*Deep fried plantains are excellent in salt and chilli powder
*Deep fried radish does not work

*****

On Thursday we will be in the UK briefly so the kitchen will be closed. I hope to drink some champagne on Brandon Hill in Bristol with some friends on Friday evening.

See you on the flip side.

Tramps like us part II

2008-07-12T21:27:00.005+03:00

"I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies,
in my lover's bed,
With a wide open country in my eyes
and these nomadic dreams in my head"

No retreat, no surrender - Bruce Springsteen

If there was ever a way of summing up how I view the world anyone who reads this would underestimate those lines at their peril.

Last night I finally saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play for the first time. The venue was the modern architectural classic Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. For those of you who are set list nerds you can see what he played here. The show was just over 3 and a quarter hours long and 31 songs. Here is the Kitchen's verdict: Almost amazing.

The good news is that the classic material is even better live: If anyone seriously doubts that Born to Run is a classic, worry no more - it is. It sounds as good now as when it first came out in 1975. The bad news is that the good material came over as only OK.

Bruce spiced things up by taking requests from the audience. It added a pleasing wildcard element to the show, but it did mean that the show as a whole lacked consistency - energy and pacing were sometimes lacking and with the bands ability to finish and start songs on a hairpin you sometimes went from way up to way down in a second. The upside of this was it's spontaneity and the way it showcased the classics. The downside was that sometimes things seemed to sag too much even if we were being treated to sincere and emotionally literate Bruce.

However to tip it over into good concert territory was: the olympic stadium itself, the great weather (walking home at 3am in the first light of dawn was a nice end to the evening), and the fact Bruce played "Santa Claus is coming to town" as a treat for the Finnish audience because after all everyone knows Santa is Finnish. Right?

Tramps like us

2008-07-09T20:01:00.004+03:00

Oh has the world been a busy place recently. The kitchen has been jumping with activity and some of it has been very good. Haven't been able to get a table? Sorry, you'll have to bribe the nice lady who knits down by the entrance. Get on her good side and you can have the best table in the house.

We've been cooking some very good dishes:

Thai red curry with chili tofu & sticky rice
Penne all' amatriciana
Chicken piri piri with tortilla and salsa
Risotto with borlotti beans served with cranberry and cumin mushrooms
Vegetable and tofu stir fry

All have been done simply with the minimal ingredients and leftovers. I'm pleased because a lot of the ingredients I managed to buy in the market without resorting to English (although amusing the stall holders with my rubbish grasp of their language) and nothing has been wasted. I don't like to bring politics into this blog but the recent "advice" of the British prime minister to the rich west to not waste food before sitting down to a multi course G8 super meal has left me a little angry that politicians think we are that stupid.

I have been working very hard recently in my real life job so am very happy that the kitchen has been so productive. I'm equally happy that the weather forecast for the Springsteen concert on Friday night is now very positive. I've never seen him live and am not by any stretch a huge fan but it's live music and the vibes coming from the reviews I've read are good. The band seems to have ditched promoting the new album and under the influence of our beautiful Nordic sun seem to be playing for the pleasure of playing.

We're busy plotting all sorts of things as well. We're off to the UK at the end of the month and have been sorting train tickets which has proved a nightmare. Why is it that UK rail companies cannot post a ticket within the EU? I could get on my soap box and complain about how the UK rips off its citizens and tourists but I won't (oops!). We're also off to France in August and have been buying tickets on the TGV. 1st class darling - well for £3 difference wouldn't you? Finally we're also planning a week in Barcelona in October for my dear lady wife's birthday. Oh did I mention we're going to Tallinn with friends in September. Blimey it's all getting too much.

My bike rides back and forth to work have been adventures as I try and find new ways and lose myself amongst the twisting turning lanes of Puistola. Today I had to follow a light aircraft from Malmi airstrip to get back on track.

The songwriting is also going well, if slowly. I have 6 workable (if still, but only just, incomplete) tracks and one song title (Killer psycho hero). My myspace page is still sitting there gathering dust waiting for tracks to be put up there. They will come I just don't know when. Maybe that could be a project for the long Finnish winter.

Only one more day until my day off. This stretch has been too hectic by far. I was thinking today that we are working at an insane pace, more hectic than when I was working for Carl Taylor in Bristol and he knows how to crack the whip. Then I realised the problem. Me. I'm the boss now and I'm the one dictating the pace. Think it might be time to pause and take stock.

The Archer

2008-07-03T09:13:00.005+03:00

We cycled yesterday from Pukinmäki to the Didrischsen Art Museum on Kuusisaari Island to see their Henry Moore exhibition. I had no idea what to expect. I knew the artist's name and had even seen one or two of his pieces up close and not understood what the fuss was about. However yesterday I spent a very pleasant hour examining his works up close and by seeing so many of them together I caught a glimpse of something exciting and interesting in his work. The picture above is of a piece called the Archer or more soberly "3 way piece number 2 LH535". At the Didrischsen they have The Archer (LH536) in white marble and walking around and around it I was able to see all the graceful curves and arches that occupy every facet of the piece and I found myself to be very impressed by it.

The museum itself was interesting but I felt the 8€ entrance price was a little on the steep side.

We cycled home in glorious sunshine and as it was a day off we played in the garden. The boss at gardening and me at learning Finnish. I'm sure it will all pay off one day.

We ate out in the garden using the BBQ again. Taking some inspiration from Moro East (Rob & Rach - thanks for buying us this book, it has been a revelation, it took me some time to get into it because it seemed overly fiddly on first glance but now it seems a little more straightforward and we're enjoying using it for ideas and places to begin) we had put some chicken in a Red wine, olive oil, garlic, thyme and pepper marinade before cycling off to the sculpture exhibition earlier and had decided to cook it with some cous cous. To add a salad to the plate I picked some cut and come again salad leaf from the garden, added a few tomatoes and some salad onion that I then drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

To cook the cous cous I used part of my old Trangia set as it seemed like the kind of pot that would be quite happy on the BBQ. I don't want to be limited to just grilling food. I want BBQing to be about cooking complete meals. It shouldn't just be about men burning flesh! The pan worked well and I will be gradually taking frying pans and other paraphenalia out into the garden when it is time to cook outside again.

Now for the chicken;

Once the coals were giving off a nice heat deeply score the chicken & put it on.

Have spare marinade ready to baste regularly to keep it moist.

Cook for somewhere between 15 - 20 minutes turning regularly.

A man who can incinerate food on a BBQ to a carbon crisp is a waste of space - the whole point of the exercise is to cook edible and very tasty food. Fortunately for me the chicken was OK. Phew.

We have some of the marinade left over which we will use to make a gravy for another dish in the next few days.

Waste nothing and enjoy the summer.

Vertigo

2008-06-28T15:55:00.003+03:00

Yesterday I went to the Anton Corbijn exhibition at the Tennispalatsi in Helsinki. I am of that generation musically speaking that became aware of rock photography in about 1987 with the release of The Joshua Tree by U2. Musical tastes develop from all sorts of starting points and mine now take in artists as diverse as Joy Division and Miles Davies amongst others. So it was great to see so many iconic images in one place and perhaps the best part of the exhibition is when Corbijn pretends to be many of his rock n roll heroes himself in a well executed series of self portraits. Not then for me the iconic images but the pastiches of them.

******

My Finnish classes have started again and after been really lazy with it for the last month I was pleased by how much I remembered and frustrated by how little I can actually communicate! However I know I am near some sort of the threshold (utterly useless to just plain bad? It's all progress!) so am wanting to put some effort in over the coming weeks.

*****

The weather seems to be holding so we're cooking out again and tonigh we're doing Pork Ribs which have been marinading all day in a mixture of

White wine
Olive oil
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Coriander Seed
Cumim Seed
Paprika
Lemon Juice
A Dried Chilli

There are no hard and fast rules for how much or how little you use of each of the above ingredients. It's just fun to play.

*****

I fancy a swim in the sea or a lake...the time is coming.

Busy summer

2008-06-26T19:10:00.003+03:00

Apologies for been so quiet - I've been busy at work and a little under the weather. I missed the chance to see Dogville this week as I simply wasn't up for it. Which is a shame as I missed some good company and what everyone tells me is an excellent film. Hopefully I'll be back to my movie going and sociable best next week. I've also been doing very little cooking but am much happier now and am looking forward to the weekend and catching up with some friends.

However last week the boss and I managed to get into the garden for a BBQ and so here is a great way to cook some pork.

BBQ'd Pork
Pork loin
2 Apples cored and roughly chopped
3 large cloves of garlic –smashed and roughly chopped
A large teaspoon of grainy Dijon mustard
Salt & Pepper
2 onions roughly chopped
A good lug of Apple schnapps
Olive oil

2 whole onions for roasting on the BBQ
Sweet potatoes

Take a small roasting tin that will fit on your BBQ and will take the loin of pork.
Put in the Pork, apples, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, mustard, oil, schnapps and give a good shake and make sure everything is well coated.
Cover with foil. Make sure it is on really tightly. Now add a second layer of foil and make sure that is tight.

Put this on the BBQ and cook for up to an hour

While that is cooking put your onions on a skewer and BBQ them so that they are sweet. They should take about half an hour to cook.

The sweet potatoes also need to be wrapped in foil and put on the BBQ. They take about half an hour but this can vary with the size of the potatoes and the heat from the BBQ.

Depending on how organized you are the BBQ’d onions can be served cold as part of a salad or warm with the rest of the meal. The reason to leave the Pork in there a bit longer is as the onions and apples cook and caramelize they become really really sweet and that gives a nice little gravy to go with the pork.

The good news of course is that whatever pork left over makes excellent sandwiches the following day.

I'm trying to hatch a plan for some BBQ'd chicken with cous cous and salad if the weather here improves. The summer in Finland has definately been on the odd side so far in June and I'd like it to be a bit more stable (and on the sunny) side so that all my little foodie plans can come to fruition.

Until next time make sure you wear flowers in your hair at least once.

After the summer break....

2008-06-16T20:31:00.003+03:00

It is always a good thing to take a holiday. Even better when you go away to get married. I've had a great three weeks away from the kitchen, I've climbed over 30 english mountains and had a wonderful (if wet) week in Finland exploring my new home.

I don't really know where to begin but can promise that there will be one or two photos of the wedding (& I mean one or two - if only to show how pretty she looked) posted here soon, and can also say to all the friends who made it to our day it was amazing to catch up with you, and to those who couldn't be there we missed you.

*****

Back in Helsinki and the kitchen has re-opened, tonight's supper was BBQ'd salmon and corn and frankly I defy anyone not to enjoy this kind of combination. Just remember people a BBQ is a great, and forgiving, way to cook food - get those vegetabables on, get that haloumi cheese on, make a nice salad, give the salmon plenty of time to cook, give the corn even longer and you will be assured of a very pleasant weekday supper with hardly any bother at all. Even better the leftovers will taste better tomorrow.

*****

Last night we had some red thai curry which was excellent. As ever I made too much (make a good lunch or supper later in the week) but the little tip that set it up nicely was I used an upside down bowl to give the rice a nice shape and I put in some fresh tomato as I served up to give it a nice fresh taste - not magic, just easy everyday cooking.

*****

On honeymoon we went into the Finnish wilderness and camped. We had to carry everything into the wilderness with us and carry it out. It just proved how easy it is to cook good food with one pan if you want to. We had - Pork and Beans, Macaroni Carbonara and Cabbage and Rice. All simple (of course) yet none of that was at the cost of taste. If yu can cook good food in the wild, you can cook it every day in the Kitchen.

*****

Off to Oslo on Wed/Thu this week, should be fun to be back in Norway. It was good to see that coming back to Finland felt like coming home after two weeks in England. Always reassuring.

Waste nothing and enjoy the summer.

Sunday supper

2008-05-18T20:36:00.004+03:00

After a fairly quiet day at work I came home to find the Kitchen needed to organise evening service. So with not a second to think we worked up this little gem. Enjoy.

Sunday night pork and potato

Olive Oil

Finely chopped onion

2 cloves of finely chopped garlic

1 Red chili

Boneless pork cubed

Black Pudding

Vermouth

Chicken stock

1 medium Apple

Chopped mushrooms

100g Peas

Salt

Pepper

Worcestershire sauce

Sugar

Parmesan rinds

Thyme

Potato

Butter

Milk

Put the oven onto 200c

Heat some olive oil in a heavy pan

When hot enough fry the onions and garlic and chili gently

Add the cubed pork and black pudding*

Put a dash of vermouth in and let the alcohol evaporate

When the pork is a nice colour add the mushrooms, apple, peas and chicken stock

A dash of Worcestershire sauce, a teaspoon of sugar, a sprinkling of thyme and a couple of Parmesan rinds are good to add now

Put a lid on the pan and put in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour

Mashed potatoes - do I need to explain this?

*Here in Finland we use Mustamakkara which while are a little different from blackpudding are an excellent alternative

*****

In other news we saw "No Country for Old Men" on Thursday. Our hostess with the mostess was unable to join us (ironic considering how much work I had this week) and I am sorry for her that she missed one of the films of the year. It richly deserved it's awards and was an engaging piece of cinema. Offbeat as you would expect from the Coen brothers and yet accessible enough to give it an appeal to the many. The cinematography captured the huge expanse of the Texan nothingness and it's sparse beauty acted as a counterpoint to some amazing dialogue:

"If I don't come back tell my mother I love her."

"Your mother is dead."

"Then I'll tell her myself."

I urge you to see this movie.

*****

On Thursday next week the Kitchen will close for summer holidays and nuptials. We wish everyone a fantastic kitchen and ask you all to remember that you don't need to waste any food. It can always be used to make something good.

When the chips are down

2008-05-17T21:28:00.003+03:00

I apologise profusely for not posting sooner but the kitchen has been preparing for an international commercial review. The result was an almost unheard of 90% so a large quantity of cane spirit ( aka Rum) has already been consumed prior to blogging. I must, as a matter of public knowledge, thank the boss for keeping me fed on good food this week as I've concentrated more and more on the big task. Without her effort it wouldn't have happened. Thank you. So now you know who is the genius in the monkey house kitchen. Not me. The boss.

Control

2008-05-09T19:55:00.005+03:00

We watched Control last week. Before I get to the movie itself I need to go back a few years. When I was 17 years old I was at boarding school in southern England and sharing a room with Tom Polo. I was in the throes of my Simple Minds phase. I started out with the Once Upon a Time album but by this stage I was into the much more interesting period that lasted from their frankly odd second album (Real to Real Cacophony) up to Sons and fascination. Tom was into a totally different type of music and the deal was whoever got back first from class got the record player and got to play what they wanted. So despite my best efforts I was frequently force fed Depeche Mode, The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, New Order and Joy Division.

The years passed and my musical tastes grew wider and I discovered such crazy acts as Bob Dylan (I still remember the night I passed up the opportunity to listen to Blood on the Tracks while babysitting while raiding the neighbours record collection and missed out on it's wonders for nearly another decade but that is another story) and others I have come to love. Joy Division have been part of the journey. Never a comfortable travelling partner and at times neglected but there's always come a point when I've rediscovered them and been glad they're there. That is my Joy Division story.

As for the film it is quite superb. There's no getting away from Anton Corbijn's photographic pedigree. I remember one scene where the camera revolved around Ian Curtis in a dark room with a white door. It was like every second was like looking at a different photo. Sam Riley's portrayal was excellent and I wonder what someone like Daniel Day Lewis would have done with it. Samantha Morton's accent was perfect and the kitchen sink drama counterpoint she brought to the highs of the live performances gave the film real pathos. However the film's greatest triumph is that in taking such a sad story it doesn't miss out in the fact there was humour as well. The road to oblivion is often paved with funny moments. The film's greatest weakness is it's obsessiveness on Curtis and it misses out on fleshing out his relationship with the band. They were pretty much bit parts. However this is a minor quibble. This is a sad film but one you should watch.

*****

In other movie news I saw the very amusing Iron Man last night. Do not analyse this movie. It is dumb. However watch and enjoy. Just for the record Gwyneth Paltrow did not work as the pretty girl this time. Or as a red head.

*****
Today we have been in Fiskars and bought a waterproof bag for camping. I resisted the urge to buy an axe. I have to say that it gave me great pleasure to write that line. It was a beautiful day and it was pleasant to walk around. Tomorrow is a few wedding jobs and then I'm on duty tomorrow night saying thank you to all the people at work for their hard work recently at a party we're putting on for winning a global sales competition.

Beetroot Gazpacho

2008-05-02T14:58:00.002+03:00

Yesterday friends came round for a BBQ which was admittedly a little on the rubbish side. The food was good and BBQ's brocolli definately has something to it worth exploring. However I wasn't thinking about what order I should be cooking things in, ratios of food so nobody got a nice, balanced plate of food. Still it seemed in keeping with the mood of the day. We did make a Beetroot Gazpacho which was excellent. The original idea was that I was going to make a salsa to go with the BBQ'd vegetables so I wanted to keep my tomatoes in reserve and that's when I had the idea to use beetroot instead. It is simple and very tasty. In addition the colour is simply amazing.

200g raw beetroot peeled
400g tomotoes
3 cloves garlic
Salt
Half a cucumber
Half a pepper (green or red)
100g Breadcrumbs
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar (red wine will also do)

Put all the ingredients apart from the olive oil and vinegar into a blender and let it run until you have the consistency of a smootie
Check seasoning
Add oil and vinegar and pulse again
Check for taste
Refridgerate
Serve with a drizzle of olive oil and some nice fresh bread

Off out for a bike ride now.

Marie Claire

2008-05-01T12:27:00.003+03:00

I saw the Darjeeling Limited on Thursday and really enjoyed it. It took me ages to decide I liked it (approx 2 thirds of the film) and then I made everyone stay until the very end in the hope of a great last shot that we'd already seen. In the way the Stones movie last week went straight to the stranger corners of my mind this one was the same and I now know that Adrien Brody is actually quite handsome and I need to be open about the fact that I love this gem of a song from my childhood. I've read another post which I wish I'd remembered to bookmark which talked about the use of colour in the film which I didn't get at all the first time round but now is blindingly obvious. Better than the Royal Tennebaums. Makes me want to see the Life Acquatic.

The Kitchen will be hosting a BBQ today, the sun is shining so I have to go play out there.

Shine a light

2008-04-27T14:13:00.005+03:00

Thursday's movie was Shine a light - the Rolling Stones concert film. I found it to be an odd affair with parts that were amazing, Ronnie & Keef's guitar playing switching between lead and rhythm like a magic trick you couldn't understand. However the overall impression I am left with is how skeletal Mick Jagger was. Sitting in the movie I was associating with what I was seeing on screen with the Mexican death paintings typified by artists like Jose Posada. Last night while out with some good friends the comment was made by someone not at the movie that Jagger was the most enigmatic performer he had ever seen. The movie, to me, at least exposed him to be anything but that. The titanic ego was there in plain view but some of his stage craft seemed more suitable to an American politician on the campaign trail. So a flawed but interesting piece of concert cinema. Pleased to have seen it, reserved as to whether I would say I enjoyed it.

Next weeks film is the Darjeeling Express and while I am also a little ambivalent about it I know these are the films that can take you by surprise. So I am looking forward to the experience, the good company and the opportunity to see something new.

*****

The kitchen has been busy as well. I'm just cooking some beans so that we can do some kind of slow cooked beef, aubergine and beans surprise for tea tonight. I know nothing more about it at this stage than that. On Friday we made ravioli which was excellent. The filling was sweet potato, red pepper and bacon with a lot of fresh rosemary and it was very very tasty.

I'm looking forward to BBQ season and cooking some lovely things, especially vegetables this year. We say a very nice gas grill in the Finnish Design Forum which may also help in the creation of Cecilie's dry fried beans.

*****

Off to get the boss a beer.

Remember waste nothing

Moving the castle

2008-04-21T21:07:00.008+03:00

Howl's Moving Castle is a Japanese film about a Welsh book with American actors. We first saw it a while back and have had the DVD floating around so last night we watched it again and I really enjoyed it. OK except Bully Crystal not being funny. It came after a long day out riding our bikes. It also came with a nice glass of rum and coke which is definitely my poison.

The Kitchen has been a very productive place over the last few days and here is my recipe for Roast Red Pepper and Tomato soup. I must start by saying I got the idea from watching the BBC programme Masterchef. One of the competitors made this and I set out to give it a go. I worked out what I wanted to do and checked I was right by looking in a book called The Soup Bible.

Unsalted Butter
Olive oil
Onions
500g tomatoes chopped
3 large garlic cloves chopped
2 Red Peppers whole
Vermouth
600 ml of Chicken stock (preferably home made)
Fennel Seeds
1 tin of Pinto Beans
Chorizo
Salt & Pepper

Put the red peppers under a very hot grill and leave so that they blacken.
Gently fry the onions and garlic in a pan with some olive oil and butter. This is a slow process so don't worry about leaving them there for a while
When they are soft add a dash of vermouth
Add the tomatoes and leave to cook with the onions
Add the chicken stock
Check seasoning
Take the peppers out from under the grill, put in a bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave to cool.
Once cooled remove the charred skin, tear up and add to the pan
Check the taste and the seasoning
If it's good put everything in the blender and whisk until it is whatever texture you like. I prefer my soups to be a little chunky. Smooth isn't so good for me.
Add the pinto beans, chorizo and fennel seeds.
Serve

Tonight we had a fun salad with Chicken fried in oregano, rice, lentils, romaine and salad leaves, tomatoes, carrots, mozzarella and watermelon, mung beans with a nice garlic vinaigrette.

I'm also thinking ahead to the good weather and starting to think about all the great things waiting to be bbq'd. I'm not just talking about meat - the ubiquitous sausages. No I mean corn, broccoli, aubergines, peppers, fennel, courgette and many more great things beside. It's going to be a great summer.

Remember get outdoors, cook out there and waste nothing.

Weekend noodles

2008-04-19T14:17:00.008+03:00

At the end of a long week you want a good dinner that isn't so hard to fix. You want to sit back, relax and maybe enjoy a glass of wine. What you don't want to do is pop some ready made meal in the microwave. There is so much more to food than that and I make no apologies for promoting the real way here. Now to be clear I will not encourage you to be a gourmet or a chef. There are others who can do it better than me. I'm the person who reads that stuff and makes it in his own kitchen everyday. Sometimes I love to fuss over my food but sometimes it is fuel.
So if you make any of these dishes I'm going to have to trust you to use your own judgement on whether something is cooked or not. Just remember I'm doing this because want people to be practical and get more from their food. Better taste, less waste.

Yesterday I finally had a day off after a long week, we had planned to go out, do a load of jobs in town and eat at a place that puts garlic in everything (beer, ice cream etc etc) but the jobs were more complicated than expected and we ended up coming home instead and watching a movie (woo hoo how excting are we?). This sudden Plan B required us to raid the fridge and the freezer to rustle up dinner on the hoof. So I apologise for a lack of authentic flavours here but it tasted good. We used Pad Thai as an inspiration and then adapted it to what we had.

Weekend noodles
As ever all recipes serve 2.

Everything needs to be prepared in advance for this dish because it comes together very fast.

Vegetable oil
Sesame oil
Garlic plenty chopped very finely
Dried Chili chopped very finely
Prawns
Tamarind paste dissolved in hot water
Rice wine
Soy sauce
Broccoli cut into florets
Carrots sliced into thin strips
Mushrooms sliced
Palm Sugar
Lime juice
Mung beans
Peanuts crushed in a pestle and mortar
Noodles

Put on a pan of water. Let it come to the boil and add the noodles
In a separate pan warm a little vegetable oil and sesame oil
Add half the garlic and chilli and fry gently
Add the prawns – admittedly ours had come out of the freezer so I needed to be a bit patient while the water evapourated.
As they begin to brown add the tamarind water, a dash of rice wine and a dash of soy.
Add the vegetables except the mung beans
Add the remaining garlic and chili
Cook for a few minutes and then add the mung beans and cook for about half a minute to make sure everything is coated and finished cooking.

To serve put the noodles on a plate, put the prawns and vegetables on top, a quick dash of lime juice and then sprinkle with peanuts. Eat hot.

The joys of a new world

2008-04-18T17:28:00.003+03:00

Today has been a good day. The boss has been bought a fabulous new coat and looks like the bee knees...everyone has to submit to being treated like a princess every now and then...but we also got tickets to see the Boss when he plays Helsinki.

Lunch was a simple salad but rather than the usual vinagrette I went for a sweet chilli dressing today which was made with a mixture of sweet chilli sauce, vegetable oil, mirin & soy. The Salad consisted of leaves, mung beans, carrot and avocado and if I'm really honest it was lush...maybe in retrospect a little salt would have upped the tastiness but never underestimate what a little inspiriation and stuff that needs using in the fridge can do. We're cooking a Pad Thai-esque meal tonight so watch out for more updates over the weekend.

When we moved to Finland we were told that we would have to wait 2 years to get a credit card. Today we needed one to book flights on line...55 euros per person difference between the office and the internet is a powerful incentive so I will see if I can get my employer to make a plea on my behalf. My employer has it's account with a well known Scandanavian bank and as the sales manager for that company earning good money (and a few solid months of receiving a salary into my account to show my contract was real not just a fake!) maybe they can consider issuing me a card sooner...

Pasta a la Deb

2008-04-16T21:28:00.003+03:00

The kitchen has been a good place to be this week. So far we've had great success with

Tuna steaks with spinach noodles
Pork chops with grainy mustard and cheese served with spinach
Pasta a la Deb

The second one was me reviving an old trick from university of grating some cheese and mixing it with some grainy mustard and then after the chops were cooked grilling the topping to give an extra flavour to the dish. It worked very well.

Pasta a la Deb was good if unusual. We used Chicken, bacon and pasta amongst other ingredients but we also added sweet potato to the mix which worked really well. I think the combination of the last two could make for a really exciting meal. It also got me thinking that sweet potato and chilli could also be an interesting combination.

*****

This week movie club was on Tuesday and was the nihilistic Funny Games. It was a disturbing film in many ways even if it fell into the unfortunate genre of movies featuring Naomi Watts in her underwear. While it was disturbing a few sequences did mean the overall effect wasn't as unnerving as perhaps was hoped for by the director. Still it was a good crowd of sickos out for the film...next week is the Rolling Stones movie so it will probably just be the diehards!

Writing of music the song writing is going well. I've finished one new song, am almost there with another (bizarrely chorusless but really works for an uptempo song), have two more sad slow ones for when I'm feeling melancholy and one more is waiting for some attention so I've gone from writers block to six good songs in a month. I'd like eight before I start recording which probably means I'll spend all of the Finnish summer holed up in the studio when I should be enjoying the nordic light.

Until next time waste nothing.

Rolling along

2008-04-11T11:08:00.007+03:00

I would love to have been a jolly soul this morning but after last night's visit to the Helsinki beer festival I missed this morning and am struggling this afternoon. I drank way too much different stuff and am reaping the whirlwind. That is a good thing in a way.

Yet surprisingly my mind turns to my trip into town to meet Deb, Cecilie, Quinn Tom, Dave & Hanna. I'd been at work so they were ahead of me. The sun was shining, I had managed to dress myself to the point where I looked like I knew what I was doing (believe me that is an achievement). The train ride into Helsinki was OK but I wanted to close my eyes in the sun but as there was nowhere to sit I settled for resting my head against the door as we rolled along. As we pulled into the station the train for St Petersburg was flling up with people. I remember seeing that there was a member of staff at every door dressed in a very Russian way with enormous hats. Then the ride on the metro was uneventful except for the girl standing on the platform in front of me. What was strange about her was that the way she stood, forced by her odd shoes and the insane tightness of her jeans made it seem as if her knees bent the wrong way. Finally I remember the strong light as I walked down the street to the mamouth old cable factory. It was piercing and even from behind my sunnies it was too strong to really see what was in front of me. The wind was vigourous but I was happy.

*****

The movie last was week - Tha Band's Visit - was also good. I know the proposition of a film in Hebrew, Arabic and Englsih with Finnish & Swedish subtitles doesn't sound so good but it was nice little vignette and very in keeping with "If no one speaks of remarkable things" in so far as it saw the beautiful in the mundane and the two combined to make me quite sad.

*****

Today despite the way I am feeling the kitchen will be busy. I am going to make Mushroom and roast pepper risotto followed by baked rhubard. Risotto is an act of love and probably the dish I love to cook more than any other. For me the challenge with risotto is to continually simplify it. Less is more. So please make sure of a couple of things. Home made stock. Unsalted butter. Dry Vermouth. Remember there are 4 stages to a risotto.

1) Soffrito
2) Rice in
3) Other ingredients in
4) Butter and parmesan

If you use these 4 stages to know where you are a risotto is simple to make.

Serves 2
Olive oil
Garlic finely chopped
Carrot finely chopped
Celery finely chopped
Onion finely chopped
110g Arborio rice
350-400ml Chicken stock
Red Peppers roasted to intensify their sweetness and then cut into strips
Mushrooms finely chopped and fried in butter and with lots of ground pepper
Fresh Thyme
Unsalted butter
Parmesan grated
Salt, Pepper

Heat the oil in a pan, and gently fry the garlic, onion, carrot and celery for a few minutes. Add the rice and let it fry for a minute or so. Then add the vermouth, let it be absorbed and the harsh vapours to disappate. Now add a ladel full of stock and begin stirring. As the stock is absorbed add more one ladel at a time. As it cooks check the seasoning. Do not add to much salt too early as the cheese will add saltiness. Keep stirring. When the stock is nearly one ladle from been all added put in the mushrooms and the thyme. When all done remove from the heat and add the butter and cheese. Stir in and put a lid on the pan. Leave for two minutes. Check for seasoning one last time. Serve with the red pepper on top.

Update: The risotto was very good, however I think cracked pepper would be better than ground pepper with the mushrooms and we found out that we had no parmesan! However as those of you who read this blog no we try not to wasit anything so we had a stash of parmesan rinds in the freezer. They were swiftly pulled out, warmed up and enough cheese was coaxed off them to save the day.