It is official

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

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

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

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

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