In hybernation

In terms of island life, the autumn and the whole winter – almost over now – went by in hybernation. The city life, on the contrary, was busy and interesting - both at work and on holidays. We had many parties and made two awesome trips to North America. After Christmas it was quieter and we made a couple of short visits to Kemio, to check that water pipes are not frozen, to mark trees to be cut, and to take measures of the kitchen we plan to renovate in the spring.

There was just a little snow on the island, the sea was frozen only partly, and there was very little to do outside. The houses in the neighborhood looked also abandoned but beautiful, and during the few walks I did, I didn’t see a soul. One big raccoon dog lied dead and half eaten on my path.

Winter is a good time to cut trees because there are local men available who can do it professionally. We had quite many large pines, spruce, birch trees and aspen cut from around the house. There will be some work for us when the snow smelts to collect all the small branches and someone needs to come and remove the stumps.


We are quite enthusiastic about the kitchen renovation, as the old cabins have served over 30 years and look miserable. We discussed a lot of letting the old wood-burning stove go because it has never been used but it looks nice and kind of cosy. But it will go! Also the floors, walls and ceiling need to be redone. First big thing is to pull down everyting to be able to take exact measures and do the ground work. And, to select the supplier and design for the new kitchen - keeping somehow the country house feeling.  This is where the free time will be spent from now on!

Little things beautiful

Just two weeks ago we had the hottest days in summer, 25 degrees C. And now, it's raining and getting dark, it's windy and cool. This is autumn!

I was prepared to go to the forest and pick mushrooms, loads of CEP mushrooms during the weekend. On Saturday, I equipped myself with a large basket and several plastic bags, a jingle bell to warn the bears - our neighbor said a bear has been seen in that forest -, a scarf to cover my head from elk flies and a water bottle to survive several hours in the forest. I killed at least 27 elk flies during the two hours I spent in the forest. Then it started to rain. 

To my surprise, not a single mushroom of any kind was there. Either it is still too early or August was too dry. So, disappointed, I had to pick some lingonberries instead. There's a lot of them, not quite ripe yet, but if you go to a sunny slope you will get red ones. And I killed some more elk flies when back at the house. They are disgusting little insects and masters in hiding.

My husband JD and his son Hank grilled us elk chorizos that were seasoned with juniper berries, bought in Helsinki at Chef Wotkins shop. With mashed potatoes and autumn vegetables that was an excellent autumn meal.

On Sunday I worked in the garden. I turned the compost and moved the almost done food waste from Biolan compost to leaf compost to continue the process. Next spring there should be strong black humus soil in the leaf compost.

The garden is full of beautiful little things. Roses are still in blossom and quite many perennials. All the herbs are blossoming: thyme, lemon thyme, mint, lemon balm, coriander. Northern highbush blueberry, black and red currants and gooseberry bushes still have some crop left. I removed the bird nets and now the thrushes can fiest with the rest of the berries. Black chokeberry is now ripe but I don't like the taste, so the berries will remain in the bushes.

Garden plums are almost ripe, and there's plenty of them. But what has happened to apple trees? There are no apples. Last year we bought a juicer and made tens of liters of apple juice. This year we cannot make a single liter.

Lession learned during the weekend:

• "Quand on a pas ce que l'on aime, il faut aimer ce que l'on a." Something like if you can't  get what you want, it's better like what you have.

 

In search of local foods

August is the best time to enjoy foods grown locally and picked at peak ripeness and best taste. There are some farms and shops that sell Kimito grown products, for example meat, flour, bread, berries and vegetables.

We managed to get almost everything for one weekend using local foods. On the way from Helsinki to the island we stopped at Pohja village to check Westchark  meat that can be bought from Deli Tukku. The shop had already closed at six, but the owners were in the Glöden restaurant next to the shop, and we could get our meat from the restaurant, the Black Angus steaks and chorisos, ordered by phone earlier.

Lamb meat can be bought lamb meat from Westankärr estate and great turkey sausages from a farm Kirakan tila.

There’s a good selection of vegetables from local producers at Perniön K-Kauppa. I bought 7 kgs of cucumbers and pickled them.

At this time of the year, it is also the crayfish season, and local crayfish can be bought,  cooked with dill, at Ölander (signs on the road from Perniö to Kemiö/Kimito) or Perniön K-Kauppa.

Baking pot bread

I forgot to buy crusty bread for the breakfast in Helsinki (not available in Kimito) and remembered a recipe my colleague once gave for a bread to be made in a cast iron pot. 

The wheat and rye flour for the bread came from from Kemiön mylly. It was easy to make and succeeded beyond expectations – Crusty and warm and soft inside! I made the dough previous evening by just mixing the 7 dl flower, salt , little yeast and 3 dl water, preheated the pot and lid in 230 degrees Celsius, baked the bread 30 minutes under the lid, and 15 minutes without the lid to get some cover.

Excellent rye bread can be bought from Kemiön leipomo  which is, unfortunately, not open on Saturdays.

 

Wild foods

On top of what you can buy, the forests are full of berries and mushrooms. I was looking for CEP mushrooms, but it is still too early for them. Instead, I found and picked Craterellus cornucopioides, black chanterelles, which are rather rare or difficult to find in Kimito and, in my opinion, they are more aromatic mushrooms than yellow chanterelles. These black mushrooms are are very good in a soup.

And wild raspberries with vanilla sauce is the best seasonal dessert. Combined with blueberries, that will be a totally different taste. If preserved, it's called Queens jam.

 

Ram testicles on my plate, OMG!

We were lucky to have one holiday week in the beginning of August when the temperature rose above 20, which, together with sunshine, made it the best week of the year on the Kemiö (Kimito) island. The headcount at our house has exceeded ten – including 4-5 children -  throughout the summer, and when the sun appeared, we escaped the hullabaloo with JD and took our first boat ride this summer around the island.

The main island is some 50 km long, so there is program for the whole day to go round it. JD likes the speed with all motor vehicles, and with 50 knots speed it didn’t take so many hours… We started at Strömma, filled the tank in Förby and headed to Kasnäs. Then we followed the Western coast and passed Högsåra, Dragsfjärd and Karuna, and turned towards Angelniemi and Mathildedahl and back to Strömma. The sea is most beautiful when you see it all open towards Hanko, and on the West towards Gullkrona.

While we were boating, Hank had prepared a surprise for us. He had agreed with Westankärr farm to buy ram testicles when they next butchered sheep. That day happened to be our boating day, and he got 4 kgs of ram balls, which he cleaned, cooked first in a broth, sliced the balls, and battered the slices in egg and bread crumbs. Last, he fried them on a griddle.  

This delicacy (?) was served to us as dinner. Oh my! I first thought that I can’t eat it, however, when I saw JD and Hank taste and take some more, I tasted one. Very mild taste, not bad, but not my favorite either. Even Emma (9 years) tasted the balls and she ate four! Lemon juice was a nice accompaniment to the balls, which in the USA they call Rocky Mountain Oysters.

Luckily we also had some grilled lamb chops in garlic-rosemary marinade and Feta salad, and a bottle of very good wine. Don Melchor was strong and fullbodied with a nice finish.
There’s plenty of wild raspberries growing along country roads. Our splendid summer day ended with a bowl of wild raspberries and vanilla sauce.

Pizza day became favorite

Next day we made pizza in the Big GreenEgg. It was fun, all the kids and young men who are not used to baking liked it a lot. Everyone made their own pizza, rolled the dough and chose  their ingredients. It took a couple of hours to make altogether 12 pizzas, first to heat the Egg to 350 degrees C, and then each pizza took 5 minutes in the grill.

I didn’t expect that you can make really crispy pizzas at home with a grill, but with a pizza stone they were perfect. The secret is in the dough (we bought Fazer ready made frozen dough) and the heat! This was so successful that we made it already a second time, and for sure, many more times with kids.

The cool of the summer

June was cold and rainy. The hottest thing in Midsummer, when our summer holidays began, was the fresh strawberry meringue cake (Brita-kakku in Finnish), that we ate as dessert outside at 14 degrees.

That was before we got our Big Green Egg which JD got in July. It brought a lot of heat, smoke and joy in our outdoor kitchen. Meanwhile, we spent the last week of June in South Spain warming our bodies. It was warm indeed down there, 36 degrees in Cadiz and Gibraltar and 40 degrees in Sevilla and Ronda.

Back in Kemiö, we had three warm and sunny days. Then the rain and coolness was back. A good thing with the rain is that the mushrooms grow fast in the forests. I am expecting a good year for chanterelles and CEP mushrooms.

With the house full of children and grand children aged from 5 months to 13 those three warm days were hectic and mostly spent by the sea or cooking.

 

The cooler days we spent mostly cooking and eating. JD and Hank were thrilled with  their new investment -  the Green Egg is the fifth grill already, but the best of all (they say)! With the original charcoal and a bunch of ‘necessary’ accessories our men were able to cook delicious steaks, picanha, pulled pork, smoked salmon and a lot more. It is true slow cooking, the pulled pork meal took seven hours to do. My job remained to do salads and other side dishes.

One favorite side dish this summer was the Moroccan tomato salad that contained salted preserved lemons (I had put 5 kgs of lemon in jars with salt already in April, see Jamie Oliver's recipe).

Moroccan tomato salad

5-6 large tomatoes, skinned, deseeded & cut into strips
1 red onion, finely sliced
Rind of 1 preserved lemon, cut into thin strips
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
Freshly squeezed juice of half a lemon
1-2 tablespoons capers
1-2 tablespoons kalamata olives, finely chopped
A  bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley, fresh coriander & mint leaves, finely chopped
1 teaspoon paprika
Sea salt and black pepper

Another nice sauce was Turkish yoghurt mixed with harissa paste. You can also buy this North African chili paste, at least in Helsinki.

Our girls Emma and Hanna prepared the desserts, mainly fresh strawberries in different formats.

Toxic spring delicacy, morel mushrooms

As I missed the skiing holiday in March due to busy times at work, I took a short vacation on the island the first week of May. So far, it has been wonderful, spring is here! White wood anemone is in blossom everywhere where you look at.

We were driving around the island with navigator on small roads I haven’t seen before. The road took us to a beautiful mansion, Sjölax, where we admired their well-attended outside cowshed.

The mansion dates back to 16^th century. There are beautiful old oak trees around the house. We have sometimes ordered some fire wood from the farmer.

I had planned to work in the garden to move some rose bushes and turn a slope overgrown with weeds to a flower bed. I bought plants from Kemiö Agrimarket and planted some stonecrop on the slope, because it’s sunny and dry, and those are the only flowers that survive there.

As it has recently been raining and the temperature was above 10 degrees, it should be the season for spring mushrooms, morel mushrooms, Gyromitra esculenta.  I have never found any, but decided to go in the woods behind our house to check. I had a plastic bag and surgeon’s gloves with me. It was amazing, there they were!  I found enough for one meal.

Morel is a toxic mushroom, potentially fatal if eaten raw, but it is one of the best mushrooms and a delicacy in Finland. It requires correct preparation. I parboiled them twice in plenty of water.

Tomorrow we’ll make a creamy stew. Hopefully the poison has boiled away!

Easter with and without traditions

Easter is as much family time as Christmas in Finland. It normally starts on Palm Sunday when little wizards (kids of the neighborhood) come knocking on your door and say ‘Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks, terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks, sulle vitsa, mulle palkka’. Then you have to give them some chocolate eggs, candy or money. This tradition happens later, on Easter Saturday, on the west coast of Finland and on the islands, where they also have Easter fires. When I was a kid in Jyväskylä, in central Finland, we also dressed up as wizards on Saturday.

A terrible flu made me change the menu at our traditional family dinner at Good Friday. We normally serve lamb with mint jelly and garlic potatoes and a Russian style pasha made with quark.

To make the 11-persons dinner as easy as possible, we had a simple shrimp cocktail with avocado as a starter. For the main course we bought two large cans Confit de Canard each having 12 duck legs cooked in duck fat, 2 kgs frozen Jerusalem artichoke puree (to be thickened with cream), frozen cranberry and one liter good red wine sauce. We warmed the cans first in hot water to make the fat melt. As the meat is overripe the legs break apart easily. To pick them from the large cans was greasy and messy. However, we managed to get most of the legs in one piece on a pan and put them in the oven for 20 minutes in 200 degrees.  They were tasty and served the purpose.

 

I had started the preparations for the dessert, lemon tiramisu, before the flu hit me by making home-made lemon curd, which is the most important ingredient for this tiramisu. I chose the micro-wave recipe, and it was great! As so often, the dessert was the best part of the meal.  

Anyway, the most important part of the dinner was to have the family together. My  two-months-old grand-daughter, still nameless, was present for the first time and moving from lap to lap. After dinner, we played Alias game until midnight and laughed a lot.

On Saturday, as there were three young men with us on the island as well as many kids eager to help and some women who needed exercise, we started logging and making firewood. We need wood for the beach sauna, fire places and outside bath tub. Simo and Hank used the chain saw and logged some birches, aspen and pine trees.

Because there were big piles of smaller branches and twigs after the firewood had been chopped, we made a big fire on the field and burned them the whole evening. Late at the sunset, we also grilled some sausages in the embers, and the kids loved that.

Everybody was exhausted after all that physical exercise and being outside the whole day. Hot beach sauna was a great way to end that day. Normally we use the beach sauna from midsummer until September and the electric sauna in the winter time, but it was great to have the wood-fired beach sauna already at Easter.

My flu got better and the weather turned warmer and sunnier towards the end of the Easter, and on Monday it was already +8 degrees. We saw the hepaticas blossom when we headed back to town.