Reindeer feast

A peaceful weekend with just the two of us in the big house. It's a good reason to celebrate it with a good dinner.

We use to buy half a reindeer every now and then from JD’s friend in Lapland. It has been cut to pieces and besides the rump and good steak, there’s also plenty of bones and pieces with little meat. We had a big bag of those bones in our freezer. This Saturday it was time to make a stew out of those bones. I also found one tin of lobster meat in the freezer, so that was to serve as a starter in our feast.

I put the reindeer bones and meat in a big oven-proof steel pan, added water, black pepper, crushed juniper berries and bay leaves, and let it cook 5 hours in 170 degrees C in the oven. Easy, just added water a couple of times.  This is real slow food, the longer it cooks the better.

Meanwhile, I went outside to cut the new shoots of the apple trees. It was strange to do it without any snow, normally it’s done in March and there’s half a meter snow. The apple trees are very old, so they have thousands of new shoots and most of them were too high to reach even with a good Fiskars tool.

After a couple of hours with the apple trees, my neck was hurting, and I put the sauna on (electric sauna inside the house which takes one hour to heat, we don't use the beach sauna at winter time) and continued preparations for dinner. 

JD opened a wine bottle to give it some air. The Italian Regolo wine from Verona region is a nice full-bodied red wine and not too expensive. We bought it in Helsinki, as in winter time the selection in the Kemiö Alko is not so good. In summertime they will add your favorites in their selection, if you ask.

I cut three carrots, a piece of celery and Swedish turnip into small cubes and peeled some potatoes. We bought these organic grown root vegetables in Perniö K-market, as they have a good selection of local products and they are very tasty.

I sautéed the root vegetables in a cast iron pan on the stove to get some color and taste, added leek, potatoes and stock from the reindeer, and let them simmer half an hour and then put the pan aside to wait for the final stage.

After the sauna, the reindeer meat was tender and could be separated from the bones. It’s easiest to pull the meat by hand. I put the meat on top of the root vegetables in the cast iron pan, added some stock and salt, and heated the pan again. Ready! It took only six hours to get this done.

Then we sat down to enjoy the dinner. Toast with Canadian lobster, Lappish reindeer stew, Italian wine and fresh strawberries from Spain.  Not so sustainable… but the root vegetables were local. And we will eat the stew on Sunday as well.