The first sun beams and visitors

It seems that the winter is over – before it really started. A sunny weekend with +7 degrees C attracted more folks to the house. Hank and Angie, 7-year old Sam and his father were already there heating the hot tub when we arrived on Saturday. 

I spent the afternoon raking up twigs and leaves, picking the earlier cut shoots under the apple trees and enjoying the sun after several months of darkness. The sea was already open and a couple of swans were swimming there as in summer.

Boys and their toys

The boys (over 30 years old) took their scooters out of the garage and took a ride. Little Sam practiced with his new kid-size ATV, all-terrain vehicle or four-wheeler. It didn’t take long until he knew how to use it and the three boys went driving a small country road behind the house. I was horrified, but amazingly Sam was in control of the vehicle and he was so thrilled! The kid is not yet at school.

Organic moose dinner

We had 2.5 kg minced moose meat, unfortunately it was bought as frozen and not from my brother who is a hunter. He lives in the center of Finland, and we don't see each other very often. When we visited him once in the autumn, we saw a recently shot moose hanging there. It's a big animal!!

So we decided to prepare an easy dinner that everyone will love:  mooseburgers with mashed potatoes, hot truffle sauce and cold lingonberry sauce. This food is 100 % domestic (if you don’t count the truffles and black pepper), and made mostly of local ingredients and fully organic.

Truffle sauce:

• 1 liter Puljonki’s  ready-made truffle sauce
• 2 dl cream

Pour the sauce in a kettle and add 2 dl cream, stir and let it simmer.

Cold lingonberry sauce:

• 1 liter frozen lingonberries, self picked if possible
• 1 dl sugar

Cook the frozen lingonberries with sugar and let it cool. This is far better than the jelly at food stores as they contain 50% or more sugar.

Mooseburgers (for 10-12 persons):

• 2.5 kg minced moose meat
• 2 dl breadcrumbs
• 5 dl cream
• 4 eggs
• 2 table spoonfuls of thyme
• Black pepper, salt
• Melted butter

Mix the meat well with all the ingredients and let it rest an hour in the fridge. Then make burgers on two large oven pans, spread some melted butter on top of them and cook in the oven 20 minutes in 200 degrees. Meanwhile prepare the mashed potatoes. If you want to save time and have it easy, use 4 bags of frozen Oolannin luomumuusi.

Hot party

After dinner, there was quite a party outside in the dark, in the hot tub. After several hours of heating the tub, the water stayed one hour around 37 degrees. And that's how long they stayed there.

JD and I were offered a slot before the youngsters, but we preferred the normal sauna party.

On Sunday, it was sunny again! The garden was shouting for attention, and I tried to do my best. However, after two hours sweating we had to leave. 

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.

Misty day, abandoned beauties

This time in February there’s always been snow, thick ice on the sea and real winter feeling.  But not this year. I went for my usual 5 km round with Nordic walking (= sticks), spikes in the shoes to avoid falling on icy road. You could hardly see 50 meters ahead, and you better stay on the road. 

The ice is too dangerous on the sea.

There are a couple of old small houses nicely renovated for weekend and summer use on the way. 

But this abandoned house is still waiting for someone to find its hidden beauty. He/She who fells in love with this must have a big bunch of money and patience for renovation. Anyhow, I believe that it could still be saved. There’s one old and quite big house being renovated close by, along the same road, which was in a much better condition, but its renovation has lasted already ten years. And it's no yet ready.

I found another abandoned beauty in our house in a room where I keep some plants and flowers over the winter, to move them outside in the spring as soon as the temperature allows. There was my 6-years old orchidé in full blossom. This is amazing, it never stops flowering. It was outside the whole summer, in full blossom, and then I thought it will take some rest, inside at a window, but alone without much water or care, but on the contrary – it has more flowers than ever. And this plant has never got any nutrients.

Before putting the sauna on, I made a marinade for our chicken thighs:

• 1 kg chicken thighs (with a small bone, ask your butcher to cut them, you cannot find this in supermarkets in Finland)
•  2 rawit chilis (quite hot)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 3 cm ginger
• Sesame oil, sunflower oil
• Light soy sauce

After the sauna, I put the thighs in 250 degrees C oven for 10 minutes and reduced the heat to 180 for the next 30 minutes.  I added some pieces of sweet pepper on the pan with the chicken thighs and once they were ready, cooked rice.    

This simple meal would have been enough dinner for me, but my dear JD wanted to have tarte tatin, which I made with Sikke Sumari’s recipe. And then we enjoyed all this, watching tv, and drinking Amarone. It was actually too good wine to drink with spicy Asian food, but the only wine there was left. The second glass was great. Then when Jimi Hendrix documentary film was going on, we both fell asleep in the arm chairs...

Winter flowers, no mice

Finally, in mid-January there’s so much snow that it looks and feels like winter in Southern Finland. The whole week has been below minus 10 degrees, and the sea is almost frozen, with some open spots under the bridges.

We made one hasty visit on Sunday to check that everything is OK in the house. Piping and heating was normal, and no mice in the cupboards (thanks to a massive amount of ‘hiiribaari’, little boxes with poison inside which makes the mouse so thirsty that it quickly runs back outside to die). 

JD organized his old vinyl records (and listened, too), whereas I went out to check the flowers and bushes and the beach.

The little snow that covered the bushes and earth was like cotton. There were animal tracks, mainly of hare, deer and fox, all over the garden. I would recognize lynx tracks, but unfortunately there weren’t any. Kemiö island has a wide population of lynx, and our neighbor saw once a lynx walking on the ice. We managed to saw the tracks next day. 

This time we didn’t cook. After all the cooking, eating, drinking, chocolate and other goodies during the Christmas time, we are both, JD and myself, on a diet. JD keeps the calories below 1000 and I keep the proteins high and carbon hydrates low, and, of course zero alcohol. Combined with 3 times gym and twice aqua jogging a week, I really expect some results soon. However, Sunday is the exception, we allow ourselves a cinnamon roll with cafe latte.

First snow, silence and candle-light

A thin white layer of snow covered the earth when I and JD arrived in Kemiö on Saturday after the Independence day. Only rabbit and dear spoor were visible, no neighbours at all. The sea was not yet frozen, and a lonely swan was swimming in the cold water. It was -3 C. 

The silence and the total darkness that landed after four p.m. made us lock the doors, put the sauna on, and light the candles. 

I was sitting in a rocking chair and knitting socks like a real old-time grand ma. JD was busy with some new sound devices to enable wireless music, or actually fine tune the settings.

These 'junasukka'
socks go to Santa.

We had bought some minced lamb meet in Helsinki (as you may not find it in the local food store) and ingredients for Bobotie, a traditional South African dish, for the first time. I couldn't find peach chutney or apricot jam for the recipe, but small dried apricot and mango pieces worked quite well. 

This tasty slow food is great at winter time. After the sauna, it tasted so good with a full-bodied Rioja (did not have South African wine). Despite many spices, it was not hot at all, and we'll cook this next summer for the kids.

We were memorizing Nelson Mandela and our visit to Robben island five years ago.  It turned out to be a melancholic but beautiful and relaxing evening.

Bobotie is great winter food 

Covered with moss

It feels strange to return blogging after a full year of busyness at work and laziness at leisure time which prevented me from blogging. 

I have dozens of pictures and memories of time spent on the island last summer, but now it’s too late to go into details. The most joyful thing was the new baby girl, Vappu, who spent her first summer in Kemiö this year. Vappu is JD’s fourth grandchild, and I could practice being grandma.

In the autumn we have spent a couple of weekends in Kemiö. We spent one day, November 16^th, checking that everything was OK after the storms. It was full moon, clear sky and unusually warm, +9 deg. C.

The only flowers left were Japanese lanterns and some sage and mint leaves. But because of the warm and wet autumn, bright green moss had covered all the stones. That was beautiful. A woodpecker was knocking hard to find some worms in a tall pine behind the house. The compost had cooled off. The sea was calm and there were still boats, most of them fishermen.

The sun set at 4 pm! We left right after that, before it became pitch-dark. Next time we come back, it is most likely winter.

Juice factory

We had again a busy weekend on the island. It's August, which means harvesting in Finland. All the berries are now waiting to be picked, juicy and sweet. And normally when you plan to work in the kitchen, it is hot and sunny, just like this weekend.

We picked some 10 liters of blueberries in the forest, resulting in black hands and back pains...
The girls picked black and red currants from our garden and made several liters of juice with Mehu-Maija juice steamer.

I bought 10 kg black currants from Bjursängen berry farm in Parainen (couldn't actually find black currant for sale in Kemiö) and made two lots of strong and tasty juice.

One bat was watching on the window bench...

On Saturday, we also went by boat to visit my sisters and brother in Karuna, Sauvo. My oldest sister has a new summer cottage and she invited all the siblings there. Was nice to meet each other after a long time - and see how much older the others have become (not me:). She had made salmon soup and for vegetarians chanterelle soup. Both soups tasted so good outside.

Traditional cooking

I miss my mother's cabbage rolls at this time of the year. As she is no longer with us to make those, I decided to try wheather I can cook as good rolls as she did. Not quite, but JD liked them a lot (which is a big achievement). I picked the recipe from Eero Mäkelä's cook book. Next time I'll ad some more pepper to the filling.