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.

From dense fog to shocking sunshine

It has been an exceptional winter in Southern Finland. First, the winter was so mild that there was no snow on the Kemiö Island and the sea was barely frozen. Then in February, it was rainy, and Annie even found small new chanterelles in the woods. The nature was still in late autumn. The forest didn't get the usual snow cover.

 

Secondly, after the dense rain and fog, the sun appeared and suddenly, in early March, the ice melted and the sea was all open.  It was full spring – birds were twittering, flies and wasps were buzzing, and the trees and bushes were pushing buds.  The first ones to burst into flowers will be the cherry trees.

The sun was absolutely shocking - to bright even with sun glasses.

On Saturday, people were already playing golf at the Meri-Teijo golf course. So, it seems we've missed three winter months here.

 

Some of the herbs are already green, like thyme and sage. I let them grow, because, being on a diet and 100 days without any wine or other alcohol, we didn't cook much.  We brought some ready meals with max. 300 calories. Boring, boring....

The island is still kind of sleeping, I didn’t see one single person or animal during my 6 km Nordic walking track. Our Fisherman neighbor in the red cottage had, however, put the fishnets in the sea, which indicates that somebody has been near by. 

 

During two weekends I have been cutting the shoots from five old apple trees. A couple of old branches had to be removed, and it succeeded quite well with a pruning hook. Of course, with my technique the sawing took some time, but I am proud of the result. It also kind of irritates the men who prefer watching tv or waiting for a better moment to do this kind of work.

There is not much more you can do in the garden at this point – there can still be ‘takatalvi’, late winter with snow and frost. If that happens in April, I don’t know how the birds, who have flown all the way from Africa and built their nests here, will survive.

Knits and Christmas mustard

Thanks to the unexceptionally big catch of cep mushrooms last autumn, I gave dried mushrooms in glass jars as Xmas presents to our kids, together with some of the best recipes for pasta and soup. So, that was easy and didn’t require much preparations in December. Instead, I spent my time and energy for knitting and cooking, mostly in Helsinki, because we spent the Xmas there.

Knits for a baby-girl

My first grandchild is expected to be born in two months time (February). A winter baby needs warm clothes in the Northern hemisphere, said my granny instincts immediately after I heard the glad news. The babies sleep outside in Finland every day, no matter how cold it is. It is regarded healthy!

I bought white and light grey Italian Lana Grossa Baby Wool before I knew the gender and planned to knit a jacket, hat and pants for the unborn baby as a Xmas present. I had to spend several weeks to find a pattern that I knew existed in the 1970s when I used it for my own daughter. Googling baby knits didn’t help, I couldn’t find that particular pattern. Until I started to search in Swedish and 1950s old patterns.

There it was, on a Swedish webshop selling antique knitting patterns! I paid 2 euros to the bank account of the web shop owner and she sent the old pattern by post. While waiting for this pattern I knitted a baby blanket from Alpaca-Silk yarn. The white yarn lasted  also to bootees, mits, scarf and another hat, so our baby-girl will get the whole set of accessories.

 

Spicy home-made mustard is a must with the tradional ham and  Xmas casseroles.  I make it every year well in advance with Kalevei Keihänen's recipe. He was a famous Finnish businessman in the 1960s and 70s in the travel industry. My first trip to the Mediterranean was on Keihänen’s package trip to Isla de Majorca in 1972. A couple of years later, as a young student, I started cooking in my own kitchen and this mustard was one of the first successes. It has stayed on my Xmas menu ever since.    

Xmas mustard á la Keihänen

• 2 dl Colman’s mustard powder
• 1 ¼ dl sugar
• 2 dl whipping cream
• 4 eggs
• 1 teaspoon potato flower
• 1 tablespoon vinegar

Combine all the ingredients except for vinegar in a stainless-steel pan and mix them until smooth. Put the heat on and stir all the time. (You can also cook the mustard in water bath.) Heat the mixture to boiling point and then take the pan from the stove to cold water to cool down. Add the vinegar, fill two small glass jars with the mustard and seal them well. The mustard is ready immediately, but it gets even better with time.

Darkness, dead leaves and corpse berries

After a busy autumn and several weekends either traveling or at home in Helsinki we headed to the island in the morning of our Independence Day, the 6th of December.

Besides celebrating the independence and relax a bit, we wanted to check the windows, set mouse baits (or killers = hiiribaari in Finnish), rake the dead leaves before the snow comes and make the final preparations in the house for the winter.

 

Precious independence

We Finns take independence very seriously, it is not self evident for us – has never been in the past and is not even today with several new signs of cold war. My father and JD’s father were both as young men (17 when the war started!) defending our country against Russians in the Winter War (1939-40) and in the Continuation War (1941-44).

Luckily both men survived and were able to tell us about it. Thank you, Dad! You made it possible for us to enjoy freedom.

After sauna, we had dinner and sat in candle light surrounded by total darkness, as if we were the only ones on the island. Of course we watched on TV The President’s Independence Day Reception, like everyone does.

 

Last berries before the snow

Corpse berry

Luckily it was not raining or snowing on Sunday, and I worked a couple of hours in the garden, raking leaves and emptying and washing flower pots. All the flowers and leaves were dead, except for the corpse berry (Symphoricarpos albus var. laevigatus). Somehow the name is so representative to the season. At this time of the year, it is normally already icy and snow. Now it was +4 degrees and even the sun popped up for a couple of minutes.



Morning dew, black berries and winter mushrooms

It's autumn. We enjoyed still one warm weekend on the island in late September. It was 14 degrees C in the morning and nearly 20 in the afternoon. Rose joined us, but no youngsters came this time.

Without any rain in the past couple of weeks the grass was very wet. Morning dew was intense and beautiful, showing all the spiders’ nets. The leaves had turned to autumn colors although there hadn't been any frost at night. Most of the apples and plumbs had dropped from the trees. Only some fishing boats were on the sea.

 

Third generation of butterflies

 

Despite of late September, summer flowers were in blossom and the third generation of butterflies were flying around them. I managed to capture by camera the Queen of Spain Fritillary, which is quite rare and not often seen in Finland this time of the year.

Rowan berries shone red and the branches were drooping heavy the huge amount of berries. These are very healthy berries that could be utilized, but they are bitter and I have never picked them for cooking, just for decoration. Instead, I picked some black berries, Sorbaronia mitschurinii in the garden. These berries are said to be very healthy superfood, they have a strong color and a bit bitter taste. I put it in the juicer together with apples and got bright red juice. In addition to all the flavonoids and vitamins, the taste was good, too.

Mushroom steaks

Rose and I went to pick mushrooms and lingonberries. The first winter mushrooms, Craterellus tubaeformis, had popped up. I also found some Albatrellus ovinus mushrooms. These are mild and tasty mushrooms that turn bright yellow inside when you fry them.

I made steaks from them on Sunday. I brushed the caps with egg and then rolled them in breadcrumbs seasoned with lemon pepper. Then I added butter on a hot skillet and fried them on both sides so long that they got a nice brown color outside and yellow inside. If they don't turn yellow but brown instead, then you have picked the wrong mushroom, Albatrellus confluens, which looks almost the same but doesn't taste good. 

 

Harvest time - tons of apples

This weekend in early September was warmer than Midsummer! Wonderful time to pick and preserve what mother nature has to offer. I had a couple of extra holidays and enjoyed fully the harvesting time.  From the forest I picked and dried porcini mushrooms. While they were in the Evermat dryer, I focused on fruit.  

There was a big crop of apples and plums in the garden. This is actually the first summer when the plum trees brought from my mother's garden in Turku are bearing fruit.  I dried a small amount of apple rings and plum halves, however, it was only maybe 0.1 percent of the crop. Then I made one lot of plum lemon marmalade. Preserving the small plums is very time-consuming because the stones have to be removed manually… I picked 170 stones from the kettle.


The chilies were also ripe and I tied them in a thread and just hung them out to dry.

As we have a large family and everyone likes juice, I thought we could use the tons of apples lying under the large old apple trees and make apple juice. We invested in a proper juicer and found a robust one, the largest of Kenwood’s models, most suitable for these amounts of apples. You can feed whole apples in the juicer.  

I pressed altogether seven 10-liter buckets of apples in two days and got 12 liters of juice and 20 liters of pulp. That felt like working in a juice factory, the entire kitchen was filled with all kinds of bowls and buckets. But the juice was very good, sweet and tasty and full of vitamins! I froze part of it, gave some bottles to our daughters in Helsinki and we’ll drink a couple of liters next week. And we’ll continue our juice factory next weekend.

 The days were busy, and to make the cooking easy, we made a lamb-cabbage stew in the oven. We had some lamb shanks and local vegetables, so the ingredients were prima. I fried the lamb first in a frying pan and the shredded cabbage with butter and syrup, too. Then we let it stew four hours in the oven until the meat was tender and came loose of the bones. 

The dessert was made of apples, of course, and in the oven, too. I scattered some oatmeal in a lidded pan, added pierced apples, plenty of cinnamon and some syrup, put the pan in the oven covered and after half an hour the dessert was ready. It was served with Valio’s vanilla sauce.

Feasting on porcini mushrooms

A week ago I checked the forests nearby and didn’t find a single penny bun bolet or porcini (Boletus edulis  in Latin, herkkutatti in Finnish, cèpe in French, Steinpilz in German) mushroom yet. Then one week later, these delicious gourmet mushrooms had popped up. They were everywhere.

 

On Friday evening I picked a basket-full from behind the house. On Saturday I went to a small forest one kilometer away, and couldn’t believe my eyes. Within an hour I had the basket and two plastic bags full, altogether 8 kgs of gourmet porcini mushrooms, which is an all-time record for me. There have been summers that I didn't find a single edible penny bun, as the worms like them, too. And our neighbors.

First night, we had porcinis 'al naturale'. We put them on a frying pan, first without butter, and after they had dried a bit, added butter only. At the table we sprinkled some Kosher salt  and black pepper on top of them. If you wish, you could also add some Thai soy sauce.

 

On Saturday, I tried a recipe ‘heavenly porcinis’ according to a Finnish recipe Taivaallinen tattipaistos found from Google.
 

Heavenly porcinis

• penny bun mushrooms
• butter + olive oil
• 1 – 2 onions
• a bunch of flat-leaved parsley and/or mint
• 1 garlic clove
• black pepper
• salt

Heat the skillet and add butter and olive oil. Fry chopped onions, and add little salt and some of the parsley and mint (I used both herbs at the same time). At mild heat let them simmer for about seven minutes. Meanwhile, cut the mushrooms into dice or larger pieces. Then add chopped garlic and black pepper, and turn on some more heat. The mushrooms will be added last with some more parsley. Continue frying for about five minutes so that the mushrooms get some color but remain juicy inside.

As we were only two eaters, we couldn’t eat them all fresh. On Saturday I also started drying the mushrooms which is the best way to store them. Our little Evermat dryer was working hard two whole days and nights. At 40 degrees C it took about 6 hours to dry one lot.

I also found two interesting mushrooms in our yard, parasol mushrooms. I have never tasted them although they are graded 3-star and regarded as gourmet food in Italy. I planned to try them on Sunday, but luckily didn’t... JD got some kind of norovirus, and if he had eaten a parasol mushroom earlier, he certainly would have blamed me for trying to poison him with strange mushrooms. I have to try these next year, if I'm lucky to find them. They are very rare.