First chanterelles popping up

Thanks to the rains in June, the chanterelles have started to pop up, actually one week earlier than normally. I found the first small chanterelles on 24th June. However, they were so few that have to wait a couple of weeks until we get enough for a meal. Behind our house there’s a forest with plenty of chanterelles.

There are also some flowers that have been placed under protection in Finland, such as Lesser Butterfly-orchid (valkolehdokki) which was in blossom right after Midsummer.

In the garden the Iris pseudacorus (kurjenmiekka) is the most handsome flower at the moment.

On a cool rainy day we drove with my sister-in-law Rose to Söderlongvik gardens  to buy some chili and tomato plants as well as more flowers…

Summer soup

Once in the summer we cook the so called ‘summer soup’ from the first small carrots, cauliflower, peas and Siikli potatoes. This was the day. We found all the ingredients along the road in small stalls where you can pick what you need and leave the money in a box. You get fresh and often organic grown vegetables - and support local farmers. There's a proverb on Kemiö, in Swedish:  'Håll pengarna på ön!' which translates 'Keep the money on the Island!'

The spinache leaves are normally hard to find, but this year the local S-Market surprised us. Without spinace the soup is not as it should be.

The summer soup requires dark rye bread, and Kemiö bakery has definitely the best rye bread in Finland. They have won awards for that. You just have to go before noon to buy it, otherwise the shelves may be empty. With warm bread and butter, this milky soup becomes a delicacy.

Midsummer feast

We started Midsummer preparations already in May, when JD bought 5kg of veal tenderloin in vacuum. He planned that after six weeks in our refridgerator at 0 degrees the meet would be just perfect to be grilled in our Midsummer feast. At that time we counted 15-17 persons to join us, but the final number reduced to 11, just family and one new partner/friend to my son. So there was plenty of meet…

The weather was perfect on Midsummer eve, sunny and +20C. We fetched the preordered potatoes – the first Siiklis – from our favorite potato seller on Turuntie.  My sister-in-law brought 8 liters of strawberries grown in Muurla.

The day was so hot, that kids were bathing in the sun and even swimming in the sea. I cleaned the beach sauna and started heating it at 3 pm with birch logs.

Then I saw a bird’s nest above the sauna door, it was swallow’s nest. We decided to move it to a better place, but then while moving the nest noticed that it had five nestlings. This was tragic – the mother swallow didn’t find the nest and the nestlings were abandoned. All our fault! Later in the evening another swallow (or maybe the desperate mother) flew against a window and got a heart attack. We had to bury that bird, too. For Emma (5 yrs) this was too much, she cried.

It took six hours to make the sauna so hot that it would stay hot all night for several groups of visitors. Meanwhile, we cooked dinner, and at 6pm we raised the Finnish flag and started eating outside.

Our menu was quite typical Finnish Midsummer menu (for 11 persons):

Siikli potatoes (4 kg), butter, dill
Various types of Baltic herring
Smoked Norwegian salmon (one large fish)

* * *

Veal tenderloin, grilled in one peace (2 tenderloins, appr. 3.5 kg, seasoned with Kosher salt, black pepper and dried herbs)
Green salad with 5 herbs dressing  (Virgin olive oil, white balsamico, Herbamare, basil, sage, thym, mint, rosemary, black pepper, honey)

* * *

Strawberries
Lime Mascarpone cream, mint leaves

The sun was shining all night and the music was reggae. Smaller ones went to sauna first, then to a hot tub and to bed.  Younger men sneaked inside to watch football (European championship games) and others were sitting outside long after midnight.

Midsummer day was rainy and easygoing. We had late breakfast/brunch and went for a walk just before the rain.

We repeated the rituals with sauna and hot tub, and for dinner JD prepared on the grill a special entrecote Wagyu steak from New Zeeland (normally not available in Finland, but he found it just before Midsummer). The two kilos was just enough for good-size rib-eye steaks for the eight of us left for dinner. JD added only Kosher salt to the meat which was very tender and juicy, tasted excellent and turned out to be the best steak we ever had. Even little Ollie said nam, nam.

More noise



Little Ollie was mainly busy with the tractor

 A week to go until Midsummer, and we got some life to the house. JD's sister, daughter and her partner with their three kids (aged from 2 to 10) spent the weekend with us. The house was suddenly filled with noice - around the clock.

Men were cleaning the terraces and patios with pressure washer, carried the grills (yes, JD has several...) and heavy outdoor furniture out from the garage and prepared the summer kitchen for the season while the girls went to buy summer flowers in Agrimarket and Cassandra downtown Kemiö. Luckily we took the bigger car, because we found irresistible flowers and had 50 plants in the trunk on the way back.

The garden looked good because it had been raining. The poppies that had not blossomed a week ago, had almost withered. Everybody was busy doing something out of doors (again moving the lawns as well) and so we were very hungry in the evening. I made children's (and actually everyone's) favourite dish, pasta bolognese - takes only some 30 minutes to cook, is simple and makes everyone happy. Served with grated cheese and good South African pinotage it beats many restaurants' food. 

Pasta bolognese for 10 people
- take a large cast iron pot (e.g. Le Croiset)
- chop 2 large onions and 5 gloves garlic, cook in olive oil
- add 1.5 kg of good minced meat (beef), let it brown
- season with black pepper and 2-3 spoonfuls of dried basil (or fresh)
- pour one large can of Bertolli pasta sauce (2.2 liters) in the pot
- let it simmer while you cook 1 kg spaghetti

It was too cold to eat outside. Before dinner, we went to sauna, and after dinner we watched a family movie alltogether, Mrs. Doubtfire. Even seen the third time, it was great!

On Sunday, I made a walk in the forest with Henna (10 yrs). We saw Rhododendron Tomentosum (suopursu) which smells strong and can be used as a herbal medicine.

We saw Finland's national flower,  Lily of the Valley (kielo), which was my mothers' favorite wild flower and she had them in her wedding bouquet. All the roadsides were taken over by hundreds of wild Lupinus polyphyllus (lupiini). 

Fight against beetles

We were celebrating JD's birthday in the city with all the kids and some friends in the new Boulevard Social Restaurant (very tasty but also tight and noisy for our group of 17 people..), and therefore had only Saturday evening and Sunday to spend on Kemiö island. In 6 days all these new flowers had popped up!

To my big surprise, also the scarlet lily beetles (liljakukko), whom I learned to know last summer, had already started to eat lilies, most of them had wholes on the leaves.
And the little red beetles were all mating - that means that next week there would be no lilies left! I found from Google that the only way to get rid of them is to boil them. So I headed to the flower bed with a kettle of boiling water and picked these little creatures two at a time with rubber gloves and dropped in the boiling water. I went back a couple of times, and found more.
I guess this has to be renewed next week.

For dinner, we cooked virgin potatoes grown in Perniö and sold by the road (the seller was drunk again as he did last summer almost every time we passed by). With butter, dill and baltic herring it was delicious. For desert, I made a compote of rhubarbe growing in the garden, seasoned with cinnamon and vanilla, which needed then vanilla ice cream to balance the acidity of rhubarbe. So, this weekend I said Goodbye to my low-carb diet.

Weeds taken over

I had a short stay with my son on the island, just one night, to mowing the lawns and check that the newly planted flowers are doing well. Weeds taken over the lawn! Millions of dandelions everywhere, actually very beautiful. It's amazing how much a plant can grow in one week! My son Yaffa spent several hours with the mower to get the grass look like grass (he was paid for the job, otherwise would rather play some games in the basement..).

It was +23C, sunny and as hot as in the best days in July. Had to protect skin from burning. The first summer day!

I made a light salad for lunch, some lettuce, cherry tomatos (unfortunately from Spain at this time of the year), basilika and buffalo mozzarella with dressing of virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, Herbamare and black pepper. Tasted summer!

After the lawn was done, apple trees looked fantastic - the buds had just opened and the trees were in full blossom. That view you cannot miss, it lasts only one week. It was a pitty that we had to leave for Helsinki early in the sunny afternoon.

Lizards and bats woken up

Another peaceful weekend, just JD and I, in the big house. Finally the sun started to warm up all those apple, plumb and cherry trees waiting eagerly in bud. It took only one sunny day for the first white flowers of the cherry trees to pop up.

Leena Törmä, an artist living in Turku, has made this garden statue.

I worked with some flower beds, but most of the time just enjoyed the sun and warmth, just like the statue in my garden. Besides me, there were some other creatures in the garden bathing in the sun, a lizard (viviparous lizard, sisilisko) and I also saw a copper brown blindwarm or slow warm (Anguis fragilis, vaskitsa) moving slowly through grass. Yäk, to me it is a snake, although I know that it doesn't do any harm and it has been placed under protection.

In our house, somewhere above the living room window and under the roof, there lives a colony of bats which are also under protection in Finland. So we have the pleasure of enjoying them flying around in the evenings. This weekend the bats had also woken up from their winter sleep to find something to eat. Luckily they are small and not vampyres - anyhow a bit disgusting.


Lamprocapnos spectabilis (särkynyt sydän) almost in blossom



Last tulips (tulppaani)



Still spring

Bad weather on Saturdays continued. The wind was blowing hard bringing showers every now and then. It was too cold to do anything in the garden. This is unusual at this time of the year. Anyhow, I went to my usual walk to the forest.


Oxalis acetosella

Some new spring flowers were trying to blossom. There was Oxalis acetosella (ketunleipä, käenkaali), which is edible and has some vitamins. I remember eating it as a kid when we were playing in the close-by forest. 

 

Then the first pink wild blueberry flowers had appeard in the forest. There's plenty of wild blueberries on Kemiö Island, last summer we picked several tens of liters of them. 



Bloody dock

In the garden the Bloody dock (Rumex sanguineus; viinisuolaheinä) surprised me. I bought it last summer as a salad and then planted the rest not used in the salad. I thought that will die in the winter, but it is perennial and doing well after all that snow and frost we had last winter. There's also plenty of stinging nettles (Urtica dioica; nokkonen) popping up under the bushes. I decided to make a nettle soup on Sunday night, the first try ever.

Sunday, the second in May and Mother's Day, was luckily sunny and +13C. I spent all the day out of doors, planning what to do with the flowers and herbs during the summer. The men came to install the pier that was taken on the shore for the winter, so now we are ready to welcome the summer (except for the boat, which will be brought in June). Actually, there's a lot of things to be done in the house before we'll start the summer. Our upstairs bathroom is being renovated and that brings a lot of dust allover. There'll be a lot of cleaning before the holidays can start.