Russian Movie Night

Our friends came to our house to eat and see a movie. We had a Russian theme and we started with awesome Borscht they brought with them.

After that we watched Battleship Potemkin. I was the only one who hadn’t seen it before. It was a great movie, so I’m glad I finally saw it.

Last, but not least we ate blini with mushroom salad, Cavi-art and cubed pickles.

I tried a blintz recipe from Kasviskeittiössä blog, and it was better than the one I have used before. I doubled the recipe, and we didn’t have any leftovers. If you have more than four eaters or don’t serve a starter, I recommend doubling this recipe.

Blini

5 dl soy or oat milk
25 g yeast
4 dl buckwheat flour
2 tbsp oil
2 tsp syrup

1 tsp salt
1 dl sparkling mineral water or beer

margarine or oil for frying

Heat the milk lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in it. Whisk in buckwheat flour, oil and syrup. Cover with a towel and allow to rise 2-4 hours. Stir in salt and mineral water/beer. Melt the margarine in a pan and add some batter to make a pancake. Fry on both sides until nicely browned. Serve with Russian style fillings, such as mushrooms, chopped onion, vegan sour cream and/or pickles.

Winter Salad

Cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce etc. aren’t at they’re best in the winter, so prefer cabbage, root vegetables or preserved vegetables as salad ingredients. This is an easy beet salad, but boiling and cooling the beets takes some time. Quicker version: use pickled beets, but omit the vinegar.

Beet Salad

500 g beets
water for boiling

1 big apple
2 small pickles
4 tbsp vegan mayonnaise
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
salt and pepper

Boil the beets and allow to cool. Peel and coarsely grate beets and apple. Chop the pickles. Mix everything together and preferably allow to sit in the fridge before serving.

You can also add (red) onion or parsley to the salad.

The Holidays

We spent couple of days visiting relatives and eating. We do love traditional Finnish holiday food, but eating it four days in a row is more than enough. So kidney bean enchiladas for dinner today was a great idea.

Seeing relatives we haven’t seen for a long time was very nice, and we gave and received some presents too. Some of the gifts we got were cooking related. We got a cast iron pot that can be used both on stove and in oven. I think it’ll be very handy. We also got a cat shaped serving bowl (designed by Ylva Olsson) and two cookbooks.

Härkäpapua sarvista is filled with ecological vegan recipes that use ingredients that grow up here in Northern Europe. I’ve already found some interesting recipes: sauerkraut croissants, mushroom roll and hemp and carrot patties sound delicious and I’ll try the recipes in near future. The other book (Jere Nieminen’s Vegaanin kotiruokakirja) concentrates on fake meats, tofu and burgers. I believe the recipes would also please omnivores. I had borrowed a copy of it from local library and have tried  couple of recipes, which were great. Both books are available only in Finnish.

Did you have nice holidays?

Thursday Stir-Fry

I haven’t cooked much with tempeh, because it’s rather hard to find here in Finland. Last week I was visiting my sister in Helsinki and brought home two packaged of tempeh. One is in the freezer for later use and one was used for noodle stir-fry today with vegetables we had in fridge and freezer.

Tempeh and Noodle Stir-fry

3 tbsp oil
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 habanero
400 g tempeh (1 package)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar

2 tbsp oil
1 tsp brown mustard seeds
2 tsp ginger powder
1-2 onions
3 garlic cloves
2 carrots
piece of rutabaga
florets of 1 broccoli
1 bell pepper
2-3 handfuls snow peas (frozen)

100-150 g whole wheat noodles

soy sauce and/or hot sauce for serving (optional)

You can first boil your tempeh 10-20 minutes to remove bitterness. Cube the tempeh and mince the habanero. Slice the onion and garlic. Cut carrots, rutabaga and bell pepper into sticks.

Heat 3 tbsp oil in a wok and fry cumin, paprika and habanero about 30 seconds. Add tempeh and stir to cover with spicy oil. Add soy sauce and rice wine vinegar and stir again. Fry, stirring often, until tempeh is nicely browned. Remove from the wok.

Heat 2 tbsp oil in the wok and fry ginger and mustard seeds about a minute. Add onion and garlic. Fry couple of minutes, add carrot and rutabaga, then bell pepper and broccoli. Boil the noodles 2-3 minutes or according the instructions on the package while you stir-fry the veggies. When the vegetables are almost done, add snow peas. When they’ve thawed, add noodles and tempeh.

Where west and east meet

Today is independence day in Finland. It’s quite common for families to eat someting fancy in celebration of this, and even though any level of nationalism is far removed from us, we decided to make something nice today as well. To celebrate the history of modern Finland, we took a bit from Sweden, a bit from Russia and added something indigenous to Finland. Sums the story of our nation quite nicely and makes a wonderful meal.

The main dish is from Sweden, it’s called pitepalt, a filled dumpling. The recipe was borrowed from our western friends, the great Cooking vegan food up north blog. We ate the pitepalt with Italian salad, which is actually a Russian salad, and lingonberries.

The dessert was more Finnish. Bilberry kukko is like a bilberry pie, but it has crust on top and berries under it. It’s originally from Savo, but nowadays it’s eaten all over Finland.

Bilberry Kukko

Filling:
2-2,5 l bilberries or blueberries
0,75 dl sugar
2 tbsp potato flour

Crust:
250 g margarine
1,75 dl sugar
5,25 dl rye flour
2 tsp baking powder

vegan vanilla ice cream for serving

Mix the filling ingredients together. Grease an oven proof dish and put the filling in it. Beat the margarine and sugar in a bowl. Add the flour and baking powder and mix together. Cover the dish with the crust. I use my hands to make it flat, but you can also roll it on the table and then put on top of the dish. Bake in 200 Celsius degrees 40 minutes or until it’s nicely browned. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Make Your Own Vegetable Broth

Making vegetable broth is easy. I make broth from vegetable scraps that are usually thrown away, like carrot peels, cabbage stems and herb stalks. We collect them into a plastic bag and keep it in the freezer. You can put there nearly anything as long as it’s not rotten, moldy or dirty.

You can use to make broth: (for example)
- carrot, parsnip, rutabaga and other root vegetable peels (wash them well before peeling)
- cabbage, broccoli, mushroom etc. stems
- parsley, dill, basil and other herb stalks
- apple and pear cores
- onion and garlic peels
- green parts of leek
- slightly wilted celery or other vegetables

Do not use:
- potatoes because of starch
- tomato because of acid
- citrus fruits because of acid
- anything rotten or moldy

Think before using:
- beet, red cabbage or other dyeing ingredients. You may not want to use beets for Jerusalem artichoke soup, but they’ll be fine for borcht.
- cabbage. Use only small amounts, because otherwise it’s taste can be too dominant
- I haven’t tried ginger, chili or rosemary, because I think they might have too strong flavour. On the other hand, they could be good for spicy Asian-style soup.

When you have saved a bag full of vegetable scraps, put them in a big pot and cover them with water. Add 1 tsp salt. You can also add peppercorns, herbs and/or bay leaves.

Bring to boil, lower the heat and slowly boil without lid at least an hour. The liquid has reduced from what you started with and the water has turned into a tasty broth. Strain the vegetables out.

Use your broth for soup, sauce, stew, risotto… This batch was used for soup with carrots, parsnip, potatoes, leek and black eyed beans.

KoKoHouse And Mimosa

Today is Restaurant Day. We didn’t have a restaurant this time, mostly because of my flu.

There were two vegan restaurants in our home town and we visited both of them. First we went to KoKoHouse, which had food for all coconut lovers. They served a combination of Asian dishes, mostly Indian and Thai. Pop-up restaurants are usually very popular, so we went there as soon as it opened to make sure there’s food left for us. Being that early wasn’t necessary, they were still setting the table when we arrived. (Sorry about the crappy pictures, we really need a new camera.)

Apple wedges and hemp seed butter as appetizers.

The buffet style table was filled with all kinds of delicious dishes. Lemon rice, Som Tam salad, coconut chutney, spicy potato wedges, awesome peanut sauce, buckwheat flatbread, pumpkin soup… There were also cakes for dessert. Everything was vegan and many things were also organic and gluten free.

My stomach was full before I had even tried everything, so I skipped most of the desserts. The restaurant was in an apartment, and it was quite full of people, so we left immediately after eating. We didn’t go straight to home but went to check café Mimosa, the other vegan restaurant. It was nearly closing time and they didn’t have many things left. We bought Karelian rice pasties and took them home with us to eat them later tonight.

Soup in Jyväskylä

A month ago me and my three coworkers went to Jyväskylä to the Birthday of Finnish national costume. Of course we had to eat something during the day and we found a soup restaurant called Soppabaari (Soup Bar).

Soppabaari is a small and cosy restaurant. It serves soups, pastas, drinks and some tapas style foods. The soup and pasta menu changes daily.

That day they had 5 dishes to choose from, and four of them contained animals or dairy. I asked if the Mexican Vegetable Soup was vegan, and luckily it was. Later I read from their webpage that they always have a vegan option on the menu, and you can also get gluten free pasta if you call them at least half an hour earlier.

The soup was thick and spicy. It was served with bread and some nachos, fresh basil and sesame seeds.

Usually vegetarian soups in restaurants tend to be pureed carrot, cauliflower or other vegetable soups, which do taste good, but soon you’ll be hungry again. They also often contain cream or cheese. This one had beans in it, no dairy products and it was very filling.

I liked both food and the atmosphere very much. If I go to Jyväskylä again, I’d like eat in Soppabaari.

The End of The VeganMoFo 2011

We did it! We posted every day during VeganMoFo. This was the third time we participated and previous years we have skipped some days. Having a theme helped a lot, especially with planning. I’m sure we’ll have a theme next year too.

Yule is getting nearer. I have already started glögg season and today I made first Yule Pastries. They’re usually filled with plum jam, but any jam or marmalade can be used. I used apple jam today.

Yule Pastries

puff pastry
jam or marmalade
optional: icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 225 Celsius degrees. Cut the thawed puff pastry sheets in half to make squares and then cut slits according to the shape you want your pastries be. See the picture below: The ones on the top row are very similar, the finished pastry will look like the pastry on the right in the photo. Bottom left makes the other pastry in the left in the photo. The last one is star shaped like the ones on the top row, but I don’t recommend cutting your pastries this way, because the points of the star will be long and sharp and they burn easily.

After cutting fold the parts marked with red circle in the middle of the square. Put some jam on top. Bake 15 minutes or until nicely browned. Sift some icing sugar on cooled pastries. Serve with coffee, glögg or tea.

Beer

Home made beer (kalja or kotikalja) is made of rye malts and it’s very low on alcohol. It’s usually consumed with dinner or lunch, and often served at special occasions like weddings or other parties. It’s easy to make, I think I should make it more often. I make the beer in a 5 liter bucket, and the recipe on the malt package is too big for my bucket, but here’s a recipe for a smaller batch.

Home Made Beer

3,75 l water
2,25 dl beer malts
1,5 dl sugar
0,5 tsp yeast or 0,25 tsp dry yeast

Bring the water to boil. Mix malts and sugar in a bucket and pour the boiling water on them. Allow to cool lukewarm. Add the yeast and loosely cover the bucket with lid (or towel). Allow to ferment 12-24 hours in room temperature. Filter (with cheesecloth) and bottle and take the bottles to fridge or cellar. Beer is ready next day.

When your beer is filtered, you’ll have about 5 dl malt mash in your sieve. Use it for bread baking, or freeze for later use.