The Grand Finale of Vegan MoFo 2012

This post is the last post of VeganMoFo 2012. The month has passed quickly, and we hadn’t tried all the interesting recipes we have found from the old cookbooks. You may see recipes from 1920’s in the future too.

Cabbage rolls are tasty and filling. Making them is time consuming, but they’re definitely worth it. The usual filling is rice and  minced meat, but the old cookbook had a recipe with a mushroom filling. We’ve always baked the cabbage rolls in oven, but this recipe instructed cooking them on stove top. Nearly all cabbage dishes are served with lingonberries here in Finland, and we had these cabbage rolls with lingonberry jam, boiled potatoes and rosolli.

Cabbage Rolls with Mushroom Filling

1 cabbage
water

filling:
1 dl rice + water for cooking
1,5 dl salted mushrooms + water for soaking
2 tbsp oil or margarine
1 small onion
1 dl cream
pinch of white pepper
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp dry bread crumbs
(salt)

margarine for frying
water or vegetable broth
1 dl cream
1-2 tbsp wheat flour (optional)

Boil the cabbage leaves until they’re soft enough to roll. You can either separate them first and then boil, or boil the whole cabbage head and then separate the leaves, I prefer boiling it whole. Cut the thick center vein thinner.

Cook the rice according to the instructions on the package. Soak the mushrooms until they’re not too salty. Then chop finely. Chop the onion and small inner leaves of the cabbage. Heat the oil in a pan and fry onion and chopped cabbage until lightly browned. Add the rest of the filling ingredients.

Put about 1 tbsp filling on each cabbage leave and roll. Melt the margarine in a pan and fry the first batch cabbage rolls until browned. Transfer them to a large pot. Rinse the pan with small amount of water and pour to the pot. Continue with the rest of the cabbage rolls, rinsing the pan after each batch. Cover the pot with lid and simmer until the cabbage is soft. Put the cabbage rolls on a serving dish, whisk the cream to the sauce (and add wheat flour mixed with small amount of cold water if you want thicker sauce). Simmer 5 minutes and serve the sauce with the rolls.

A Salad From The Finnish Mid-West

This one is a great and simple salad. It possibly originates from the area of Häme in Finland, from where it spread to other parts of country. It is made from simple ingredients, and nowadays mostly eaten at Yule time, but in the centuries past, it was likely a much more common salad, as in some parts of Finland it was called sallatti (literally “salad” in english) instead of rosolli. The original recipe called for herring and whatever, but we naturally skipped them entirely, as it represents just one of the million variations of this salad.

Rosolli

3dl cubed beets
2dl cubed carrots
2dl cubed potatoes
1 small onion
1 cubed pickle
1 big sour apple
grinded white pepper

Boil beets, carrots and potatoes, peel them and cube them. All ingredients are mixed together in a bowl and seasoned with white pepper. Serve with vinegar and/or oat cream or soy youghurt.

Old vegetarian peasoup

This is a real vegetarian recipe from the 1920’s! Well, okay, lacto-vegetarian by today’s standards, but anyway. It’s one version of the eternally popular peasoup (“hernekeitto”) we love over here. The very smooth texture makes it great comfort food for the cold season. We just had our first snow in here…

Vegetarian puréed peasoup

2l water
4dl dried green peas
3 tbsp vegan margarine
2 tbsp wheat flour
salt, minced white pepper
1dl oat cream

Dried peas are soaked in water through the night. The following the day the peas are cooked until very soft. Purée the peas with a blender. Fry the flour in margarine for a minute and add the puréed  peas. Let boil for roughly ten minutes. Season with salt and white pepper and add cream. Serve with croutons.

Cabbage Balls

If you like cabbage, you’ll like these balls.

750 g cabbage
water for boiling
4 tbsp oat or soy milk
2 tbsp wheat flour
2 tbsp potato flour
6 tbsp dry breadcrumbs
3 tbsp oil
1,5 tbsp salt (or to taste)
pinch of white pepper
oil or margarine for frying

sauce:
2 tbsp margarine
2 tbsp wheat flour
1 dl oat or soy milk
water (from cabbage boiling)
salt

Boil the cabbage until soft. Chop finely or grind with a meat grinder. Mix all the ingredients together, shape into balls and fry.

Sauce: melt the margarine in a pan. Add flour and fry about a minute. Stir in the milk and enough water to get desired thickness. Simmer 5-10 minutes and season with salt.

Simple Carrot Sauce

In the 1920’s the vegetable selection here in the north was very narrow, especially in the winter. Root vegetables and cabbage kept good in the cellar even in the winter, but cauliflower, green beans etc. were summer food. And people probably hadn’t even heard about sweet potatoes, eggplant, mangos or other exotic things. That’s why the recipes in the books include a lot of carrots, rutabaga, cabbage, potatoes and parsnip. Today’s recipe is made with carrots. We had the sauce with mashed potatoes and browned cabbage, but it goes well with patties too.

Carrot Sauce

5 dl diced (or sliced) carrots
2,5 dl water
pinch of salt and sugar
1 tbsp margarine
1 tbsp wheat flour
1 tsp dried parsley OR 1 tbsp fresh

Boil the carrots with salt and sugar until tender. Add margarine and dried parsley. Mix the wheat flour with small amount of water and stir in to the sauce. Bring to boil and simmer 10 minutes. Add fresh parsley and serve.

Best browned cabbage ever

This is the ultimate “poor man’s sauerkraut”. Tastes exactly like the real thing, even after browning. If you ever plan on making pierogi, pastry or whatever, this one is a pretty killer filling. Or alternatively, as the recipe says, serve it with something awesome, like fried seitan.

Browned Cabbage

2 l thinly sliced cabbage
2 tbsp oil or margarine
2 dl water
2 tsp salt (or to taste)
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp distilled vinegar

Heat the oil in a big pan. Fry the cabbage until lightly browned. Add water and simmer until cabbage is soft. Season with salt, sugar and vinegar.

Fast food with rice and tomatoes

This is a nice and quick side-course, if you have some fresh tomatoes and rice available. Feel free to substitute the rice with oat or whatever rocks your boat, the final result will be delicious anyway!

Rice-filled tomatoes

6 big tomatoes
1 dl rice, water, salt
1 tbsp margarine

Sauce:
1 tbsp margarine
insides of the tomatoes
1 dl oat cream
1 tsp lemon juice

Cook the rice according to instructions. Cut the top off the tomatoes and spoon out the insides. Mix rice with a spoonful of margarine and stuff the hollow tomatoes with the rice. Put insides of the tomatoes in a kettle with the tablespoon of margarine. Put the caps back to tomatoes and insert them into the kettle. Let them cook for a minute or two under a lid. Remove the whole tomatoes, pour cream into the kettle and spice with lemon juice. Serve warm.

Apples and Potatoes for Autumn

An autumnal alternative for boiled or mashed potatoes. The Kokbok recommends serving it with meat, but I recommend beans.

Potatoes with Apples

0,75 l potatoes
water
2-3 sour apples
0,5 dl oat or soy cream
1 tbsp margarine
0,5 tsp salt

Peel and dice the potatoes. Put them to a pot or sauce pan and add water to barely cover them. Bring to boil and simmer until the potatoes are half done (this doesn’t take long). Drain. Dice the apples and add all the rest of the ingredients and 1 dl fresh water to the pot. Simmer until potatoes are done.

Vinegary Cucumbers

A friend of ours is a baker and she had made delicious rye bread and pesto bread to our wedding. We had a lot of leftovers, and we put the rye bread to the freezer and dried the pesto bread in the oven to make rusks. Tonight we had the rusks with cucumber salad. The salad contains a lots of vinegar, so you may want to use half distilled vinegar and half water if you’re not used to eat so vinegary things.

Cucumber salad

1 medium cucumber
salt
1, 5 dl distilled vinegar
2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp white pepper
1 tbsp each fresh dill and parsley OR 1 tsp dried

Peel and slice the cucumber. Put the slices to a bowl and sprinkle salt between layers. Let sit about an hour. Mix the rest of the ingredients together and pour on the cucumbers.

Cabbage Pie

We had a lot of leftovers from the wedding, including a ton of cabbage salad. There was too much of it to eat as a salad before it gets bad, so we used it as a pie filling. The dough recipe was from cookbook and for the filling I sautéd 2,5 l cabbage salad. But here’s the recipe for the original filling too.

Cabbage Salad with Tahini Dressing
(for 4-8 persons)

500-600 g cabbage
salt
2 carrots
1 bell pepper

Dressing
2 tbsp tahini
1 tbsp lemon juice
pinch of sugar
1 garlic clove
freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp water

Thinly slice the cabbage and put to a bowl. Sprinkle with salt and squeeze with your hands until the cabbage starts to get soft. Peel and shred the carrots, dice the bell pepper and mix with the cabbage. Combine the dressing ingredients and mix with the salad.

Cabbage Pie

Dough
3 dl water
20-25 g yeast
0,5 tbsp salt
0,75 dl oil or margarine
about 500 g wheat flour

Filling
3 l cabbage
3 tbsp oil
5 dl water
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
1,5 tbsp distilled vinegar
melted margarine

Dough: Put 1,5 dl lukewarm water and dissolve the yeast in it. Add 2 dl wheat flour, mix well, cover with a towel and allow to rise. Add rest of the water, salt and some wheat flour. Add the oil and more wheat flour and knead. Cover with a towel again and allow to rise.

Filling: Heat the oil in a large pan. Fry the cabbage until it starts to brown. Add water and simmer until cabbage is soft. Add the rest of the ingredients and let cool.

Punch down the dough and divide it in two. Take the bigger piece of dough and roll it to a baking sheet sized rectangle. Spread the filling on it. Roll the other dough ball to a little smaller rectangle and put it on top of the filling. Brush the edges with cold water and close tightly. Brush the pie with margarine and bake in 200 Celsius degrees 30 minutes or until golden brown.