Putin's Pickles

I was strongly advised against calling my pickles “Putin’s Pickles”. I didn’t follow the good piece of advice, though, as very often is the case. (Will I ever learn?!) These pickles don’t actually have anything else to do with good old Vladimir except for the fact that they are made with a Russian-style recipe – without vinegar, that is.

Besides, many things in Finland are called Putin’s something these days: there’s been Putin’s cheese, Putin’s butter, and there’ll be Putin’s fish, from what I’ve read. All this because European products are no longer welcome in Russia, and now we poor Finns are drowning in food that is not good enough for uncle Vova.

But enough of politics and back to the pickles.

This is the way my parents used to prepare pickles every autumn. I’d never done it before myself, but now it was really the time! It’s not difficult at all, and the result is so much superior to anything you can buy that it is more than worth the trouble (not as much trouble as waiting, by the way). All you need is a bucket with a lid, cucumbers, blackcurrant leaves, horseradish, dill, and brine. One slice of rye bread is also needed to start the fermenting process.

What you need is:

• enough pickling cucumbers to fill a 3-liter bucket


• about 30 large blackcurrant leaves


• a couple of slices of horseradish


• some dill


• 1,5 l water


• 1,5 tbsp salt


• one slice of rye bread

First, make the brine: Bring the water to the boil, add the salt and let it melt. Let cool a couple of hours or overnight. Wash the cucumbers well and place them into cold water. Let them stand a few hours or overnight.

Then take cucumbers out of the water and place them in layers with blackcurrant leaves, dill, and horseradish in the bucket until you’ve used up all of the cucumbers. Pour the brine over the whole – they should be completely covered. If not, prepare more brine. Place one slice of rye bread somewhere in the middle!

Now starts the waiting part: first, only partly cover the bucket with the lid (that means, the cucumbers should get some air). Let stand in room temperature about 2-4 days, or until some foam appears in the liquid. By this time, the cucumbers will have gained their typical smell – a bit sour, yet fresh and very pleasant. The time needed depends on the temperature – I did mine during the great heat wave, and only 2 days were needed.

Then place a small plate on top of the cucumbers and press, making sure all of your future pickles are under water. Close the lid well and place the bucket in your fridge. Check once in a while – after 2 to 4 weeks (mine took almost 4 weeks but do check every few days), the cucumbers will have turned into the most delicious pickles you’ve ever had! They will have changed colour from fresh green to yellowish green, they should be soft yet not too soft, and when you cut them (lengthwise, of course!!), you can see that they are almost translucent from the inside.

That’s when it’s time to enjoy your pickles: cut them lengthwise and eat with rye bread, butter, smetana, and a bit of honey. Or the vegan way: just with sto gram vodka!

Salla's Sunflower Bread

After one month of packing, one week of traveling, and one month of unpacking I’m finally more or less installed to my new home.

Before even starting unpacking, though, I started baking bread. So the first morning in our new home, we already had sourdough bread for breakfast!

I’ve baked a lot of different breads now: Finnish rye bread, spelt bread, a French country-side loaf with 10% rye and 90% all-purpose flour. But today, I baked four loaves of the most delicious bread I’ve baked so far here in Finland!

I came up with this recipe thanks to my friend Salla who loved my rye bread but suggested I could add sunflower seeds to it. At the same time, I thought of adding a bit of spelt for a richer taste and a softer result. And it worked amazingly well! The bread has a crunchy crust, a very soft inside, a nice nutty taste – and the best thing is: the sunflower seeds on top get roasted, so they add an indescribably rich flavour to the whole experience.

This is a basic 1-2-3 recipe, but I write the measures down anyway, just in case!

For two nice small loaves you need:

• 200g sourdough starter


• 400g water


• 200g whole-grain spelt flour


• 400g whole-grain rye flour


• 12g sea salt


• a generous handful of sunflower seeds for the dough, another one for the topping

In a baking bowl, combine starter, water, and the flours. Let stand 20-40 minutes. Then add salt and knead about 10 minutes, or until you just can’t anymore. Add a handful of sunflower seeds and knead one minute more.

Cover the bowl with a moist kitchen towel and let ferment 5-10 hours at room temperature (my dough normally ferments overnight). Then knead the dough quickly again, and form it into two equal-sized balls. Transfer the dough balls into floured proofing baskets. Cover with a kitchen towel and let ferment about one hour.

Heat your oven to 250C. Now you have to be quick: transfer both loaves on a baking tray, brush them with water, cut “sun rays” on top (like in the round bread in this picture) and sprinkle generously with sunflower seeds. Place a cup filled with water on the baking tray for a better crust.

Bake the loaves at 250C for 10 minutes or so, and then reduce the temperature to 200C and bake until well done but not burned, or about 35 minutes more.

Enjoy with butter or good olive oil!

P.S. My camera is still missing - probably in one of those still unpacked boxes - so my N9's camera will have to do for now!

Clafoutis, or the Reason Why Cherries Were Created

For me, summer only really starts the day I can make the first clafoutis, or French cherry pie! This year, that happened on Wednesday. Since then, I’ve baked six clafoutis – that is an average of 1,2 per day. That might tell something about how irresistible this thing is!

The recipe is from my very old version of Larousse de la Cuisine, which I haven’t seen for ages – but that’s ok, because this is one of the few recipes I could recite by heart even if woken up in the middle of the night.

You’re supposed to use cherries without removing the pits, and I’d suggest you really don’t. If you remove the pits, the whole thing gets coloured by the cherry juice, and doesn’t look that great…

For about six servings you need:

• 500g cherries


• 4 eggs


• 80g flour (I use 40g whole-grain, 40g all-purpose wheat)


• 80g butter


• 125g sugar


• 1 tsp vanilla sugar


• 250ml milk

This is how to do it:

Set your oven to 190C. Place the cherries (with their pits still in!) in a round cake form with a diameter of 26cm or so. Melt the butter. Crack the eggs in a baking bowl, and beat them lightly together with sugar and vanilla sugar (I emphasize the word lightly! A bit like when you’re doing an omelette…). Then add flour, stir until it gets well mixes, then add milk and butter, and slightly stir again.

Pour the batter over the cherries and bake your clafoutis until it’s set and nicely brown on the top. Remove form the oven and let cool a bit. Then decorate with confectioner’s sugar and serve – either a bit warm, or completely cooled down. And enjoy the summer! :)

Zucchini Feta Fritters with Tzatziki

When the kids are craving for pasta pesto with broccoli and the somewhat bigger kid  announces he will only eat low-carb for dinner from now on, what does one do? Well, one makes the pasta (10 minutes, remember?), then takes a look at the fridge and comes up with a new, rather quick Greece-inspired recipe!

So I’m proud to present these delicious and fluffy fritters with zucchini, feta, and dill, served with a generous helping of tzatziki. This recipe is not as quick as some others: it took me 20 minutes to make this dish, mainly because I could only fit three fritters easily in my pan at the same time. So, if in a hurry, use two pans!

This recipe is for two people, especially if served with a slice or two of good bread. If you - like me - are not afraid of carbs, that is!

For the fritters:

• 140g zucchini, grated


• 75g feta


• 2 eggs


• 1 Tbsp pine nuts


• 2 Tbsp fresh dill, chopped


• salt and black pepper to taste

For the tzatziki:

• 10cm piece of cucumber


• 4 heaped Tbsp natural yoghurt


• 1 small garlic clove (or to taste)


• 1 Tbsp olive oil


• salt and black pepper to taste

First, make the tzatziki: grate the cucumber very fine and drain in a sieve to get the excess water out. Then combine in a bowl with yoghurt, crushed garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stir, cover, and place in the fridge for the time you make the fritters.

Now, it’s time to make the fritters. First, crush the feta with a fork. Then place all ingredients in a bowl, stir until well combined, and fry the fritters in a large pan with a little bit of oil over a medium heat. This amount of batter results in 6 smallish fritters. It was a bit challenging to fry them – in the beginning, the batter tends to spread a lot, which you need to stop by moving the runaway batter back with a spatula. But after that, it’s easy! Once they’re done from one side (about 4 minutes or so), turn them and fry until both sides are golden brown.

Serve the fritters with tzatziki, sliced fresh vegetables - and maybe some good bread!

 

Home-Made Tortillas with Kidney Beans and Fresh Vegetables

Have you ever taken a closer look at the ingredients of any given tortillas available at the supermarket? I recently did. The ones I found contained 14-15 ingredients, among other things emulsifiers, stabilizers, and preservatives…

Then I read the preparation instructions: one is supposed to warm the tortillas in the oven for 10 minutes. (In the microwave it would go faster.)

Ok, I thought, it can’t take much longer than those 10 minutes to make eight tortillas from scratch. And it didn’t. To be exact, it took 10 minutes and a half for me to have 8 home-made tortillas ready! When the first one was frying, I rolled the next one out, and so on. Note that you need a cast-iron pan to get soft tortillas – oddly enough, when I fried them in a Teflon pan, my tortillas turned too crispy to fold.

And if for the filling one chooses something that doesn’t need to be cooked – like canned beans and fresh veggies - it takes no longer than 15 minutes to have 8 delicious filled tortillas ready to be eaten. From scratch!

So, no reason anymore to buy those industrial “fresh” tortillas as they are ironically called!

This recipe is for 8 tortillas, which is just enough for 4 people as a main course or 8 as a snack.

This is what you need for the dough:

• 300g flour (I used half whole-grain, half all-purpose wheat flour)


• 150ml water


• 50ml sunflower oil


• two pinches of salt


• ½ tsp baking powder

And for the filling:

• 150g sour cream or soft cheese (for a vegan option, use a non-dairy option)


• 2 large ripe avocados


• 2 Tbsp olive oil


• juice of half of a lemon


• a couple of drops of Tabasco sauce


• two tomatoes, chopped


• half of a red pepper, chopped


• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced


• 120g canned kidney beans


• a few lettuce leaves


• fresh cilantro or flat-leaf parsley


• salt and black pepper to taste

To make the dough, just combine flour and salt in a bowl. Make a hole in the middle and add water and oil. (Note that if you’re using only all-purpose flour, you’re likely to need a bit less water. Start with 100ml and add gradually more if needed.) With your hands, work the dough until it’s easy to form it into a ball. Divide the dough into 8 pieces and roll each of them into a very thin tortilla. Don't worry if they're not perfectly round: when you fill and roll them, no-one will notice! Fry your tortillas on a hot pan (without oil) on both sides about 30 seconds, or until dark spots appear. Remember to use cast-iron pan only! Pile the tortillas on a plate and cover them while frying the rest – that way, they’ll keep soft and warm.

For the filling, peel the avocado and crush it with a fork. Add lemon juice, olive oil, Tabasco, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread a generous tablespoon cream cheese or sour cream and avocado paste on each tortilla, then divide tomatoes, onions, red peppers, kidney beans, lettuce, and cilantro/parsley. Add a bit more salt and pepper if you want, then roll the tortillas and serve immediately!

Miraculous Two-Ingredient Chocolate Mousse

About two years ago, I was desperately looking for vegan chocolate mousse recipes. I thought I’d tried them all: with avocado, with banana, with silk tofu, with whipped coconut cream – you name it. And yet, all of them were a more or less big disappointment compared to the one and only – you know, 3 eggs, 30 grams butter, 100g dark chocolate, a bit of sugar – the one recipe I haven’t had to look up in the past twenty years or so!

Oddly enough, I never came across this recipe when doing my research last time. I only found this amazingly easy recipe when I was looking for quick chocolate desserts. But on top of being really easy to do, this chocolate mousse also happens to be vegan (provided the dark chocolate you use is vegan). No milk, no eggs, nothing except for dark chocolate, and one secret ingredient.

Curious to know what it is? It isn’t tofu, cream, avocado, or banana. Nothing of the like.

It is… water!

Yes, you read right. All you need to do this perfectly tasty and creamy chocolate mousse is chocolate and H2O.

I like my mousse very bitter, very chocolaty, so I used 75% dark chocolate. If you like it sweeter, use 50% or 60% chocolate and/or add some sugar.

This is what you need for 3 smallish portions:

• 125g dark chocolate


• 100ml water

And this is what to do:

1. Measure the water and chocolate in a saucepan and let melt over a medium heat.

2. Remove from the heat, transfer the melted chocolate into a baking bowl over an ice bath (even very cold water is enough).

3. Now, beat the mixture with a mixer or with a twirl whisk for 2-3 minutes (I used a twirl whisk and it took about 5 minutes), or until the mixture starts to thicken.

4. Transfer it into three espresso cups or other small serving cups and let your mousse set either in the fridge or at the room temperature for a couple of hours before serving!

If you like, you can add something to flavour your mousse – how about coffee mousse, with some instant coffee powder? Or a small amount of Cointreau to give a citric twist?

Frozen Yoghurt with Lemon and Honey

This morning I walked past our local frozen yoghurt bar, and it struck me how perfectly frozen yoghurt would fit in my current dessert series! You know, the desserts that make themselves while you’re eating your main dish.

The convenience of frozen yoghurt over other types of ice cream is not just that it contains less fat and mostly sugar as well. It also helps you avoid one crucial and very time-consuming step: yoghurt is already cold enough for your ice-cream maker (as long as you keep your yoghurt in the fridge, that is ;) ), so no need to cool it before feeding it to your ice cream maker…

I decided to flavour my frozen yoghurt with lemon and honey – but feel free to try other flavours as well!

For a vegan version, use non-dairy yoghurt and sweeten it with sugar or agave syrup, for example.

This is what you need for three smallish portions:

• 500ml plain yoghurt


• 2 Tbsp liquid honey


• 1 tsp grated lemon zest

To make this is ridiculously easy. Just combine yoghurt, honey, and lemon zest, and make the frozen yoghurt according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. With mine, this amount of frozen yoghurt took 15 minutes to make – exactly the time it took us to eat our pizzas! Decorate and serve.