Likka's first birthday - today

Today Likka turns one. Wow. Where did the year go. But I'm happy it did, toddlers are way more fun. We celebrated Likka's birthday with the family on Wednesday and with friends yesterday. We kept things simple, even the cake was decorated with just a pile of mini marshmallows and candy on the sides. Likka got to eat a few marshmallows and then those were all she wanted to eat.

Today we are leaving for the annual crayfish party at our friends' cabin, that is why we celebrated Likka's birthday couple days beforehand.

Christmas porridge

There are some disadvantages being on maternity leave, like that the rice porridge/pudding served in the canteen at work is not available for me. But I can make it myself. I also made plum kissel to eat with the porridge. This is a very traditional dish to eat here in Finland around the holidays, but usually the kissel is from dried plums.

 

 

I really like the waiting of Christmas, I think I like the waiting even more than the Christmas day itself. And I like to prepare for Christmas, like decorating and such, but I like to keep things simple still. For example a simple flower arrangement does it for me. Tulips are from the local market and the blueberry and lingonberry branches are from a near by forest.

 

The christening of Likka

 

We had Likka's christening at our home. After the ceremony my dad gave a short speech and we had toast of sparkling wine. Then some general mingling together with four different pies, salad, coffee and cakes. A's mom made all the pies, I made the cakes.

Likka behaved really nicely during the christening, momentarily she cried a bit, but mainly she was just looking around amazed of all the hazzle around her.

The rose cake is made with a recipe from Kinuskikissa (in Finnish), only with different decorations and the other cake is a velvet cake with a recipe from ET magazine (not available online). Both were yummy!

Preparing for the christening

Some stuff to do for tomorrows christening of Likka

The season of cleaning the fridge

This most likely does not apply to all latitudes, but now is the best season to clean the fridge. The temperature outside is about the same as it is in a fridge, which means it's so easy to empty the frigde and just take everything outside and then you are in no hurry with the cleaning. Like for instance you might run into delays like lets say you have a baby and in the middle of your cleaning project she desides it's not the time now to put all the things back to the frigde but in two hours it is. When a delay like that happens you are really glad you put all the food outside.

The season of cleaning the freezer comes bit later.

Pureed apple for the baby

Yeah, I know Likka will not eat anything else than breast milk for about next six months, but I made pureed baby food from apples for her. We got lot of apples from our neighbour, which she brought from her cabin, and those were just getting bad sitting on our kitchen table. I have nothing against shop bought baby food and am not planning to make all the baby food myself but I cannot eat apples raw and since it's the apple season now and not in six months, I thought it was somewhat wise to make the pureed baby food from the apples now.

I boiled apple slices with some water and then pureed them with a hand blender. The puree I froze in ice cube trays and in ice cube bags. (Do NOT use ice cube bags, it was the dumbest idea ever. It took for ever for the puree to pour into the bag.) Once the puree was frozen I removed it from the ice cube trays and placed the cubes in a bag. Now and by now I mean next March or so it's easy to get a portion of the puree from the freezer for Likka.

Our own apple trees seem to have a resting year, neither of them have made more than couple of apples and even those have been eaten by the squirrels. So no wine or cider producing this year.

The 8th annual crayfish party

It was time of the crayfish party again. Amazingly it was already the eighth crayfish party in a row. We have never skipped a year and it's been held every time at our friend's cabin. The menu is always the same, but why change something that works.

The simplest but tastiest desert

I'm not much into deserts, except for the random piece of chocolate or cookie with coffee. But sometimes the desert is just nice to have.

I love Pavlova desert, it has a meringue base with cream on top and berries, lots of berries. It is usually one big round cake, but for people of two or even four that is just too much. So Pavlova in a cup is more better suited for us. This is also super easy to make, expecially if you buy the meringue instead of making your own. I have occasionally made meringue but I've never managed to fylly dry them in the oven, it just seems to take forever. 

What you need is meringue pieces, whipped cream (,some sugar or sweeteners) and berries, the more berries you have the better. Meringue goes in the bottom of the cup, then that is topped with whipped cream. If the berries are not very sweet like the currants then some sugar can be added to the cream, also icecream sauces can be used, or some flawoured syrup. The desert is decorated with a huge pile of berries. And tadaa, it's done.

I have a thing for meringue. So if that is not for you try cookie pieces instead, but then it's not a Pavlova anymore. But equally easy.

Rhubarb pie and some minor decluttering

Everything in Finland seems to happen on summer. We have not spent much any time at home. Every evening we've had something and weekends too have been full. Except yesterday on Sunday afternoon. We had such a good Sunday feel, we had an afternoon nap, read books and magazines, listened to some radio. But we did also spend a little time decluttering. I was able to remove some items from my clothes cabinet and A also. A did trash a pair of shoes and desided to sell motorbike trousers and jacket. I removed some random items from my bookshelf and toilet cabinet.

As a reward of the decluttering I made a rhubarb pie. We didn't declutter much yet, but it was a such a good start.

Potato growing bags, part one

I got potatoes from a friend, not for eating but for growing new ones. I have had the potatoes on my window sill for quite some time, maybe even too long. But I don't have any place to grow potatoes, except on containers on the terrace. So I figured I could buy buckets or those growing bags. But buckets are not very beautiful and the growing bags I've seen sold in Finland are either hideous or ridiculously priced. 

I had an idea of making my own bags, but then I got some white plastic from work and figured I could use that to make myself some growing bags. I knew the plastic itself would not hold up so I also got some wire net and double sided tape.

I made a frame from the net and lined it with the plastic. I used bits of the double side tape to keep the plastic in shape bit better. 

I made three of these bags or wire baskets, or what ever these should be called, untill I realized that they look like trash cans. Not really the nice, modern look I was after. So I will return to use the original idea I had and I will make new potato growing bags for the rest of the potatoes.

Part two of potato growing bags coming up soon...

Nice Easter to everyone

My Easter grass this year are peas. Just regular dryed peas that I soaked over night, put to soil and now they are growing. Those are really nice on salads and on bread. Also bought daffodils for some Easter decoration. And that's about all the Easter decorations we have this year. 

I wish you all a very nice Easter holiday

May contain horse meat

Have you all heard of the food scandal we have been having all over Europe? From some processed foods was found horse meat, the biggest thing in the whole scandal is that horse meat was not listed as one of the ingredients. For me or for most Finns horse meat is not a tabu of anykind so eating horse is fine, but of course it is alarming that food manufacturers do not know what meat or other ingredients they have in their foods.

I have eaten horse meat as cold cuts on a bread many times. I cannot say it's a reqular part of my diet, but maybe once a year we buy one packet of those cold cuts. Those are sold in the regular store. But I have never seen ground horse meat. Maybe now because of the scandal and all the attention to horse meat A found ground horse meat from a convenience store. He bought it just out of curiosity.

From the ground horse meat we made Greek style meat dish with hummus and oven potatoes. I tried to find a recipe for you, but I cannot find one from the web. Also I'm too lazy to write the complete recipe for you, but just fry good amount of onion and huge amount of garlic with the meat, then add handful of coriander and juice of a lemon. Add spices to taste like curcuma, cumin, ground bell pepper, soy sayce and ofcourse some ketchup for colour.

Our dish had lots of spices so I cannot say we could so easily taste what the horse tasted like, but it seemed to taste quite similar to beef, perhaps the texture was bit more hard, but it's difficult to say. Anyway the dish was good.

Wine labels

I have been agonizing what kind of labels I want for the wine we made earlier on the fall. For some reason I wanted to have something cool, but I still so far have not figured out what is that cool label I want. I had promissed to give some wine and cider to my colleague who we got the sweet apples from to make the wine and cider. I had been avoiding taking the bottles to him, because I had wanted to label the bottles first. But on sunday I decided he has waited too long and then just grabed a white marker and wrote straight on the bottle its content.

And I think those turned out really cool, so I decided to label all bottles like this. I really like them.

Bottling wine

The actual bottling of wine does not really differ in anyway than bottling cider, but the preparations are a bit different. In my opinion making cider is whole lot easier. And cider is a lot better too. If I was the one to decide I would have made only cider from the whole batch of apples. But A likes wine. So we made that too.

On wine it is not important to keep an eye on the gravity level of the juice while it's fermenting. The wine is left to ferment until there is no sugar in the juice, which can be noticed from the airlock. No bubbles will come through the airlock anymore. At this stage the wine is siphoned to another bucket for the first time to get most of the dregs out. Then what is left from the yeast in the juice is killed. That can be done with Potassium Metabisulphite or Potassium sulfate which is mixed in with the juice. After this the juice needs to be shaken agressively to get all the carbon dioxide out from the juice. The shaking is hard work. It's really difficult to get a hold of the bucket that weights almost 30 kg and shake it. I cannot do it for more than two seconds at a time. And that is why A does it. Sorry to have no picture of the shaking, that would be a fun picture.

After vigorous shaking a clarifier is mixed into the juice. Now the bucket should be placed somewhere high to stand so it's easy to siphon after 24 hours. Then it's siphoned to a bucket.. again. Can you already see why I like making cider a whole lot more? 

Apple wine is usually quite sweet, but we wanted to have some of the wine quite dry and also made two other batches sweeter. You could just add sugar to taste or you can measure with the gravity meter to gain the right sweetness. 

Did I say we bottled the wine... I should have said that we bagged the wine. We were unable to collect that many wine bottles and we were also lazy so we bought wine bags. You know those things that are inside the cardboard wine tetras.

We still haven't found any place good enough to store the wine, but unlike cider apple wine does not really require much maturing. So let's get drinking!

Apple chips

This should actually be a guest post, since I did not make the apple chips I'm about to show you, but A did. His friend, who also happens to have a blog, was visiting us few weeks back when we were just starting to wash the apples for the cider. Since apples were everywhere in our home those soon became a discussion topic. She suggested that we could make apple chips from the sour apples we had so much of.

A thought apple chips could be fun so he made them. He didn't google any recipe, although I'm sure there are many. First he removed the seeds with an apple drill and then sliced the apples thinly.

Some of the slices he hung on a rod and some he placed on an oven rack. Then these were placed in the sauna. We did not have the sauna on or anything, but the room is always a bit warmer than the rest of the house and there is some handy free space. I think it took about one week for the slices to dry. Maybe.

After the slices were dry we had apple chips. I don't think the slices are actually crunchy, like you could expect chips to be. They have some toughness in them which I think all dried fruit have. I've never been a huge fan of dried fruit but the apple chips are okey, they are a nice snack once in a while. At least the apples store better like this and take much less space.

~ ~ ~

And look we got our first snow last night.

Pumpkin carving

Halloween is not celebrated in Finland although some stores do sell Halloween junk for the kids. Also pumpkins are sold around this time. I, like most other Finns, am not that excited about Halloween, heck I don't even know what it's for. Well anyway... crafting is fun and when I saw the carved pumpkin on Santa's blog Homestilo I just had to carve one too.

Like said the Halloween isn't such a big thing here so I did not want to carve on the pumpkin anything scary but thought of carving something more related to fall. I searched a simple image from the web about a tree and did plan to print it out, but for some reason the printer would not work so I ended up copying the image to a paper from the screen using a pencil. Then just carved the pumpkin using the drawing as a guide.

I think it ended up looking really cool. I added a string of light inside it. I made a small hole in the back with an apple drill where I ran the wire through.

Because I scooped out most of the inside of the pumpkin before the carving I also had to figure how to consume all the pumpkin. So I made a pumpkin pie with this recipe (click). I know according to the recipe I should have used a sugar pumpkin and I don't know what is the pumpkin I had but I had to use it somewhere. I made the pumpkin into a puree and used half of it to the pie and placed the rest in the freezer, so I can make a new pie later if I want to. I hope the puree freezes well. Since A is in Shanghai again I took the whole pie to work and fed it to my co-workers. Anything taken to work is gone in a matter of minutes and so was the pie too. I had never made a pumpkin pie before and had actually tasted it only once before. That was last year when we were visiting in NY on Thanksgiving. The pie I made looked quite ugly, like you see there, but it was good, tasted like gingerbread dough.