A day as a tourist

We had a great day! First we toured Porvoo's fleamarkets, cafes and the little chocolate factory (guess if we bought anything...). After that we visited Malmgård estate (link...), got a tour by the current owner count Creutz and afterwards shopped in the estate's foodie heaven. We bought flours, pasta, rice made from spelt grains and beer.

Just in time

In this year I managed to use all the berries in the fridge before the new crop arrives. I don't much care for baking anymore so more often than not I still have some blueberries lurking in the fridge in the end of the summer.

Sweet things

I seldom bake but yesterday I made a carrot-ginger cake with orange-cheese topping. I put the topping in a separate bowl as there is no way we two (my husband and I) could eat the whole cake during the weekend. This way I can freeze the rest of the cake and make a new topping for next weekend.

Inspiration for cooking

These 50's cooking magazines give instructions for slaughter, tell you how to store bread in warm city apartments etc. and in addition there are really good recipes (e.g. meat-and-cabbage stew: take some meat, cabbage, salt and water and let them stew...).

Five a day

Carrot is a vegetable and vegetables are good for you. With me so far? Well, then a piece of carrot cake must also be good for one, mustn't it? By the way, I am looking for pastry forks, if you know good looking ones, let me know. Now we have to use spoons and that is just tragic :)

Say cheese and maybe cherry, too

As we ate in Loviisa city yesterday, we only had some bread and cheese for dinner. Cherries wouldn't normally be included but they were literally dropping from the trees and something had to be done.

Hard decisions

I love to cook and usually try 3 to 7 new recipies each week. But as I read every food magazine there is and buy and borrow loads of cook books I am forever behind with trying out new dishes. I can't imagine how many more recipies there would be to try if we ate more meat. As it is now, I still gather a lot of meat recipies, I just change the meat to salmon or chicken.

Just fry everything

My aunt and uncle visited us on Friday and they bought us whitefish (muikku in Finnish). I fried the fish in butter and put some parsnips, red onions, chilli, garlic and dark bread in the oven with a touch of honey and a drizzle of olive oil. Super good Saturday dinner!

Winter celebration

On Saturday we ate blinis. I got buckwheat flour as a birthday present from my aunt - we visited a farm market together at Kausala and the flour is from a local mill. Maybe this is the reason for the blinis tasting great.

Looking good

I made this brussel sprout/cold-smoked reindeer/walnut/cream cheese/lingonberry pie on Saturday. We chosed to take the picture before putting the pie in the oven. It looked good enough to eat :) The pie tasted ok but it was more of a novelty than a recipe to try again and fall in love with. The recipe was from the January number of "Glorian ruoka ja viini".

The most amazing thing about this pie is that we were driving through Kymenlaakso area and had to visit five stores before we found the sprouts We first tried Kausala's K-market and Kausala's S-market, then Kuusankoski's Lidl and Kuusankoski's S-market and finally found what we wanted in Citymarket in Kouvola's Veturi.