Pasha & Kulich

Pasha & Kulich, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Pasha is spread on the kulich and eaten.
Pasha is a very rich.

No!!! to say it is rich is a lie.

Pasha is a heart attack on a plate.
Pasha is the gunge that will clog your arteries.
Pasha has so much sugary sweetness it will have you running up the walls.
Pasha explodes in your mouth.
Pasha tingles your toes and gives you pins and neddles in your fingers.
Pasha makes you dance with schitzoid jerky movements.
Pasha is dangerous and should only be eaten by people who have practiced extreme eating for years.
Pasha is the nipple of heaven.

If food were flags

If food were flags then a tomato boat carrying a wedge of feta as cargo under the full sail of a basil leaf would represent Italy. The colours are right and the taste is right too. For the lion rampant of Scotland you would have custard and strawberries. The English would have milk and beetroot juice, and the Americans would have a blueberry pie topped with a triple helping of double cream, and an obscene amount of glazed cherries.

The sad thing is that things are being grown for looks rather than flavour. Shelf life is more important than taste. It is a given that tomatoes are red, but what is the point of selling nice red tomatoes when the price is all wrong. If you have a glut of tomatoes on the market then you get rock bottom prices for them.

So what you do genetically engineer them to remain green on the vine for a longer period of time, and when the price is right you pump ethelyene into the green house and have them ripen overnight, and then sell them at top dollar. They might be rock hard and taste like sewage, but they sure as hell look good on the supermarkert shelves.

If Peru had a flag it should be shaped like a potato, and potatoes should be knobbly with vivid strange colours, just the way nature intended, but no they need to have a certain shape if they have to be made into Walkers crisps, and Walkers will only buy certain types of potato which means that growers will only grow certain potatoes so they can sell them to Walkers. The end result is that the old varieties disappear.

The same is true for wheat and rice. Varieties are bred to be high yielding, but only if you use lots of fertilizer. This is why the big chemical companies are buying up seed companies, since seeds are being designed to grow well with chemicals. Who cares about the diminished gene pool? Who cares that the genetic heritage of the generations is being fed to pigs, because modern seeds give better yields and more profit. Who worries that there might be huge swathes for land devoted to mono-cultures of corn or rice. With mono-cultures the risk is that if they are hit by disease like a fungal rust then there exists the distinct possibility that entire crops will be wiped out from japan to India.

I am all for genetic diversity. I am all for taste. I want wierd shaped fruit with stange colours, that does not have a shelf-life and needs to be eaten fresh. Give me a basil tomato boat with a cargo of feta, floating on a sea of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Give me taste.

Strawberries and black forrest ham on a poppy seed roll

Why not? If things taste good on their own them why not combine them, and see if the combination opens any doors. Hmmm that roll with poppy seeds would burst a saloon door wide open. Those small wild strawberries would cause the camera eyed doors on the Sar wars DeathStar blink open, and if you laid a few slices of German black forest ham on the combination lock at Fort Knox it would blow those vault doors wide open.

Put them all together, bite into them and they prove to be the key that opens Pandora's other box, you know the one she kept under her bed covered with a red silk shawl. The box of pleasures that we are not allowed to taste.

I eat everything. I eat the forbidden. I eat crusts and burnt bits. The brown burnt egg stuck to the bottom of life's pan. I lick the bowl. I eat raw dough. I finger melted chocolate from the pan. I drizzle olive oil on green leaves, shake rock salt on fish heads, suck marrow from the bone, tear crisp spiced brown skin from the bone, squeeze mustard on hot pork, mash bannana on white bread and sprinkle it with sugar.

You ask why I do it and I reply. Why not?

God's blow-out.

Here is a thought for you. It comes from the old testiment. It is in actual fact a command from God, and it goes like this.

And thou shall bestow that money for whatsosever your soul lusteth after, for oxen, for sheep, or for wine, or for stong drink, or for whatever thy soul desireth, and thou shall eat there before the Lord they God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thy entire household

If I get it right there are times when you take the tithe ( a tenth of your income ) and instead of giving it away, you use it to have a good time with your family and friends. Now that is quite radical thinking


So here is what I am suggesting that when pay day comes along you forget about the rent and the bills and the other financial matters that weigh you down, and set aside one tenth of your salary to buy some really good food to share with your friends and family.

Don't blow the money on a resturant. You can make better meals at home. Cooking together is good. It does not have to be French cuisine, but what it does need to be is tasty. Lip smacking good. Finger licking good. Fresh tomatoes spiked with sea salt and placed on buttered bread straight from the oven is heavenly. Whole cloves of garlic drenched in olive oil. Scarred and charred salmon has that smokey oily tang that makes you want to take the flesh in your mouth and suck, and suck, and suck, until all the flavour has been drawn out






At the end of the meal there should only be bones left. Every bit of goodness should be devoured and savoured. And after the meal... lick each others fingers... you would not get away with that in a resturant.

You know it is what God wants... so do it.

The vampire challenge

Imogen I eat you, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

It all started out in a very innocent manner. I had found a photo by Imogen Cunningham called three vegetables, and as part of a Utata project I dug around in the fridge for three vegetables I could photo, and came across some cloves of garlic that had began to sprout.

So I snaped the garlic and since I had taken it out and it looked so nice I decided to spice it up and bake it in the over along with some potatoe wedges.

I went and bought some fillet steak to go along with it and I used some Nomu African rub to give it some edge.

Can you eat so much garlic in one go? Yes of course you can. The cloves go wonderfully soft and almost caramelised. I do not recommend using a knife and fork to get at the innards, instead use your fingers and suck all the goodness out of them.

If I were a Vampire I wonder how I would react to a nicely done RARE steak with garlic on the side. I think it would be tempting and off-putting at one and the same time. The luciousness of the red meat and the horror of the garlic, but I think that good food inherently has a tension within it. It almost dares you to be brave enough to eat it.

Gravlax... innit???

It is so expensive to make buy gravlax so why not make your own. It is very simple. First of all you need a nice bit of salmon. On offer in the shops at the moment at reasonable prices are farmed salmon from Norway or deep sea salmon from Ahvenamaa. I went for the salmon from the archipeligo.


raw salmon from the archipelego

To start the process you need to salt the fish and I use natural rock salt. It is big and it is cruchy and it looks good. It is enough to put a couple of table spoons on the salmon to coat the flesh.


Salmon salted with rock salt

After that the flesh is sprinkled with ordinary sugar. Just plain old sugar. I used sugar from estonia which I bought at a bargain price from Lidl. I was tempted to use some brown sugar from Suomen sokeri but thought better of it.


sugar added

Then it is time for some spices and I went for a mixture of rose pepper and Jamacian allspice. The recipe from the web called for crushed white pepper, but I did not have any so I went with the Rose pepper instead. It looks better with a little bit of red added to it.


Rose pepper and Jamacian allspice

Traditionally for some green you should go for dill, but I did not have any, but I did have some rosemary growing on the balcony so I chopped up some leaves and sprinkled it over the fish. It made a good contrast with the rose pepper.


Rosemary added

Finally the fillet is tightly wraped in cling film and place in the fridge for a couple of days to mature. The package is placed in a dish and then another dish is placed on top of it to weigh it down. You should expect some juices to come out of the fish fillet.


Wraped in cling film

In 48 hours time the fillet will be removed from the cling film and all of the remaining salt and sugar and herbs will be scraped off and the fillet sliced at 45 degrees to give very thin slices. It should be eaten with garlic mustard but I have decided to do gravlax con meloni.

If the Italians can get away with parma ham on melon, then I am going to be the first to put strips of gravlax with melon. I may even smother it in liqorice sauce. Eat your heart out fat duck.

P.S. Did I forget to mention that it was also marinated in Hunaja-Terva Snapsi (Honey-tar Schnapps)

Fava bean and chickpea soup

I visited a Kurdish shop in Espoon Keskus and bought some nibbles. It is hard to describe what they are exactly, since it looks like hollow bits of spaghetti coated in chilli pepper. Whatever they are they taste good, and to my mind are better than peanuts or popcorn. Perhaps it is a Kurdish version of Bombay mix.

Anyways I also discovered they had some condensed milk, something I have not been able to find in the supermarkets here in Finland. Maija found a recipe for some special christmas sweets which needed dark chocolate and condensed cream so we will be all set to roll in a few days time.

The other thing that I picked up was a tin of Fava beans with chickpeas, by Wadi Chtoura Foods. The only time I have heard fava beans mentioned in connection with eating was in the the movie "Silence of the lambs", when Hannibal the Cannibal says "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti." So I just had to try the Fava beans and instead of liver I tossed in some spiced Gyros from Dulano.

I suppose the Fava beans should have been eaten in a salad with olive oil and lemon but when I opened the tin the beans and chickpeas were floating in a hot and spicey tomato and chilli sauce, and since it was one of those raw days outside, I added some more liquid to the sauce and made the whole thing into a warm and satisfying soup. I crisped up some bread under the grill and while it was still hot spread it with a generous layer of real butter. I had intended to leave half the soup for tomorrow but it tasted so good I ate the lot in one go. It was excellent and I plan to do it again as soon as I get more beans.

Though the wife says wait until tomorrow until you see how you react to the beans.

Fish and bacon... yeah right

Combine fish and bacon... I don't think so. I mean to say it just does not go. It clashes. Pig and fish just does not look right on the menu. Chuck in a few green beans. Vegetables always bring forgivness. Oh but I forgot about the white wine, a pinot grigio from Northern Italy. That makes everything right. Doesn't it? White wine and fish that has got to be OK, and white wine and pork well that is a combination to die for... NOT!!!

But who could resist Siika dusted down with rye flour and simply spiced with pepper and salt and fried so the skin on the fish is crisp and succulent. I mean to say this is a skin that you do not scrape off and put on the side of the plate. This is a skin that you cut off with the flesh and suck all of the goodness out of it. You eat some green beans because you feel guilty. You drink a little wine to get rid of the guilt. You eat some bacon and feel that you have to do some sort of penence so you eat some more fish to say that you feel sorry for defiling yourself with the evil pork, and so it goes on... fish, beans, wine, pork, until you have finnished the meal.

We always rationalise our reasons for eating stuff that we shouldn't. Fish good, wine bad, Pork bad, beans good. It all evens out in the end... that is if you do not use TOO much salt and pepper, which is diabolical and the most sinful of condiments.

Muikku/Vendace

Muikku/Vendace, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

How is it that you can buy gutted muikku? All the heads have been cut off and the insides are missing. I can only imagine some machine that slices the heads off and some suction method to remove the guts. But all that is beside the point, the important thing is how to cook them and how to eat them.

Well you have to cook them in rye flour that has been spiced with salt and pepper. Nothing else, and they have to be fried in butter. Not olive oil, not margarine, not sunflower oil.

And when it comes to eating them you eat them whole. You eat the skin, the tails, the fins, the bones, everything and you do it with your fingers. No forks and knifes.

Muslims have the habit of eating food with their hands, and we may scorn this practice but it makes very good sense. When you pick a fried fish up with your fingers you make a judgement of how hot it is, and if it is safe to put it into your mouth. How many times have you speared a pototo with you fork and popped it straight into your mouth without checking how hot it was?

At the end of the meal you can lick your fingers for desert.

Home-made Dill, Pepper, Garlic pickled Gherkins

Home-made Dill, Pepper, Garlic pickled Gherkins, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Pickled Gherkins with dill, pepper,and garlic

I bought about a kilo and a half of gherkins to suppliment the ones I got from my allotment and decided to pickle them. This is the process.

Dump the gherkins in a basins and wash them, then take a fork and prick them all over. Transfer the gherkins to a container and cover them with 1/4 kilo of salt and leave for 4 hours. During this time the gherkins will become soft and they will loose water from the holes you have pricked on the surface.

Once the 4 hours is up wash the gherkins 5 times in cold running water ready for putting in preservative jars.

Pickle mixture.
1/2 cup of vinegar
2 cups of water
1 cup of sugar
1 tablespoon of mustard seed
1 tablespoon of jamacian allspice
3 heads of dill plant
6 cloves of garlic finely sliced.

Place all of the spices in a pot and add the vinegar and water and bring gently to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes.

2 kilos of gherkins should fit nicely into 3 1/2 litre jars. Place the dill heads and mustard seed at the bottom of the jar, and then you can either pack the gherkins into the jar whole or you can slice them, then top up with the spiced pickling mixture and seal the jars.

When the gherkins go in the jar they are still rather green in colour but by the next day they will have drawn in the spiced pickling liquor and their colour will change to a more olive green, and believe it or not they are ready to eat the next day.

Great with cold ham or salmon.

Pistachio Lemon bread with Lemon butter

Judith Olney has a chapter in her book called Essence Breads and their butters, and Maij decided to try the Pistachio/Lemon bread. It is more of a cake than a real bread and it is quite heavenly to eat. After it had been made we cut a couple of slices and had it with coffee on the balcony.

The strange thing about this bread is that after it has been baked you prick the top of it with a wooden kebab stick and then pour a "glaze" over it, which is basically 1/3 a cup of sugar and the juice from a lemon. I thought it would make it sodden, but somehow the bread absorbed it all and became very moist and succulent with a tang to smack your lips to.




If that is not lemony enough for you then you also have lemon butter to go along with it, which is made with 8 tbl spoons of butter, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of lemon zest. As you can see from the photo the butter just melted into the hot bread once it was taken from the tin, and the pistachios were dotted through the bread with green nutty goodness.

Verdict: Mahtava!!!

Smoked fish and sunday newspaper

No we did not find a new way of cooking newspaper. We just read the day old Sunday newspaper while we were eating. When you read and eat at the same time it is a slow process, and you tend to savour the food a little more. You examine it for texture, You suck it for flavour, you pick the best bits out of one thing and leave the best bits of something else. Eating becomes and adventure, and you can quite easily pinch something off somebodies plate if they are engrossed in the gardening section.

Maija bought some lovely smoked "muikku" and we had it plain and simple with potato salad, tomato, gherkins, together with some focaccia rosemary bread. It was nice. I inspected those muikku. They were topped but not tailed. Crisp fish tails to a Finn is as chicken feet to the Chinese.

I have planted a tomato plant on the balcony, appropriately enough it is called "Balcony Star". It is a gnarly looking plant. Tough with wrinkly leaves and I am expecting a tomato that would win prizes. We shall see.



How do you take photos of food? It is quite a complicated business to get it right. Do you do close-ups? Should there be the background clutter of life? Like the newspaper or a flower. Or should it be clean and stark? I wish I knew.

The Judith Olney book has some wonderful photos in it and if you are doing her rercipes it is not good to try and repeat the same shots that she has put in her book. There has to be something different. I am still looking for a style.

Meringue dream with kumquats (Brazo de Zetor)

This is good. The visitors had seconds. And the kumquats... how do you eat those damn things. They look like small oranges. cut them open and inside all you have is seeds, big seeds, seeds that are hard and you cannot eat. Seeds that you have to throw away, and all that you are left with is the orange coloured peel and hardly any fruity flesh at all. It looks for all the world like orange peel. You do the maths... oranges 1.50 euro a kilo... kumquats 11.50 euro a kilo, and you think to yourself am I paying through the nose for orange peel? You see with kumquats you eat the peel, there is nothing else to eat from it really and the taste if you believe the supermarket is bitter sweet.

Which reminds me of artichokes... you get this hellava big green flower plonked on your plate and you wonder what bits of it are you supposed to eat. It's like drinking lemon flavoured water, and complimenting the lady of the table, how refreshing it is only to discover later that it was a finger bowl for cleaning your fingers. Such is life. Airs and graces.

Recipe
Meringue:
4 egg whites
1 tsp lemon juice
2 dl sugar
1 dl crushed almond
2 tbl cornflour.
Topping:
1/2 dl almonds
Dusting of icing sugar
Filling:
2 dl whipped cream
1 dl quark
1 dl strong marmalade
1 tsp vannila sugar
1 tin tangerines

Add the lemon juice to the eggs and beat, slowly add the sugar and continue to whisk,and near the end carefully add the crushed almonds and corn flour. Place the meringue mixture in a bag with a 1cm nozzle and pipe the mixture onto baking paper. Make 18 strips 35 cm long that are joined along the edges and sprinkle with almonds. Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes at 175 C untill the meringeue just takes on some colour. Don't over cook so the meringue becomes hard. Carefully turn the sheet of soft meringue over onto baking paper and leave to cool.

For the filling whip the cream and mix in the quark, marmalade and vannilla sugar. Spread this mixture onto the soft meringue and with the aid of the baking paper carefully roll into the shape of a log, and place in the fridge to set. Just before serving dust the top with icing sugar.

Asparagus, romain pepper, onion, mushroom in a thin liquorice sauce and topped with ground black pepper and rock salt.

Asparagus is in the shops, and I just had to buy some, and fry it up in olive oil with mushrooms, onions, and peppers. No steaming for me. There is an interesting story connected with aspargus. Supposedly your pee smells different after eating asparagus. Some people thought this was due to the fact that something in the asparagus was not metabolised properly, and thus gave your pee a distictive smell. But in actual fact some people have just got more sensitive noses.

Lison et al. (1980) concluded that the urinary excretion of an odorous substance after eating asparagus is not an inborn error of metabolism as had been proposed by Allison and McWhirter (1956). Instead they suggested that the detection of the odor constitutes a specific smell hypersensitivity. Their observations on a large number of individuals indicated that those who could smell the odor in their own urine could also smell it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus, whether or not that person was able to smell it himself.

Mitchell et al. (1987) stated that Nencki (1891) had shown that the odor of urine after ingestion of asparagus is due to the volatile sulfur-containing compound methanethiol, which imparts a smell similar to rotten or boiling cabbage.

Bacon and beans

Green beans, pinto beans, blackeyed peas, haricot beans, broad beans, soya beans, fava beans, French beans, jumping beans, runner beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, , mung beans, the list goes on and on and where can you get that big plump and pregnant queen of beans, the butter bean. Nowhere.

In the past I have scorned beans thinking of them in the immortal words of Bart Simpson, "Beans beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot", but then came the magical day in a tapas bar in Madrid. We were in there to sample some sherry. Just extremely small glasses, but lots of them and with every glass of sherry we bought the owners felt abliged to bring us some more tapas. Sizzling prawns in a garlic sauce (dribble dribble), cold cut of tuna with french mustard (smacks lips), olives stuffed with pimento (savours the acidity), whole white-bait dressed in breadcrumbs (crunches them bones and all from head to tail).

Then came the beans, big and buttery, shaped like a small kidney, coated in olive oil, with their fine skin dusted down with aromatic herbs, and black pepper. It may have been the sherries that went beforehand but somehow the butter beans, which I had held in such low esteem were suddenly elevated to something most noble, and ever since then I have wanted that taste again.

But not having any sherry I got side tracked and I did some spiced beans with bacon. Here is the recipe.

Soak a cup of butter beans in water over night. Add a pinch of bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt. This is the magic part since it helps the beans to absorb water and expand. You won't loose the skins when you boil them either. Drain the beans and add new water and bring to the boil. Lower the heat and simmer until tender. Low heat is esential since you don't want them to disintigrate and turn to mush. Drain the water off and add the following spices. Ground black pepper, Rock salt, fresh basil torn, fresh parsley torn, garlic pepper, and then drizzle on some olive oil and mix. Transfer the spiced beans to a dish and on top place some roughly cut strips of bacon. Place in and oven at 250 C and cook for 20 minutes. This is to give a crunchiness to the beans and the bacon is cooked to perfection. Juices from the bacon are absorbed by the beans, giving them a delicious moistness.

Now for the most important part of the operation when you have removed the dish from the oven and let it cool, you should eat the beans with your fingers. No forks or knives allowed. It is a great pleasure to pick up the beans in your fingers, and to sift around the dish for the best bits. While eating your fingers will become flavoured by the spiced juices in the dish, and you will be afforded the opportinity to lick your own fingers, or even suck them to get them clean. Don't wash them or use wipes. That would spoil everything.

Enjoy... I know I did

The easiest, bestest foccacia ever

There is nothing better than a fresh warm bread served straight from the oven. Maija made the "Italian Picnic Bread" and it received a very good response on Flickr, but that bread is more of a meal than a snack. The best bread for snacks is foccacia since it has such a lovely structure and the presence of olive oil makes it so moist and succulent.

So I dug around and found a wonderful website with a recipe for the easiest and bestest foccacia ever. I made it exactly according to the recipe with the exception I used emental cheese which is much stronger than the mozzerella cheese suggested in the recipe. I also baked it in a dish to give it some shape, but apart from that it is a wonderful recipe and it only takes an hour from start to finnish.



This type of bread is best eaten fresh and if possible in the open air. I ripped it into bits and had it with fresh vine tomatoes, pickled gerkins, and black olives. I sat out on the balcony amongst the pots with pelargonia cuttings, and enjoyed the afternoon sun. It was not Tuscany, but it was good enough for me.

Avocado, strawberry and liquorice sauce

So I cut the avocado so there was nice little circles and into them I poured a liquorice sauce and dusted it down with icing sugar. Liquorice of the salty sort (salmiakki) is very popular in Finland. They put it in vodka and call it salmiakkikossu, and it tastes a bit like cough mixture.

The liquorice with the avocado and strawberries is nice and sweet. I made a plate for presentation, and it was so good that I made myself another plate but this time everything was just roughly cut up and smothered in the sauce.



It was then that I made an amazing discovery, food does not need to look good before you can eat it. The roughly chopped ingredients was just a luscious. Believe me this obscenely decadent avocado and strawberries with liquorice sauce is a treat for the taste buds and tongue.

Italian picnic bread

Some people say
That oysters make you
come on strong,
But I don't buy it,
I don't believe my diet
turns me on.
Won't take no pills,
That's the last thing
that I need to do,
I can't deny it,
My aphrodisiac is you.

Don't smoke no grass,
Or opium from old Hong Kong,
That hubble-bubble
Just makes me see you double
All night long.
Don't waste my time
With Spanish fly and roots to chew,
They cause me trouble,
Because my aphrodisiac is you.

Katie Melua (my aphrodisiac is you)

Russian leg of lamb with rosemary

Yes it was heavy but I didn't eat it... the wife did, at a russian resturant called Shaslik in Helsinki. We had a small cabinet all to ourself, and in other parts of the resurant you could here a mixture of languages from all over the world. Shaslik seems to be a watering hole for companies like Nokia who want to show their customers something exotic.

The resturant itself looks like something from the turn of the century. The walls have flocked floral patterns in the style of imperial Russia. The waiters dress like cossacks. The Vodka is served chilled. The food is heavy but very good an tasty.

At the end of the meal a man with an accodrian and a woman entered the booth and sang us some sad russian songs. It is strange that a certain note and a word in an unknown language, causes a bubbling of emotions inside like a kettle on the boil, and from your eyes tears roll unhindered.

Tagliatelle siskonmakkarakastikkeella

The lady selling cold cuts of ham, chicken and luncheon meat at the local supermarket suggested that I buy 'siskonmakkara', a special offer of course, and use them as an ingredient in a pasta sauce. Siskonmakkara (sister's sausage) in a PASTA SAUCE, what has the world come to? I only remembered them as these slimy sausage skins that you took between your fingers and squeezed the contents into a pot of boiling vegetable soup. Or going back even further, my mum's soup that had them cut in skins and all (caused a nice swelling effect at both ends). The ends where the sausages had been cut. Once they reached the boiling pot, that is.

But pasta sauce, give me a break. Well I gave her a break and bought the leek, the chanterelle cheese spread and the cream. Squeezed (at least I got to squeeze) the contents little blobs at a time into a hot frying pan, added the chopped leek, the cream and the chanterelle spread. Cooked the tagliatelle, arranged it all on a plate topped with some parsley and red pepper. Observed the nice swelling effect round my midriff. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all. Must move on with the times.