Finnish-syle hamburgers with vegetarian steaks

This hamburger is inspired by Hesburger, which is Finland's biggest native fast food chain. They have got hamburgers with rye bread, and I remember them, but they don't yet have a rye bread vegetarian hamburger. I created one myself! They turned out so yummy, especially yummy for my Finnish taste. The vegetarian steaks I used I made with this recipe, but you can just as well buy ready made veggie steaks.

Ingredients (x2):
Two loaves of rye bread cut in two halves (in Finland for example Puikulat and Ruispalat work well)
butter
2 veggie steaks
2 slices of cheese
1 tomato
a small part of a bell pepper
salad leaves
ketchup
mayo
black pepper
salt
oregano

Preparation:
spread butter on the breads. Add a slice of cheese on two of the bread halves. Put the breads into the oven along with the vegetarian steaks (since they need to be heated too). Remove the breads from the oven when the cheese will have melted. You may need to keep the steaks in the oven somewhat longer.

Place the breads that have a layer of cheese on separate plates. Stuff first some salad on these breads. Then add mayonnaise evenly on the whole bread. Take the heated steaks and cut them into halves. Place the two halves next to each other on the bread, looking like two consecutive full moons. Now it's time to add a bit of ketchup. Then, cut the tomatoes into slices and lay 2-3 slices of tomato on each bread. At the end add some bell pepper that you have cut into thin sticks. Dust a bit of pepper, salt and oregano over the creations before topping them with the top half of bread. You may desire to serve these hamburgers wrapped into paper in order to make eating easier and more enjoyable!

Salmiakki Swiss roll

Swiss rolls (fi: kääretorttu) are a very common dessert in Finland. The crust can be made brown by cacao powder or it can retain a light colour. The fillings are many and diverse, and this one here is a rarity. A few friends of mine sounded astonished when they heard I was making a salmiakki Swiss roll. Fantasy, however, is a good quality! And since salmiakki (=strong salted liquorice, nh4cl) is inevitably the most fantastic candy in Finland if you ask me, I felt like trying this out! I recommend to use a kind of salmiakki that is easy to cut. Unfortunately I didn't and so I, to avoid excess suffering, left the pieces bigger.

Ingredients:

The dough:
3 eggs
1 dl sugar
½ dl wheat flour
½ dl potato flour
1 tl baking powder
2 tablespoons cacao powder
sugar
bread crumbs
baking paper

The filling:
1,5 dl whipped cream
1,5 dl vanilla flavoured quark (That's Dutch, and it's something like a very thick yoghurt)
salmiakki candies

Preparation:
Cut the salmiakki into pieces. Mix the whipped cream and the quark and add the pieces of salmiakki into it. Put the filling into the fridge to wait for the crust to be ready.
Mix the sugar and the eggs into an airy foam. Mix the flours together and add them carefully into the foam. Pour the dough on baking paper on an oven plate. Bake it in a 225 c oven for 7 minutes.
Take a sheet of baking paper and put it on the table. Dust some sugar on it. Set the crust, on its other side still attached to its baking paper, on the sugared baking paper. Remove the baking paper that was with it in the oven.
Spread the filling you previously prepared on the crust.

Roll the crust into a roll. The result is the best if you let the Swiss roll stay in the fridge overnight and serve it the next day.

Finnish style oat & chocolate cookies

Here's a recipe for cookies including dark chocolate, hazelnuts and lots of oats. They even made me think of how great it would be to eat them along with some hot chocolate, having a view on the lake at sunset. Maybe I am getting Finland-nostalgic.

Ingredients (12-14 cookies):
100 g dark chocolate
50 g hazelnuts
2 dl wheat flour
2 dl oats
1 teaspoon vanilline sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
100 g margarine or butter
1 dl sugar
1 egg

Preparation:
Cut the chocolate and the hazelnuts into small pieces. Mix together in a bowl the dry ingredients. Mix the soft butter with sugar. Add the egg and mix intensely. Finally add the dry ingredients and mix the dough until it becomes uniform. Form a bar 20 cm long and 6 cm wide out of the dough. Cut the bar into 1 cm wide pieces and place the pieces of dough on baking paper on an oven plate. Bake them in the oven heated to 175 c for around 12 minutes (they are ready when they have got some colour).

Vegetable&soy macaroni pot

This is a vegetarian version of the Finnish and Swedish dish macaroni pot (makaronilaatikko or makaronilåda in Finland, makaronipudding in Sweden). It's great that this way even vegetarians can enjoy this dish where meat is normally considered pretty central.

Ingredients (x5):
400 g dark macaroni
2 carrots
1 big onion
peas
1 clove garlic
1 vegetarian bouillon cube
½ dl ketchup
1 ½ dl grinded soy
2 ½ dl water
1 ½ dl cheese
basil
black pepper

For the egg-milk:
3 eggs
7 dl milk
salt, grinded paprica, black pepper

Preparation:
Boil the macaroni. Grate the carrots and chop the onion. Fry them in a pan and add the boullon cube, water, grinded soy, ketchup and the spices. Pour the water off the maraconi and add the soy-vegetable mix and grated cheese into the macaroni. Mix and spread it evenly into an oven mould. Mix the ingredients of the egg-milk well and pour the egg-milk on the food in the mould.

You may dust some bread crumbs on top if you want.
Bake in the oven heated to 200 c for about an hour.

Ideally served with ketchup.

Beetroot steaks with cottage cheese sauce

Here's the recipe for a traditional Finnish vegetarian main course, beetroot steaks, served with a lightly spiced cottage cheese - sour cream sauce. In Finland nowadays you can get cottage cheese (fi: raejuusto) in different flavours, but since here we only have plain cottage cheese, I spiced it up myself with some garlic and cayenne pepper.

Ingredients (for some 10 steaks):
3-4 potatoes
2 beetroots
1 carrot
100 g white celery or rutabaga
1 onion
2 eggs
½ dl water
½ dl potato flour
½ dl wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme or salvia (or mixed)

The sauce:
2 dl unflavoured yoghurt
1 dl cottage cheese
1 small clove garlic
a pinch of cayenne pepper or some other similar spice
1/4 teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon vinegar

Preparation:
Mix the ingredients of the sauce, check that it tastes good and put it into the fridge to for the steaks being ready. Peel the potatoes and the other vegetables and grate them. Mix the eggs, water, potato flour, wheat flour and the spices in a large bowl. Finally add the grated vegetables into the mix.

Put some butter or olive oil on a frying pan and fry steaks out of the dough on medium heat.

When each steak is ready, keep it warm by wrapping it into aluminium foil.
Serve with the sauce you previously prepared and with cooked potatoes or mashed potatoes.

Apple pie featuring oats

Here's the recipe for a heavenly oat-driven apple pie. Yes, Finns use them even in apple pie. Comes out really good! I recommend it if you still haven't tried!

Ingredients (8 portions):
100 g butter
1 egg
1 ½ dl oats
½ dl sugar
1 ½dl wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

2-3 apples

On top:
50 g butter
½ dl sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
1 ½ dl oats

Preparation:
Mix the sot butter, egg, sugar, oats, flour and baking powder together. Apply butter on the surface of your baking mould. Press the dough onto the bottom of the mould and use extra flour to help. Peel and slice the apples and settle them on the dough.
For the topping: Melt the butter and mix into it the sugar and the oats. Dust the mix equally on the whole surface of the pie.
Bake the pie in 200 c for 25 minutes.
Excellent served with vanilla sauce or vanilla ice cream!

Summer soup

Today it is Midsummer and yesterday I prepared Summer soup (fi: kesäkeitto), a traditional soup for this season in Finland (even though my boyfriend thought it was pretty Thai). Ideally it is prepared with new, fresh vegetables of the summer. It is sweet and has milk, which makes it a bit controversial to some people. But it isn't good to judge it by that! It is very good with rye bread or crispy rye bread.

Ingredients (x2):
2 carrots
½ small cauliflower
2,5 dl water
½ teaspoon salt
1 dl peas
2 ½ dl milk
65 g soft cheese (in Finland, Koskenlaskija)
a pinch of sugar
parsley

Preparation:
Peel and slice the carrots. Cut the cauliflower into smaller pieces. Cut the well-washed potatoes into cubes.
Put the vegeables to boil in salted water. Cook them for some 10 minutes until they are done. Add the peas and milk. Cut the cheese into small cubes and mix it into the soup. Heat it so that it starts boiling and take it off the cooker. Spice the soup with a bit of sugar and add abundant chopped parsley.

Vegetarian pyttipannu

Here's my vegetarian version of pyttipannu (Swedish: pyttipanna). It is a lot more unhealthy if prepared with sausage, like traditionally (but luckily I am vegetarian!) It is part of the Swedish and Finnish food tradition, and it used to be prepared of leftover ingredients, which isn't always the case nowadays. The name of this dish probably derives from "pytteliten" (=very small), which describes how all the ingredients are cut into small spieces.

Ingredients (x2):
4 middle-sized potatoes
250 ml water
½ vegetarian bouillon cube
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons olive oil
150 g chopped onion
150 g soup vegetables
1 teaspoon salt
a pinch black pepper
½ dl chopped parsley

Served with:
2 eggs
2 tomatoes

Preparation:
Wash and peel the potatoes and cut them into cubes of 1 cm. Heat the vegetarian broth and add the bay leaf. Cook the potato cubes for 5 minutes so that they get a bit softer. Pour the broth off and let the potatoes emit steam. Heat a pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil and add the chopped onion into it. Add the soup vegetables and let them steam off the liquid. You can take the vegetables off the cooker when they have gained some colour. Spice them with salt. Keep them warm under the cover. Heat the rest of the olive oil on a frying pan and add the potato cubes on it. Keep the pan hot and keep on turning the cubes around.

When they have gained some colour on all sides, add them into the rest of vegetables. Dust some black pepper on the food. Add parsley and mix. Fry the eggs on the frying pan and slice the tomato and serve the pyttipannu with them.

(Here in the Netherlands the [not-frozen] soup vegetables included a lot of greenery, in Finland they have a pretty different makeout of vegetables. Don't care, as long as they are soup vegetables.)

Feta-spinach pastry

Not sure how Finnish this is, but this kind of pastries (resembling the quiche en France) are very common in Finland, and this recipe is originally from a Finnish recipe magazine. Attention, it's very filling. I served it along with onion soup yesterday, and it was an excellent combination.

Ingredients (for a mould of 24x24cm):
3-4 layers puff pastry
1 big onion
2 tablespoons oil
150 g frozen spinach
200 g feta cheese
3 eggs
2 dl light cream or cream-milk
1/4 teaspoons black pepper
a pinch of nutmeg

Preparation:
Chop the onion and sauté it on a frying pan with olive oil. Melt the spinach and squeeze the excess liquid off it. Pour the liquid off the feta cubes.
Cover the mould with puff pastry. Spread the spinach, onion and feta cheese on the puff pastry.

Mix the eggs, cream and spices together. Pour this mix on the mould.
Bake the pastry in the lower part of the 200 c hot oven for about 45 minutes.

Finnish-style pulla-pear dessert

This is a soft tasting fruity dessert improvised by me. I think the ingredients really suit each other, so I wanted to share it with you.

Ingredients (x2):
1 pulla (=sweet bun) (the 'korvapuusti' kind is ideal for that they have cinnamon!)
300 g vanilla ice cream
2 dl milk
a big pear or two small pears

Preparation:
Cut the pear into small pieces. Put the pieces of pear into mugs and pour milk on them. Cut the pulla or korvapuusti into "flakes" and add it into the mugs. Add ice cream on them. Mix.

Karelian pastries

These are pastries very popular in Finland. This recipe is for those with the most common filling, the one with rice (other types of fillings for them include potato or carrot). Karelian pastries are part of the food tradition of the Eastern Finnish region Karelia that Finland ceded to the Soviet Union in WW2. Karelian refugees spread the tradition of their cuisine, including this pastry, to the rest of Finland in the post-war period. Besides Finland it is eaten also in Northern Russia. They are usually served with egg butter.

Ingredients (20 pastries):

Rye crust
3 dl water
1 teaspoon salt
2 dl wheat flour
around 4 dl rye flour (you're lucky if you find it outside Finland)

Rice porridge filling
1 l milk
3 dl porridge rice
2 dl water
2 teaspoons salt
optionally, a pat of butter

Egg butter (which you apply on the ready pastries)
3-4 eggs
butter

Preparation:

Prepare the rice filling first: Boil water, add salt and the porridge rice. Add the milk and cook for an hour on rather low heat. In case the rice you use requires less time, add less milk respectively.

Then, prepare the dough: First mix water, salt and wheat flour. Then add into them the rye flour. The dough can remain pretty humid, as long as you can work with it.

Cut pieces of the dough and start rolling them out. In Finland we use a special kind of rolling pin for this (pictured above), doing a circular motion with it. You can however even do with a normal roll, as long as the crust for each separate pastry will be around 2-3mm thin and of a round or oval shape. Place a tablespoonful of rice porridge on each of the flat crusts. Once you've done that, start closing the pastries with the edges of the crust, using your index and thumb of both hands on respective sides of the pastry. This will give the pastries their final shape.

Bake the pastries in an oven heated to 210 c for around 15 minutes. Once you have taken them out of the oven, apply some milk on them with a brush. It is good to let them rest for a few minutes before eating.

(The crust of my pastries got thicker in the oven because we didn't find plain rye flour here in Holland, only a "bread mix" with a lot of yeast. Better than nothing, but yeast really does not belong to karjalanpiirakat.)

Prepare the egg butter: Cook the eggs for 10 minutes. Peel the eggs and add a couple of tablespoons of butter on them. Crush it all together with a fork. Add the egg butter on the pastries.


Enjoy!


We had a pretty Finnish night, since all the evening I had been feeling psyched about that I was going to make karjalanpiirakat, and as I made them and as we ate them, we watched Pasila with English subtitles (a cartoon for adults about a police station and all the great personalities around it)