Rosolli

This mix of vegetables, called rosolli, belongs to the Finnish Christmas as tightly as ham.
It is usually combined with other Christmas food.
Some people like to prepare a creamy sauce for rosolli but I prefer to skip that.

Ingredients (x2):
1 beetroot or two if smaller
some white vinegar
1 big carrot
1-2 cooked potatoes
1 pickled cucumber
½ red onion
½ apple
a pinch of black pepper

Preparation:
Cut the vegetables into cubes. Put the cubed beetroot, apple and red onion into a glass and pour some vinegar on them, and mix. After a while pour the vinegar off.
Lay the vegetables on a plate separately or, alternatively, mix them together (in that case the beetroot will colour the whole rosolli red).
Dust some black pepper over the vegetables.

Potato gnocchi with beetroot sauce

This was really good, even if I first had no idea what to expect from it! It is a bit agrodolce, both sweet and sour. If you're looking for ideas on what to serve your potato gnocchi with, I warmly recommend this sauce!

Ingredients (x2):

For the gnocchi:
600 g potatoes
100 g flour
½ egg
1 tablespoon parmesan
a pinch of salt
(bread crumbs)

For the sauce:
3 tablespoons olive oil
250 g beetroots
1 small onion
1 small clove garlic
150 g grated cheese (for example Edam)
a pinch of salvia and thyme
salt
pepper

Preparation:
Peel the potatoes and cook them in a pan. When they're ready, mash them and let them cool down for a while. Add the egg, salt, parmesan and bread crumbs into the mashes potatoes. Start adding flour and mixing the dough. Add more flour until the dough is easily manageable in your hands and you manage to make balls out of it. When you have transformed all the dough into small balls (2-3 cm of diameter), fill a pan with water and make the water boil on the cooker. Add the potato balls into the pan and wait until they come to the surface and then take them out of the water.

Chop the onion and grind the garlic and fry them on a pan with olive oil. When they have gained some colour, add the beetroots that you have previously cooked and cut into small spieces (or use readily cooked ones). Add salt and pepper. Let the sauce flavour for 5 minutes on rather low heat.

Apply a light layer of butter on the surface of an oven mould. Place a part of the gnocchi in the mould, and cover them with a part of the sauce and grated cheese. Repeat this procedure two or three times. When you're done with the last layer, pour some olive oil all over the dish and dust the surface with a bit of thyme and powder salvia.

Cook the food in an oven pre-heated to 180 c for 7 minutes.

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.