Vegetable steaks

Nothing keeps you from making vegetable balls instead of steaks with this recipe!

Ingredients (x3):
150 g potatoes
½ or 1 egg
40 g emmenthal cheese
½ bag of deep frozen vegetables including cauliflower, broccoli and carrot
bread crumbs
salt
black pepper
nutmeg
olive oil

Preparation:
Cut the potatoes into pieces. Cook all the vegetables in a pan in salted water on heavy heat for some 10 minutes. When cooked, pour the water off and let the vegetables cool down and release stem for a while. After a few minutes mash the ingredients as if you were mashing potatoes, but don't mash them very fine. Add the cut cheese, the pepper, the salt and the nutmeg. Add the egg (keep in mind that the entire egg may not be necessary) and bread crumbs, until you get an easily manageable dough. Taste the dough to judge if you need to adjust more spices.

Spray some more bread crumbs on your cutting board. Form steaks out of the dough in your palms, dipping the steaks in bread crumbs. Pour olive oil on a frying pan and fry the steaks on rather high heat. Turn them around frequently and keep on frying them until they will have obtained a golden/brownish colour.

You can serve the steaks with for example potatoes or rice and a sauce (The sauce I used in the picture below was made by me ouf of butter, flour, milk, cheese, basil and lemon juice). If you don't mind it being more fast food kind, serving them with rice, mayo and ketchup is also a good idea.

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.