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.

Finnish-style oat bread

I'm totally a sucker for such bread that you can get in Finland - partly or completely full-grain stuff, with not much yeast or none at all, firm, and so charming of taste that you prefer to eat it without anything on it so that the bread itself is the centre of attention. I couldn't find the right flour here though so I had to use white wheat flour. But anyway the bread came out so beloved that both of them were eaten in less than 10 minutes. Oats are very popular in Finland, and it is a common conviction there that you should eat some oats every day to be friendly to your heart and to reduce LDL cholesterol.

Ingredients (for 2 breads 20 cm of diameter):
3 dl dark wheat flour (hiivaleipäjauhoja/jästbrödsmjöl)
1 dl oats
½ teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 dl grated cheese
50 g margarine
2 ½ dl milk

Preparation:
Mix the flour, oats, salt and baking powder in a bowl with a wooden fork. Add the grated cheese, the milk and the margarine that you've previously melted. Mix quickly, don't mix a lot! It is normal that the dough is very loose. Put baking paper on an oven plate. Pour half of the dough on the baking paper and pat it with floured hands into the shape of a bread of 20cmx20cm. Form another bread next to it (or after the first one has been baked). Bake in the oven in 225 c for 15 minutes.

Tagliatelle with pistachio-zucchini cream

Here's an excellent tagliatelle recipe where I make use of pistachios, those that you usually associate with snacking. Pappardelle are just as fine as tagliatelle.

Ingredients (x3):
200 g tagliatelle
2 small cloves garlic
½ onion
1 zucchina
4 tablespoons crème fraîche
3/4 dl milk
(instead of these last two you can use just plain cooking cream instead, or only milk if you want a lighter version)
black pepper
salt
olive oil
25 pistachios
parmesan

Preparation:
Put the pasta to cook in a pan with salted water. Grind the garlic and chop the onion and heat them on a pan with olive oil. Grate the zucchina and add it on the pan. Fry it on pretty high heat for three minutes. Mash 12 pistachios and add them on the pan. Add salt and pepper. Lower the heat considerably. Add the crème fraîche and milk into the vegetables and mix. Let the sauce cook on low heat for some 3-4 minutes. When the tagliatelle are al dente, remove the water. Mix the pasta with the sauce and mash the rest of the pistachios and dust them on the portions along with grated parmesan cheese.

Spaghetti with parsley cream

This dish is very easy to make and the result tastes soft, charming and fresh. With the short preparation time of some 15 minutes it's a good one to make even if you're in a hurry. Capellini are just as suitable as the good old spaghetti.

Ingredients (x2:)
175 g spaghetti or capellini
15 g parmesan
60 g crème fraîche
1 medium-sized onion
4 tablespoons chopped parsley
salt
black pepper

Preparation:
Chop the onion and put it into a pan with along with a bit of water. Add the cream on the pan and mix to form a crema out of it and add salt and black pepper. Heat up the crema. Chop the parsley and add it into the crema. Cook the pasta in salted water and when ready, pour the water off and serve it with the parsley cream and grated parmesan.

Carrot muffins

These are absolutely delicious muffins with carrot. Alike with the carrot cake, but in muffin form. Common in Finland.

Ingredients (12 cake cups):
around 300 g carrot
4 dl wheat flour
3 dl sugar
2 tl baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
3/4 dl crushed almonds
100 g margarine
3 eggs

For the topping:
200 g unspiced unripened cheese (for example Philadephia)
1 dl icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Preparation:
Mix all the dry ingredients with each other. Peel and grate the carrots. Melt the margarine and then let it cool down a little. Mix the eggs, margarine and carrots together.

Add the dry ingredients into the wet dough and mix. Fill the cake cups quite full with the dough. Bake in 200 c for 20 minutes.

Mix the ingredients for the topping. Wait until the muffins have cooled down before you spread it on them. You may even add some more decorative things on them, like we did by adding extra pieces of carrot.

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.)

Soup of three onions

This is a nice onion soup that differs from the traditional onion soup by having 3 key ingredients: yellow onion, shallot and leek. Worth a try next time you want to make onion soup! To be served with croutons, a good idea is to make them yourself the way I suggest here (they come out pretty luxurious!)

Ingredients (x2):
2 yellow onions
2 shallots
½ leek
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
½ l water
2/3 bouillon cube
1 small bay leaf
1 teaspoon thyme
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Garlic-croutons:
(semi-)dried bread
1 tablespoon oil
1-2 cloves garlic
(1 teaspoon dried parsley)

+ grated cheese

Preparation:
Peel the onions, cut them in halves and then cut them into thin slices or pieces. Wash the leek and cut it into pieces.
Melt the butter in a pan and add the onions. Give them 5 minutes to gain some colour, but don't let them become brown.

Add the water, the 2/3 bouillon cube and the spices. Cook under cover on mild heat for half an hour.
Cut the bread into cubes. Grind the garlic and fry it on the pan with oil. Add the bread cubes on the pan let them become slightly brown in colour. Optionally add some parsley on them.

Serve the soup with the croutons and grated cheese.

(Sorry for taking the picture a bit too late!)