« Kaisla sleeps through her first meeting and photo with Santa, a cherished holiday tradition in the US. »

After what seemed like an eternity in limbo we finally moved into a house on Friday. It has been a long, stressful journey from packing and selling the house in Helsinki beginning in early September, my mother dying rather unexpectedly about the same time, living in a Residence Inn for two months, buying a car and driving in MA again, searching for a suitable home and buying one, not to mention being pregnant, giving birth and dealing with a newborn throughout the process. I think Jarkko and I have managed to squeeze in every major life event other than marriage and our own deaths into the past three months. Finding ourselves in a house filled with boxes of stuff that had been savaged by the US Customs/Homeland Security Department and the movers and a box springs too large to fit up the stairs was the crowning touch. I think I would be having a nervous breakdown presently if two of my sisters weren't coming to help us get settled in next week as it's nearly impossible to do anything with a baby who is frequently hungry and insists on being held by me most of the time.

And it is the holidays. People generally go bonkers around this time of year even without all the added extra stress. We had to go by the Home Depot hardware store yesterday for a few things and that was a shopping nightmare bar none given the crazed last minute holiday shoppers driving around in their SUVs.

All things considered though it has all gone remarkably well. The staff at the Residence Inn were so incredible to us that I find myself actually missing being there and my early morning coffee, newspaper and chat with the guy at the desk. Our real estate agent who, after we backed out of the first house we made an offer on, made sure we got the second one and has just been terrific all around. Friends here who saved our unprepared asses by lending us a few essentials for the baby since I went into the hospital the day we got the car and were planning on shopping for a few things for the yet-to-be-born Kaisla. And the neighbours who dropped by to welcome us to our new house and neighbourhood with chocolates, flowers and an adorable "Welcome to your new home" artwork from one of their toddlers. It's a bit overwhelming coming from Finland where many neighbours never said hello and avoided eye contact even after four years of living there. I don't know how to thank all these people enough. Even in the best situation, moving at this point was an insane proposition and I can't imagine how much more unpleasant it would have been without them.

Someday Kaisla may ask what it was like when she was born and we'll both probably glance at each other with a "where do we begin" look and show her the picture of her sleeping through her first visit with Santa. We took her to the mall to wait in line for an hour and I just kept looking at her in the pram sleeping so peacefully wishing for a less chaotic moment in our lives so we could really enjoy the fleeting time when she is so small. Hopefully things will quiet down now and life will return to some semblance of normal in a month or three.

Happy Holidays/Festivus/Christmas/Whatever and Happy New Year to each and all.

« Maybe this will explain what I've been doing for the last 10 months :) »

After 10 months of baking, we have a new dish: Kaisla. :) One of the first things to go when tired is the ability to string words together into sentences and complete thoughts so I haven't been doing much in the way of writing here or replying to email. To those who have sent email, please accept my apologies as I think about replying to the backlog every day and somehow manage to fail most of the time. Sleep deprivation is my constant companion. :)

In addition to the fun that comes with being host to a parasitic growth who takes over the space your vital organs once enjoyed, we also moved back to the US since Jarkko got a great job offer and though I had mixed feelings about returning I was happy to leave Finland. At some point I may elaborate on why I was, and still am, happy with our new location. Everything happened so fast that we barely had time to pull up stakes and say good-bye to everyone. We flew out of Helsinki only days before I wouldn't have been allowed to fly anymore so there wasn't a lot of time for much outside of moving and getting moved.

It is rather strange being back in the US, all the little things like the sucktastic mobile network and stone age banking system that you forget about when you leave, but living in Finland has made me appreciate being back home in ways I never would have expected. In spite of the terrible state of US politics, the people are so incredibly friendly ( in MA! ) which is both annoying and wonderful at the same time.

I'll likely be baking again once we move into our new house next week and I splurge on a Wolf stove I've been dreaming about for a long while. I will try not to gush too often over the baby, but I also swore I wouldn't buy her anything pink or cute and look how well that worked out. I suppose I'll have to go to Germany to find little black baby clothes and Docs for toddlers.

So...we're alive, well and back in the Hub. And soon I may try to form complex thoughts and sentences and put them here and possibly some pictures, too. Until then, you might find me in the aisles of the internet gushing over cute baby stuff that Kaisla is too young for but I get all squishy over anyway. Hormones. Fear them. :)

« Fire Island »

The Da Vinci Code has managed to sell an incredible number of copies in the past few years though I must be one of the very few people on the planet who have not purchased or read the book. Over Easter weekend, we watched a 2-hour special on the fact and fiction of the premise of the book largely because there was nothing else worth watching and the teaser mentioned something about the Catholic church being a bit pissed off about the whole thing. If the Pope is upset, it must be worth watching at least once. It was interesting to see just how far people are willing to go to believe something that is either ridiculous or highly improbable. Since then, there have been two other special programs on the National Geographic Channel's "Secret Bible Week" about the Templars and the apocalypse. And, now that the movie has been released, there are a whole slew of programs with Dan Brown and talking heads trying to look scholarly and thoughtful while thinking about what's for dinner tonight.

Having been through Catholic schools and a Jesuit University, I remain a recovering Catholic but retain some sense of humour at the thought of the Church getting its hackles up over a third-rate novel written by an author whose earlier books were not very popular or critically acclaimed. Throughout the centuries, the church has remained rather touchy about being reminded of its bloody past. The premise that Jesus and Mary Mag were married and had a daughter is entirely plausible, if not probable, but where the suspension of disbelief enters the picture is where Mary and the child disappear without a trace after the crucifixion well before there was a Catholic church whose misogyny their existence might cause problems for. The whole quest for the Holy Grail, a.k.a. Graal in Medieval literature, becomes the search for the lost bloodline of Jesus? I think the UFO abductees have more proof of LGM probing their anal cavities than the idea that the Holy Graal was in fact Jesus' long lost daughter whose descendants became the Merovingian bloodline 300-400 AD. Well, ok, maybe Jesus having a sex life instead of spending a few decades as a human male without jerking off or never having an erection is a little more credible than alien anal probes. There is no parish named "Our Lord of the Blue Balls", is there? I rest my case.

Then there is the idea that the Templars were the guardians of the secret that Jesus and Mary had a daughter and the subsequent bloodline. The Templars have been accused of just about everything imaginable given that a lack of information about something leads to a whole range of crap that people fill the gaps with. Now it is speculated that the Masons are the modern successors of the Templars after they were eradicated in 1307. Trying to imbue Masons with so much mystery is, well, amusing. My grandparents were Masons and every damn Christmas I had to get dressed up and be a bearer of gifts in some cult-like ceremony where each point on a giant 5-point star had some old prune in a different shade of chiffon sitting in a chair waiting for me to arrive after the appropriate incantation. I just figured that it was a social club much like their bridge club where everyone was ancient and had lots of time to kill. Creepy? Yes. Cultish? Yes. Mysterious? No.

Now the movie is out and, wow, what a boring three hour movie it is. Given the choice of what few decent movies seem to be around these days, it was either MI:III or DVC. There are a few amusing parts like the latin speaking killer albino monk and the Soprano cast of Vatican white guys trying to snuff the good guys. I mean, in the 70s when The Exorcist came out the Church had reasonably good grounds to get huffy and ban the movie, thereby ensuring its timeless popularity, as it was based on a true story and involved the arcane practice of exorcism which only the Jesuits in St. Louis seemed willing to attempt in defiance of the Vatican. The Exorcist also had a fabulous score with lots of the scary apocalyptic choir music so often associated with evil or doom whereas I can't even remember if there was any score in DVC. It provided Halloween costume ideas for years and years afterwards, too. What are kids supposed to do now, get into genealogy and trace their family back to French nobility? Boring. With The Da Vinci Code the whole story is fictional, even if parts of it might be plausible. It's not like Dan Brown inserted bits about Jesus preferring his right had to jerk himself off claiming them as fact thus refuting the long cherished belief that every sperm is sacred and that masturbation causes blindness. Think of the chaos that would cause amongst the faithful. What's so blasphemous in suggesting that this son of god guy might have been a regular Joe?

One would think that, after all these years, the Church would have figured out that there is no such thing as bad publicity and that by banning something it nearly guarantees that it will be an international success. Even in Finland, where they wisely ran off the Catholics early on, the movie has been sold out for much of the last week or two and I don't think it's because Tom Hanks is considered a hottie here. I'm sure Dan Brown is thanking the Pope and all the other religious freaks in a huff about the movie every time he looks at his rapidly swelling bank account.

Maybe it's time I wrote the novel about Jesus' wild teenage years and sexual coming of age, Jesus is Coming!.

And those with 10 minutes to kill will enjoy giggling at, The Albino Code, which is both shorter and cheaper than DVC. :)

« A flourless chocolate cake that goes by the name Chocolate Decadence ore Chocolate Nemesis. It could also be called The Dark Slab. :) »

I've been baking lately, but I've been too distracted and lazy to write about it as once I get home from work and walk the dog, I begin the slow drift of falling asleep on the sofa. I've been working my way through the same book for over a week now, too. Largesse is my middle name. Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. :)

In my spate of baking ennui, I noticed a friend had tried to make a chocolate cake with disappointing results. With a name like 'Chocolate Nemesis', I was curious and started poking around on the net and was amazed to find that this single recipe was responsible for countless angst-filled laments about wasted expensive chocolates and ruined dinner party desserts. This cake has four ingredients, how could people go so consistently wrong and not lynch the authors of the recipe/cookbook? Good question.

It is a flourless chocolate cake in its most basic form and, while you need to follow the directions carefully, this is likely one of the easiest cakes you can possibly make. I consulted my hefty tome of pastry and found a recipe almost precisely like the one causing all the flopped cakes except that it didn't call for overbeating the eggs, fleshed out little details like buttering the pan and lining it with baking paper and, most importantly, it included the all-important refrigeration. It has to be cold to set firmly for removing from the cake form and cutting.

So, no nemesis, just a rich chocolate cake that is easy, easy, easy to make. Take no shit from bad cookbooks and bad recipes, especially ones that seem to circulate around the net like wildfire. When you read through a recipe, it should have enough detail so that you aren't asking questions like what pan to use or how much water, etc. If you have more than one item left in doubt, keep looking for a better recipe. Bad cookbooks with bad, untested recipes really should get sent straight back to the publisher with a pointed critique as they keep on churning out these lame cookbooks as though they are completely unaware that some folks might actually try cook something from them. It's a pet peeve of mine.

Chocolate Decadence, a.k.a. Chocolate Nemesis

Makes: 1 10-in/25cm cake with 8-16 servings
Time: 20 minutes prep + 30-40 mins bake + 2-8 hours refrigeration
Source: The Professional Pastry Chef

• 7 oz or 200g sweet dark chocolate (70% cacao)*
• 7 oz or 200g unsweetened chocolate (85%+ cacao)*
• 3/4 cup or 150ml water
• 6 oz or 170g granulated sugar
• 2.25 sticks or 255g butter, room temperature
• 6 eggs, room temperature
• 3 oz or or 85g granulated sugar

1. Generously butter the inside of a round 10-inch/25cm cake pan or springform pan. Cut baking paper to fit in the bottom of the cake pan, place on the bottom and butter the top of the paper as well. Set pan aside.
2. Chop chocolate into small pieces and place on a sheet of baking paper. Slice butter into small pieces, too, and place on baking paper.
3. In a saucepan big enough to hold the chocolate and butter, bring the water and 170g of sugar to a boil. Remove the saucepan from the heat and quickly stir in the chocolate until it is completely melted and smooth. Add the butter and stir in until melted and the mixture is again smooth. Set aside and allow to cool until it is only warm to the touch.
4. In a large bowl, whip the eggs with the 85g of sugar at high speed until it is light and fluffy (about 3 minutes). Do not whip the eggs as you would for a sponge cake as too much air will make the cake dry, crumbly and difficult to slice. Slowly pour the cool or warm melted chocolate into the egg mixture. Try to pour it down the side of the bowl and not directly onto the egg mixture. Mix together gently and well.
5. Pour mixture into prepared pan and carefully place it into a pan filled with a small amount of water and add water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the cake pan. If you use a springform pan, wrap the pan in a layer of aluminum foil to prevent leaking.
6. Bake immediately at 175C/350F for about 30-40 minutes or until the top feels firm. Be careful not to overbake the cake. Allow the cake to cool for an hour and then refrigerate for a minimum of two hours or, even better, overnight.
7. To remove the cake from the pan place in a shallow pan of warm water and run a knife carefully around the edge. Invert onto a plate and gently tap around the top if it is slow to unmold. Remove the pan and carefully peel off the baking paper. If you used a springform, run a warm knife around the edge, remove the band, place a plate on top of the cake and flip over onto the plate. Remove the bottom and then remove the baking paper on top.
8. Using a thin, sharp knife dipped in hot water, slice the cake while it is cold and allow to warm up before serving. Serve with a raspberry or strawberry sauce/puree and sour cream.

* You can also just use 400g/14oz of 70% semi-sweet/bittersweet dark chocolate instead.

« A creepy anthropomorphic representative of the two most popular foods in Finland; sausage and catsup. »

I noticed a lot of the foodie folks have recently been reading and commenting on Julia Child's new book, My Life in France. I had to wait a month for the book to arrive by slow boat before I could read my copy. The food aspect of Julia's life never really interested me as I've always regarded French food as too heavy, too rich, too gamey, too full of itself and drowning in sauces. Instead, I wanted to read her story as an expat since I was always intrigued by her obvious presence and character from the first time I saw her cooking show on PBS so many decades ago. It seems doubtful that people tuned in to make French food in the 1970s, a time when velveeta cheese balls and bundt cakes were all the rage, but who could resist a woman who cooked with such flair and drank from the sherry bottle as she cooked? And the light, high voice from a 6'2" amazonian woman bidding her audience "Bon Appétit" at the end of every show was also strangely endearing.

Julia was 36 when she left the US to live in France, just as I was 36 when I came to live in Finland. Although Julia had the advantage of being part of the US consular machine which provides quite a network of advantages for the expat when compared to the spouse who expatriates without an organization to support them, I found her experiences familiar. I was particularly jealous of her claim to becoming fluent in French within a year of arrival, something I attribute to French being a romance language, and I wondered how she might have fared with Finnish. But, like her, learning all the food words first for reading menus and grocery shopping was a priority for me.

She, too, was a liberal living outside the US in a time of political discontent back home; McCarthyism. It is interesting that she mentions that McCarthy was largely supported by "Texas oil millionaires." So much, yet so little, has changed over the decades. And, too, she became somewhat alienated from her family because she held such radically different political views. Her father was a staunch Republican who supported McCarthy and thought that the leftist college professors and socialists in Europe had brainwashed his daughter. She wrote a letter in defense of several accused professors at Smith (her alma mater) who had fallen into the path of the McCarthy witch hunt that is remarkably current and patriotic:

In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States... I respectfully suggest that you are doing both your college and your country a disservice... In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due process of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

Aside from her going from mere consumer to gourmet in four years, her decision to take on the cookbook project and the attention to every detail she lavished upon it from verifying authenticity to American kitchen equivalents to fool-proofing the recipes was a surprise. So few cookbooks these days bother to test their recipes much less give a damn whether the ingredients are readily available to their target audience. I completely understood her desire to make French cooking as authentic and as easy as possible using what would be reasonably available in the local American grocery. Few cooks who have never left the borders of their own country can appreciate how frustrating it is to cook elsewhere when many of the ingredients simply aren't available. Try making Kraft mac&cheese with franks (often mocked by those who have never eaten it :) or green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup or anything with velveeta or marshmallows or Helmann's mayo, etc. in Finland and you'll be left with an empty plate. Even basic things like sour cream and buttermilk have to be substituted for which is only done by trial and error. Her diligence saved a lot of cooks the frustration that only the expat can truly understand.

One particular story in the book went into great detail about her determination to perfect the recipe for crusty French bread. At first I read the recommendation about using an asbestos tile as a baking stone and gasped given that asbestos was public health enemy number one in the 1970s, but later she mentions the panic she and Knopf had when the news about asbestos first came out and how they switched to ceramic tiles just before she was to do the baguette show on TV complete with footage of her baking with an artisanal baker in France.

The only part of the book that left me wanting was how little of her she really allowed the reader to see. We get a few glimpses here and there of how her collaboration with Simone "Simca" Beck was turbulent at times, but these are rather breezy and don't really tell us what was really going on. Clearly she was a very bright, colourful, vivacious, driven perfectionist, but that's all we really get to know of her in this book. There was one particular quote that made me smile amidst all of her effusive comments about French food and how much she loved France that confirmed that she was still real, still American.

In the meantime, we'd be going back the the US for a couple of months of home leave... I couldn't wait to see them and get my feet on US soil. But what I really looked forward to was eating an honest-to-goodness American steak!

So, I may reconsider my years of avoiding her cookbooks now that I know she put so much effort into perfecting each recipe for the average American cook. I had always admired her as an entertaining TV chef, but I have a new respect for her cookbooks.

« Delicious and chewy chocolate caramel turtle brownies. »

While trying to come up with something to make for Easter to supplement my annual pitiful attempt at making pasha/pashka, I found a recipe for some dark chocolate turtle brownies that immediately trumped all the other possibilities if only because I used to eat turtles by the box and haven't had any since I left the US. I don't remember if turtle candies were very popular in New England, but in the Midwest, they are a classic staple. Chocolate coated caramel with nuts is tough to argue with in terms of taste and texture.

When I went hunting for the origin of turtles it was somewhat surprising that the only useful clue was from the linguist list archives where Barry Popik, the resident food word hunter for the OED in NYC, had found the first citation for turtles. Finally, I found that DeMet's, the original maker of turtles in Chicago, had been sold to Nestlé in 1988.

DeMet's Turtles was introduced in the early 1920s by Rowntree DeMet's Inc. An employee at the chocolate factory remarked that the new candy, with pecans protruding from its side, looked like a turtle. The name stuck. Nestlé acquired Rowntree DeMet's Inc. in 1988. In January 1996 the name changed to NESTLÉ® TURTLES.

The current turtles don't look like the ones I remember devouring limb by limb as a kid since you can't see the four pecan halves poking out from beneath the mound of chocolate coated caramel which looked like legs and lent the confection the appearance of a turtle. I suppose you'll just have to use your imagination.

Turtle brownies sounded too good to pass up and, after eating half of a batch of them I can vouch for their crack-like addictiveness for the chewy, nutty and dark chocolate brownie lover. The caramel is just heavenly on top, too. The brownie batter is quick and easy, but the caramel should be approached with care and preparation since it isn't difficult to make, but it can be a bit scary for the first-time cook. Use a deep sauce pan if you have one and when the caramelized sugar is ready for the addition of the cream, pour in a small amount at a time while vigorously whisking as it bubbles and spatters from the extreme heat. It will be smooth and spatter-free by the last addition of cream. Those not adventurous enough to make their own can likely use a bag of Brach's caramels (in the US), melted and poured on top although it won't taste quite the same as a batch of fresh caramel.

Ultimate Turtle Brownies 

Makes: 25 (1 1/2-inch-square or 3.8 cm-square) Brownies
Time: Prep time - about 30 minutes + 30 min bake time and 3 hours cooling time
Source: CI, May 2006

Caramel

• 1/4 cup or 0,60 dl heavy cream plus 2 additional tablespoons
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt 
• 1/4 cup or 0,60 dl water 
• 2 tablespoons light corn syrup 
• 1 1/4 cups or 250g sugar
• 2 tablespoons or 28g unsalted butter 
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Brownies

• 1 stick or 113g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
• 4 ounces or 113g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 2 ounces ore 56g unsweetened chocolate, chopped
• 3/4 cup or 106g unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 
• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 cup or 198g sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt 
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 
• 2/3 cup or ~78g chopped pecans
• 1/3 cup or 0,75dl semisweet chocolate chips (optional)

Garnish

• 25 pecan halves, toasted

 

1. For the caramel: Combine cream and salt in small bowl; stir well to dissolve salt. Combine water and corn syrup in heavy-bottomed 2- to 3-quart saucepan; pour sugar into center of saucepan, taking care not to let sugar granules touch sides of pan. Gently stir with clean spatula to moisten sugar thoroughly. Cover and bring to boil over medium-high heat; cook, covered and without stirring, until sugar is completely dissolved and liquid is clear, 3 to 5 minutes. Uncover and continue to cook, without stirring, until bubbles show faint golden color, 3 to 5 minutes more. Reduce heat to medium-low. Continue to cook (swirling occasionally) until caramel is light amber and registers about 360F/182C degrees on candy or instant-read thermometer, 1 to 3 minutes longer. Remove saucepan from heat and carefully add cream in small doses to center of pan; stir with whisk or spatula (mixture will bubble and steam vigorously) until cream is fully incorporated and bubbling subsides. Stir in butter and vanilla until combined; transfer caramel to glass bowl or measuring cup and allow to cool.
2. For the brownies: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 325F/162C degrees. Butter a 9-in/23cm square pan and line bottom and sides with baking paper or greased foil, leaving excess to overhang pan sides to allow for easy removal for slicing brownies later.
3. Melt butter and bittersweet and unsweetened chocolates in medium heatproof bowl set over saucepan of barely simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth and combined; set aside to cool slightly. Meanwhile, whisk together flour and baking powder in small bowl; set aside. When chocolate has cooled slightly, whisk eggs in large bowl to combine; add sugar, salt, and vanilla and whisk until incorporated. Add melted chocolate mixture to egg mixture; whisk until homogenous. Add flour mixture; stir with rubber spatula until almost combined. Add chopped pecans and chocolate chips (if using); mix until incorporated and no flour streaks remain.
4. Distribute half of brownie batter in prepared baking pan, spreading in even layer. Drizzle scant 1/4 cup or 0,60dl caramel over batter. Drop remaining batter in large mounds over caramel layer; spread evenly and into corners of pan with rubber spatula. Drizzle additional scant 1/4 cup or 0,60dl caramel over top. Using tip of butter knife, swirl caramel and batter. Bake brownies until toothpick inserted into center comes out with only a few moist crumbs attached, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool brownies in pan on wire rack to room temperature, about 1 1/2 hours.
5. Heat remaining caramel (about 3/4 cup or 1,75dl) in microwave until warm and pourable but still thick (do not boil), 45 to 60 seconds, stirring once or twice; pour caramel over brownies. Using spatula, spread caramel to cover surface. Refrigerate brownies, uncovered, at least 2 hours.
6. Using baking paper or foil extensions, lift brownies from baking pan, loosening sides with paring knife, if needed. Using chef's knife, cut brownies into 25 evenly sized squares. Press a pecan half onto surface of each brownie. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

« A birch tree afflicted by a parasitic fungus that causes massive branching which looks like bird's nests. »

I would always think that the dense bunches of branches in the birch trees were simply bird's nests whenever I would see a tree dotted with dark balls of branches and it was only recently that I found out that it is actually a fungus, Taphrina Betulina, that stimulates growth of the branches to form these "witches' brooms" or tuulenpesä (wind's nest).

Overall, Easter was a lazy four-day weekend where watching lots of disaster porn on the National Geographic channel made me wonder if they have been franchised by FOX. Where did all the interesting cultural documentaries go to? Canal+ must have had some sadist setting up the weekend schedule with the most boring movies of all time that they've already shown fifty times in the past month. There isn't a whole lot to do around these parts when you don't leave town and everything is closed for four days. I think the US would cease to function in two days without anything open for business except the 7-11 and QT.

At least Amazon was open for shopping with a few interesting new titles.

• The Twinkies Cookbook: An Inventive and Unexpected Recipe Collection from Hostess - Cooking with....twinkies. It's such an unlikely book that I have to get a copy just for the fun of looking at the recipes and pictures. Why not a book on science projects you can do with twinkies, such as freezing them in liquid nitrogen and launching them at other kids using a slingshot? (they smart pretty badly) We never did figure out what the filling was made out of even after putting it through a mass spec. Some speculate that the formula was brought to earth by aliens. :)
• The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science - The 16th century was a tumultuous time for free thinkers and scholars. A history of Paracelsus has the potential to be a really interesting read.
• Sweet and Low: A Family Story - A dark memoir about the family empire behind the pink packet of saccharine that may teach other such families to never disinherit the ones who know how to write well. :)

« The noble beast, Otava, watches a ferry push through the sea ice. »

These days, I think the dead lead more thrilling lives than I do as, other than sleeping, eating and going to work, I've just not had the energy to do much of anything in the past few weeks. The highlight of my day is walking Otava and going to the puppy park where it can get pretty 'exciting' now that it's spring. I think much of the hormonal fervor is due to a very large percentage of both male and female pet dogs are not neutered/spayed in Finland as they are in the US. I'm not sure if it is an issue of cost or an issue of people wishing to breed their pets, but I don't remember HB going this berzerk with the twice-yearly rush of hormones. I mean, what do you do when your enormous dog jumps the fence to rumble with a male dog of similar size whom he used to play with rather well and then cowers at a dachshund who is snarling and biting at him? It's spring, even though it's snowing to beat the band.

What's the deal with Helsinki real estate prices lately? One 80-ish sq. meter attic apartment is asking 650,000 euro. It's not in a jugend building or anything fancy like that and the tiny circa 1930s lift doesn't even go up to the floor the apartment is on. I just cannot fathom who is buying these fantastically overvalued apartments on salaries that are, on average, well below 50,000 euro per year (before taxes). It makes me wonder if and when a real estate 'correction' will come as either the prices will fall thereby decreasing equity overnight or the interest rates will rise (you can't get a 15-30 year fixed rate in Finland) and there will be a lot of sales and foreclosures for those who purchased at the limit of their available cash. Even for those who could afford to buy these overpriced places with cash, why do it?

One bit of deeply depressing reading over the weekend was a Seymour Hersh column, The Iran Plan, in The New Yorker. I suppose I had given myself some comfort thinking that the US was either smart enough not to or fiscally unable to consider invading Iran but this piece makes me want to buy a bunker somewhere far, far away from the Middle East and Israel. Too many wackos pushing for the apocalypse with fingers on the button. What ever happened to the checks and balances that would prevent this sort of insanity?

On the bright side, Douglas Coupland will be releasing a new book, JPod (Microserfs 2.0) in Mid-May. Supposedly Microserfs meets the Google generation. I loved Microserfs so this should be an equally entertaining read. The book's website also mentions a 'special edition' of the book that is boxed, signed and packaged with a special editon of cube figures, presumeably of the characters from the book. I wonder why the book hasn't gotten more publicity as I only found it while browsing the humour section of Amazon.co.uk and it was on the 6th or 7th page of the upcoming titles.

« Mämmi frozen yogurt. (Those unfamiliar with mämmi might read "Warm Cowpies".) »

Mämmi is that pre-digested-looking substance that rarely finds friends outside of the native Finnish population. It's a pity, really, as once you get past the way it looks it's delicious. It's like the browner, less chocolatey, more viscous cousin of Whoppers. I've often thought that mämmi is a perfect substance to use as an ingredient in other things given its unappetizing looks and distinctive flavour. It usually is only available around Easter, but with some creativity, it could be enjoyed all year long.

Last year, Jarkko, Arabella and I left work early to visit the Häme fair in order to try mämmi ice cream. I couldn't wait to try it and I was totally crushed when it was all gone by the time we arrived. I vowed that I'd make my own if I had to since I thought it was a brilliant idea to take the mämmi and the cream it is traditionally served with and make it into a frozen dessert.

Two months ago I went in search of an ice cream machine and, after sizing up the very few models available in the shops downtown, went with the smallest and cheapest model; the Braun. I can't say that I'm impressed with the performance, but it works and produces a manageable amount of ice cream in a short amount of time. It's a pain in the ass to stick the tub in the freezer for 24-hours before I want to make ice cream and the stirring paddle is suspiciously flimsy but, given the choice between a 350eur Italian model vs. a 40eur Braun, I can't really complain that I didn't get what I paid for. I have fond memories of the old hand crank variety that used ice and rock salt, but I don't honestly remember if it made better ice cream or not. Now that I have spoken critically of the Braun, it will promptly break the next time I try to use it. :)

I first tried a recipe for mämmijäätelö I found on MTV3 (that is now lamentably gone) that was a cooked custard base of milk, cream, sugar and 8 egg yolks. There are a lot of recipes that simply use vanilla ice cream with mämmi mixed in, but really good store-bought vanilla ice cream is hard to find and it's much more fun to make your own. It tasted terrific but it was a bit too heavy. What about frozen yogurt? Yogurt is very popular but I've been somewhat surprised at the limited popularity of frozen yogurt, especially given that it is often much lower in fat than ice cream. I went looking for a frozen yogurt recipe, but nothing really fit with what I wanted so I sort of made one from various ideas I liked in several recipes. What results is something that tastes a bit like a light version of a malted milk shake for those who are old enough to remember what a malt is. After making this stuff I wonder why Valio yogurt hasn't introduced a mämmi-flavoured yogurt before or maybe the Valio Bar in Kämppi could consider offering a mämmi milk shake during Easter and beyond.

The Kymppi Company who is a major producer of this brown malty goodness offer a bunch of mämmi recipes on their website (or a free booklet if you write to kymppi@kymppi.laihianmallas.fi and request a copy). Some of them, like the mämmi shot, are...not so inviting, but the letut and muffins look good. Kymppi also hosts the mämmi eating contest in Toijala, but they only hold it every other year so perhaps in the off years of the eating contest they could host a mämmi bake-off to inspire people to cook/bake with mämmi throughout the year.

Behold the power of mämmi! :) Hmm...I wonder if it tastes good with cheese.

Mämmi Frozen Yogurt

Makes: about 1 litre/4 cups
Time: about an hour, including the ice cream maker

• 170g or 6oz granulated sugar
• 80ml or 1/3 cup light syrup
• juice from one large orange
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1 litre or 4 1/4 cups unflavoured yogurt (whole or low-fat), drained
• zest from one large orange
• 300g naturally sweetened mämmi (you can use the sweetened kind, too, but you may want to adjust the amount of granulated sugar.)

1. Pour yogurt into a sieve lined with cheesecloth and place over a bowl to drain. Allow to drain for a few hours or until it loses about 1/3 to 1/2 its volume. (note: low-fat yogurt will yield much more water than whole-fat yogurt)
2. In a saucepan, bring the syrup, orange juice and half of the sugar to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil for 1 minute and remove from heat.
3. Beat the egg yolks lightly and stir in a small amount of the hot syrup to temper the yolks. Add the remaining syrup and let cool to room temperature. Stir in orange zest.
4. Whip egg whites until they are foamy. Gradually add the remaining half of the sugar and whip to stiff peaks.
5. Pour the drained yogurt into a bowl and whisk in the syrup and egg yolk mixture until smooth. Whisk in mämmi until smooth and evenly distributed. Fold in egg foam with a spatula. (At this point you can cover the yogurt and refrigerate it for up to 24 hours to allow the flavour to 'mature' before processing it into frozen yogurt.)
6. Process in an ice cream freezer according to directions.

« In the absence of actual spring we have to pretend. »

In spite of the animals behaving as though it is spring and the return of the retarded turning the clocks forward at a latitude where it does little good in either direction, it's snowing and still cold in Helsinki while it's nearly 80F back home. I don't mind winter, but after more than six months of darkness and cold, I'd like the warm weather to hurry its ass up before the dark and the cold return. It's hard not to wonder if it's going to be a year without a summer while watching it snow on the second day of April.

I've been sick as a dog all last week and this weekend. I'm constantly nauseated, tired, unable to sleep well and have been mostly just sitting on the sofa staring into space wishing I could sleep and that my stomach would find something better to do. Even looking at pictures of food makes my stomach flip flop. Being sick along with the crappy weather as well as finding out that there won't be a mämmi eating contest this year has put me in a rather glum mood. In a desperate attempt to cheer myself up, I ran the logs from the web server through an analyzer and was quite entertained by some of the search phrases. Aside from altogether too many 'porn', 'naked' and 'sex' queries attached to various combinations of words, there were a lot of odd weather folklore and scary cooking questions. Some were just plain odd.

• jello wrestling and customer service in philadelphia - Uh...how do these go together and how did google think that this web site was what they might be looking for?
• the boss beer drunk pictures powerpoint - Nothing like having a powerpoint slide of your drunk boss ready for Monday's meeting.
• see n say penis - a new toy for kids?
• do i look like a people person magnet - on the internet nobody knows you're a dog
• zit cake recipe - eew. I suppose something with pink marzipan and whipped cream could work.
• cookie dough and anal leakage - if ever there were two things that didn't belong together, this might be them.
• forbidden secrets egyptian method of penis enlargement - they remove it, wrap it until it's larger than an elephant dick and stick it in a canopic jar.
• description of mr potato head as the ideal man - only if he comes with a dildo attachment
• flour salt oil sugar water baking powder make rear big fat ass? - yes
• a recent survey discovered people who text with right hand masterbate[sic] - So what do the lefties do?
• banana peel used as floorwax - What?
• how the fuck do you use a caulking gun - Very, very carefully.
• is it true that blackstrap molasses help to regain color in grey hair - no
• satan was seen building a snowman - Hell is a cold, dark place people.
• what material make up chicken feet and how to make it crispy for food - Who cares? Just deep fry it in oil and it'll be finger lickin' good!
• prunes for constipation how to use - Insert 5 of them rectally and wait.
• something funny or unusual about the culture of tallinn estonia - They have great candied nuts.
• can i used vegetable oil with my fleshlight? - Uh....sure, guy.
• can heroin be emulsified in gasoline - You gotta wonder where that question is going.
• pugs life span with a smoker in the house - longer than the smoker unless the pug shreds the smoker's cigs.
• how to make raspberry buns with children - children aren't nearly as sweet as raspberries so puree as you would with berries and add extra sugar.
• what recreational activites does north dakota enjoy during the months december through february? - drinking, fucking and sleeping. In that order.

And here's one just for Ignatz: John Waters' no smoking in this theatre leader from 1983. Ah, the memories. :)

Note to self - Pinhole Day 2006 is 30 April this year. Just in time for Vappu.

« Pīrāgi, tasty pork, onion and caraway filled Latvian dumplings. »

I've suddenly found myself on a dumpling kick and am going around the Baltic for a variety of tasty examples. When we were in Latvia last year, we had a plate of these pīrāgi which were peppery and, surprisingly, contained caraway seed. I grew up with caraway since it is a regular feature in German foods like pumpernickel bread. Caraway, in spite of it being common in Latvian and Estonian dishes, is largely absent from Finnish and Swedish cooking. Also there is a bit of linguistic confusion in Swedish, which spread to Finnish, as the word 'kummin' in Swedish and 'kumina' in Finnish can be used for both caraway and cumin which are two different spices. Again, much linguistic comedy ensues as Jarkko says, "Cumin?", and I say, "No, caraway.", which leads to about 20 minutes of my finding pictures and descriptions on the net of caraway and trying to explain how it is different from cumin. As it happens, caraway is sold as 'kumina' and cumin is known as 'juustokumina' (cheese cumin/caraway) in Finland. Why there isn't a completely separate word for cumin is rather curious.

Although the filling is similar to the Swedish kroppkakor, but uses yeast dough instead of a potato dough. The dough is a really tight dough, meaning that the gluten makes it difficult to roll, cut and form the dough since it is constantly springing back. There are products that are called 'dough relaxers' or 'dough enhancers' that were made for just this kind of dough as they break down some of the gluten so that it's not so springy. Without dough relaxer you simply have to roll out the dough and leave it for a few minutes to relax before you cut the dough. Also use the egg wash to help seal the dumplings as they do tend to pop open if not firmly sealed.

Pīrāgi

Makes: about 24 dumplings
Time: about 2 hours
Source: Latvian Institute

Dough:

• 2.5dl or 1 cup whole milk
• 25g cake yeast
• 25g or .90oz sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, room temperature
• 500g or 17.5oz all-purpose flour
• 75g or 5 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

Filling:

• 4 slices of bacon, diced
• 250g or 9oz ham, grated
• 1 large onion, diced
• black pepper
• 1 teaspoon caraway seed

1. For the filling: Chop onion and bacon and fry in a skillet with a tablespoon or two of olive oil or butter until the onions have softened. Grate ham into the skillet and continue to cook while adding black pepper and caraway seeds. Set aside and allow to cool.
2. For the dough: Warm milk in the microwave for about 1 minute until it reaches about 40C/105F. Crumble yeast into the milk and stir until dissolved. Add sugar, salt and egg, mixing well. Add flour gradually to milk until dough forms a soft ball. Knead in melted butter until it is absorbed into the dough. Place dough into a clean, lightly greased bowl and cover with a clean dishtowel or plastic wrap. Place in a warm spot until the dough has doubled in volume.
3. When the dough has doubled, remove it from the bowl and divide it into two pieces. Roll the dough thinly and use a 3.5-inch/9cm or 4-inch/10cm round biscuit cutter to cut the dough. Spoon about 1 tablespoon of filling into the center of each circle of dough, moisten one half of the dough edge with egg wash, fold the dough in half and seal it firmly with your fingers or by pressing it together with a fork. Place the dumplings on a greased or baking paper lined baking sheet, brush each with egg wash and bake in a 375F/190C oven for about 15 minutes. Cool and serve with mustard.

« Hummingbird cake with cream cheese frosting and dried pineapple flowers. (yes, that's really a flower made from pineapple.) »

Since work has been making for long days at the office, seemingly the only thing I can do that's remotely interesting, aside from rant about the various unpleasantries of my current project, is bake which I put a lot more thought and enthusiasm into than may be readily apparent or wise to admit to. It's still snowing like hell here so there are worse things than staying indoors while waiting for winter to finally bugger off.

One of the more appealing parts of finding recipes and making them is researching the history behind them as well as learning new methods or techniques. Also, I enjoy making the traditional local foods as a way to get to know the culture, but reversing that and inflicting non-fennicized versions of American foods on my colleagues is both entertaining and, at times, mystifying when they don't receive something as well as I was convinced they might. It's a neverending learning process. :)

Pineapple and banana have been frequent additions to Finnish desserts and main dishes for quite a few decades now, almost to the point of being a bit of a cliché. Pineapple is popular. Really popular. So, I was thinking I'd find a cake recipe with banana and pineapple from the US and see if it would be tasty or find out if their popularity might be limited just to Finnish cakes. I found something called Hummingbird Cake, a cake that I'd never heard of in spite of quite a few sources on the internet claiming that this cake is among the 10 most popular in the US. The cake originally appeared in Southern Living Magazine, a popular magazine throughout the US in spite of the name, in 1978. There doesn't seem to be an authoritative source as to where it might have come from before the magazine published the recipe though The Food Timeline does a good job of gathering what little is known.

I suspect that the name has everything to do with how very, very sweet this cake is as well as the tropical fruits it contains. One of my colleagues spent five years living in Chicago and returned to Finland late last year and we often compare notes on our perceptions of the US and of Finland. Perhaps one of the most interesting things that both of us noticed and agree on is the Finnish sweet tooth. Candies, sweets and cakes, both of us agree, have a much higher profile in daily life than they do in the US or, at least, the part of the US that both of us have spent the greatest amount of time in; the Midwest. There have been various articles in the Helsingin Sanomat in the past few years that also tend to support this observation in that the amount of sugar consumed per capita has skyrocketed in the past few decades, possibly due to the plenitude and availability of candy. My colleagues all really liked the cake and so I had that warm fuzzy feeling of choosing/guessing well.

The cake and the frosting are easy to make, but the pineapple flowers really are a beautiful addition if you have the time and patience for them. The flowers would really be perfect if you make individual hummingbird cupcakes with frosting and a pineapple flower on top of each. People don't think they're really pineapple until they start to eat them as the core looks just like the center of a daisy. I wasn't very impressed with the way the 'flowers' looked from the original directions from Martha Stewart and had the thought that, since the center looked so realistic, why not try to cut them into flowers and was really happy with the way they turned out. I made them the night before I baked the cake, which is likely a good idea since the time may vary for the pineapple to dry out.

I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it as it reminded me somewhat of banana bread that my mother used to make. It is a heavy cake both in that I built some muscle carrying it to work and that it doesn't take more than a small slice to get your fix. The nuts in the cake also make it necessary to have a very sharp knife to cut through the cake neatly.

Hummingbird Cake

Serves: 16
Time: about an hour for the cake + bake time
Source: Southern Living Magazine

• 3 cups or 7dl all-purpose flour
• 2 cups or 4,75dl sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup or 1,75dl vegetable or sunflower oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla/vanilla sugar
• 1 8oz or 225g can crushed pineapple, undrained
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 3/4 cups or 4,25dl mashed/pureed ripe bananas
• cream cheese frosting (recipe below)
• dried pineapple flowers (directions below)

1. Preheat oven to 350F/175C. Grease and flour 2 or 3 9-inch/23cm cake pans. Mash ripe bananas in a bowl with a fork and chop pecans into small, but not fine, pieces. Set aside.
2. Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl. Add eggs and oil until dry ingredients are just moistened. Add vanilla, pineapple, pecans and bananas, stirring until combined.
3. Pour batter evenly into 2 or 3 round cake pans.
4. Bake at 350F/175C for 23 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes, remove from pans and cool completely on wire rack lined with baking paper.
5. Spread cream cheese frosting between layers and on top and sides of cake. Decorate with dried pineapple flowers. Store in refrigerator.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Makes: 3 1/4 cups or 7.5dl

• 1/2 cup or 113g butter, room temperature
• 8oz or 225g cream cheese, room temperature
• 16oz or 455g powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup or 1,2dl chopped pecans (sprinkle between cake layers)

Beat butter and cream cheese at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. Gradually add powdered sugar, beating at low speed until blended. Beat at high speed until smooth; stir in vanilla.

Dried Pineapple Flowers

Makes: about 2 dozen
Time: about 3 hours - prepare 1-3 days in advance

• 2 large pineapples (about 1kg) (the recipe works best if the pineapples are not quite ripe).

1. Heat oven to 225F/110C. Line a couple baking sheets with Silpat or parchment paper.
2. Peel pineapples with a serrated knife (Remove "eyes" using a very tiny melonballer, or paring knife if you don't plan to use a flower cookie cutter for shaping them.) Cut crosswise into very thin slices and place in a single layer on prepared baking sheets. Bake until tops look dry, anywhere from 1 to 2 hours.  Using tongs, flip slices over and continue to cook until reasonably dry, about an hour or so. Arrange on a wire rack and leave to cool and dry a bit more for a few hours. (note: A convection oven is an advantage for faster drying so use it if you have it.)
3. When slices are cool and dry, take a small metal flower-shaped cookie cutter and press into dried pineapple. Use a rolling pin on top of the cookie cutter to press firmly. Set cut flowers aside on the wire rack. When the flowers are dry, but still a bit pliable, hold the center of the flower between your thumb and forefinger in one hand and pull the petals of the flower upwards with your other hand to give them a more realistic look.
4. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 3 days.

« Kroppkakor, a.k.a. Smålandskroppkakor or body crop cakes, are pork-filled potato dumplings from Southern Sweden. »

Back when I was making spätzle, I wondered about the lack of dumplings in both traditional Finnish foods and even in the more modern array of products available at the local groceries. One person suggested that the absence of dumplings in the more traditional foods might be due to the expense of wheat and that potatoes didn't arrive until late and, even when they did, they weren't immediately popular, neither of which cast too much doubt on my hypothesis that dumplings simply must not be an appealing food for many Finns. It was also suggested that possibly Karelian pies and the Savonian kalakukko might be close enough for jazz in the dumpling category. The kalakukko is somewhat like a giant dumpling so if there were mini versions of it, then it might qualify as a dumpling, but the Karelian pies are open-face pasties filled with rice which, considering there are no rice paddies in eastern Finland, are likely not that traditional if one disqualifies various foods on the basis of cost and availability of ingredients over the past 300 years. Finns had rye, water and eggs to make dough and meat from which to make dumplings and yet, no (filled) dumplings**.

**Technically, there does appear to be one sort of dumpling soup called 'klimppisoppa' that consists of a thin broth served with dropped noodles much like spätzle, with raisins occasionally added to the dumplings for holiday flair. The recipe does not appear in Kotiruoka or any of the older Finnish cookbooks I could find and seems to be a dish limited to a small region. The few mentions of it that I could find with google seemed to indicate that it is not a very well loved dish, too. The plot thickens.

I looked to Sweden where so many of the foods considered traditional and old fashioned originated and I found kroppkakor, potato dumplings filled with pork and onions. I started poking around for them in Finnish cookbooks, especially a few that have been translated from Swedish into Finnish, and found no mention of them in spite of them being in almost every general Swedish cookbook. There were a few moments of comedy when I asked Jarkko what the literal translation to Finnish might be and he seemed confused since the 'kropp', though often translated as 'body'**, makes more sense in the 'corpse' connotation and wondered why I was interested in recycling dead bodies for dinner. Perhaps the Swedes engaged in cannibalism years ago and make these to remind themselves that people are, in fact, the other white meat. Still, even with literal and creative attempts at translation, these dumplings simply did not make the jump along with all the other Swedish foods such as lutefisk. Why lutefisk and not kroppkakor is a very curious bit of food history that no doubt has an interesting story behind it. Does this mean that Finns, and this would include the Swedish-speaking Finns (none of whom I know had ever heard of them), actually like the taste of smelly, gelatinous fish soaked in lye better than pork-filled potato dumplings? Say it isn't so.

**Kroppkakor are often translated as 'body cakes' using the literal modern meaning of the word 'kropp' which can mean either body or corpse. However, neither make much sense when applied to a boiled dumpling. With the help of a very kind Swedish speaker, it appears that the word 'kropp' has an older meaning that makes a lot more sense:

ETYMOLOGI:[till sv. dial. kropp (äv. i avledd form]
kroppa, kroppning), klimp i soppa, blodpalt, sannol. identiskt med KROPP, sbst.⁴; av mnt. krop, kroppe, ett slags bakvärk med fyllning av kött, sannol.urspr.: fylld kräva (i bildl. anv.)]

The etymology of 'kropp' appears to be related to the old German word 'kropf' and English word 'crop' where they refer to a part of a bird's anatomy that is a round pouch in the gullet which stores food for digestion. This seems to be a much more likely source for the name since the dumplings are round pouches filled with meat that are heavy and do take quite a long time to digest. It is no more appetizing than 'body' or 'corpse' but at least the name fits. :)

I figured I had to try making the dumplings to see if they tasted or looked like corpses and maybe find a reason as to why they failed to find a home in Finland. There are two main variants of the recipe; the original version, Ölandskroppkakor, uses shredded raw potatoes and the more modern version, Smålandskroppkakor, uses mashed potatoes. I opted for the mashed potato version since they're less work, produce a smoother dough (and thus a more attractive dumpling) and because we now have such wonders as plentiful chicken eggs, at least until bird flu arrives. There is a third variety that uses corn meal called pitepalt.

My first batch of dough was an utter disaster since I used a slightly dodgy recipe I found on the net. You remember only when you make a batch of potato paste that there is little difference between the nasty, gummy potato dough and wallpaper glue. I then swore off the recipes in English I found on the net and started hunting for recipes in Swedish which resulted in a few that were much, much more successful. Essentially the basic formula should be 1 pound/500g potatoes, 1 egg, and 1 cup/2.5 dl flour which doubles easily.

Like anything that is deceptively simple in appearances, there is more to boiling a potato than just dropping it into boiling water. Cooking the potato without it becoming soggy and/or gluey can easily become a fool's errand. I dislike peeling hot potatoes so I usually peel them first, put them into a pot with water, stick it on a burner and forget about it until it boils over or I begin to smell something burning. I can bake, but basic cooking stuff eludes me. After a couple of batches where the potatoes started to disintegrate in the pot I began to think that there really must be a secret to this task only marginally more complex than boiling water. I found that the potatoes disintegrate when you boil them at too high a boil which causes them to bump around vigorously and break apart. I suppose that this should have been obvious, but what is obvious if not elusive and often overlooked? The starch in the potatoes is a temperamental substance. Try taking a hand blender or a food processor to a boiled potato sometime if you'd like to see just how much fun you can have with starch that has been released from its cells.

Boiling the potatoes with their skins on is best as it will help keep them from becoming soggy which results in using more flour and gummy dough. You'll want to rice/mash them while they are still piping hot so that they can release a bit of moisture through the steam. I was already unnaturally fond of my potato ricer, but when I discovered that you can cut the unpeeled potato in half, drop it cut side down into the hopper and squeeze the potato out without the peel, I wondered where it had been all my life. I've been unable to find anything about the history of this gadget or even how it came to have the unlikely name of 'ricer', but wherever the inventor may be they have my enduring admiration for such an elegantly simple human-powered, multi-purpose kitchen tool. If you make real mashed potatoes with any frequency at all, buy one of these things tomorrow. Julia Child also gushed a bit about her German potato ricer with priceless audio of her extolling its virtues. I'm going say "ssshhoooommmm!" every time I rice a potato from now on. :) Another great masher is the OXO square masher which produces a less gluey texture than the usual squiggly masher.

Once you have the dough prepared, use immediately as it tends to get very gummy and unworkable if left to sit for any amount of time. There are many ways to get to the same meat-filled ball, but the easiest seemed to be the log of dough that is sliced into 12 parts, flattened, filled, sealed and formed into a ball. As for the filling, there are many different variations though allspice does appear to be very common and, frankly, is an often forgotten spice. I tried a few different combinations of fatty pork scraps, bacon and ham and found that using all or mostly ham had a much better colour and flavour than the others. Chopping the filling into a paste with a hand blender made filling and eating the dumplings much easier so I highly recommend it. I've also seen variations using salmon and vegetables that look pretty tempting as well. It might be fun to make a batch of them for halloween and decorate them to look like eyeballs, too. :)

The recipe makes 24 dumplings that will feed you for at least a few days since I'm not sure most mere mortals can consume more than 4-6 of them in one day.

Kroppkakor / Smålandskroppkakor / Body Crop Cakes / Pork-filled Potato Dumplings

Makes: about 24 golf ball-sized dumplings
Time: about 90 minutes
Special tools: potato ricer, big pot for boiling

Filling:

• 1 large onion, diced
• 200g or 7oz meaty or lean bacon
• 200g or 7oz good ham
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• black pepper
• white pepper
• allspice

Dough:

• 1kg or 2 pounds potatoes, boiled and riced/mashed
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 4.75 dl or 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt

1. For the Filling: Place a bit of butter or olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan and sauté the onion until soft. Add ham and spices to taste. Turn down heat and allow to simmer for about 20 minutes. Allow to cool, transfer to a deep bowl and chop finely to a paste with a hand blender. Set aside or refrigerate overnight for better flavour.
2. For the dumplings: Fill deep pot with cold water and potatoes. Add a generous amount of salt. Bring to a boil, turn down heat and simmer potatoes for about 20-25 minutes. Drain, slice potatoes in half, and place each potato half, cut side down, into a potato ricer, removing the peel from the hopper after ricing each potato or peel with a knife and mash with a hand masher (Do not use hand blender) into a large bowl. Allow the potatoes to cool for 10-15 minutes. Beat eggs lightly and pour over potatoes. Add flour and knead by hand until the dough forms a smooth ball. Use dough immediately.
3. Divide the dough into two parts. On a smooth surface, shape each part of the dough into a long cylinder about 12-inches/30cm long. Slice dough into 12 pieces, each 1-inch/2.5cm wide . Flatten each piece into a circle about 10cm/4-in in diameter. Scoop about 1 tablespoon of filling into the center and proceed to seal the meat inside the dumpling by pulling the dough up in three places and pinching the three seams. Spackle any holes with small bits of extra dough. Gently shape the dumpling into a ball with your palms. Place finished dumpling on a lightly greased baking sheet and repeat until you have used all the dough. [ see illustration of the whole process of making the dumpling. ]
4. Boil water in a deep pot and gently lower a few dumplings into the water. They are ready when they float to the surface which takes about 5 minutes. Lift out of the water with a slotted spoon (there is a special wooden tool in Sweden just for this task called a kroppkakeslev which is a long-handled wooden spoon with five holes in the spoon to drain the dumplings) and place in a baking dish or serving platter. Keep them warm in the oven until ready to serve. Repeat with all the dumplings until all are cooked. Serve with melted/clarified butter and lingonberry or any other tart red berry jam. You can also refrigerate or freeze them and microwave or pan fry them to reheat. They make excellent leftovers.

« Moving the earth. »

Lately, I begin to look forward to Friday by late Monday afternoon. The weeks pass slowly and the weekends fly by in a flurry of laundry, cleaning house and dog walking. My project from hell at work just keeps grinding on and on and on, wearing down my patience for and my interest in technology. Or, at least, the janitorial side of technology. After thinking about the jobs I've had over the years, every single one has had at least one guy who knows just enough to be dangerous and subsequently breaks systems in new, previously unimagined ways. Clean-up on aisle 6. Bring the mop.

The introduction of the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) in Solaris 10 is a wet dream for guys like this as it is both new and powerful enough to lay waste to a fresh system in less than an hour. When I think of the SMF, I have a mental image of a committee of engineers hovering around the unholy birth where there emerged a hairy, middle-aged, very unattractive guy to the horror and delight of all. Never before have I seen a system that asks for the system maintenance password on the console, only to keep right on booting to multi-user with services like cron and syslog somehow in a 'disabled' state. I still have no idea which combination of services this person disabled in a spate of paranoia over security to achieve this level of system fuckitude and I'm not entirely sure that I want to know. Soon we'll see a Solaris 10 system exploit that quietly disables the 'boot' service, thus rendering a system unbootable on the next reboot. Nifty.

I'm sure that the engineers at Sun thought it was a brilliant idea to streamline the somewhat cryptic and mysterious system processes for the pretty GUI jockeys who wouldn't know a command line if it bit them in the arse, but what used to be simple is now a baroque labyrinth of XML, rc scripts with 'methods' and databases that have the power to cripple your system without even trying. The services will list their dependencies, yet won't warn you what services depend on THEM so that when you disable a service you can, in fact, unwittingly disable half of your system. What's the point of having a database with dependencies if it doesn't work in both directions? I suppose that feature is only available in the java-based management GUI that I can't use.

Here it is 2006 and we're still using metal tape, have UFS filesystems that max out at 1 inode per MB in filesystems over 1 terabyte, have OS tools that are essentially worthless on filesystems over 1 terabyte, etc. and they're redesigning something that has worked well for over a decade? I'm sure ZFS is going to be ready for production any year now. Sure. The folks who buy into the whole 'Web 2.0' and internet 'revolution' would probably be a lot less enthusiastic if they saw the bowels of the systems that are still remarkably similar to the big ugly boxes from the 1970s, if only a whole lot smaller. The 'revolution' is how much money people are making off the suckers who have bought into the hype. It's amazing that Google is worth billions while running on a platform that has not improved dramatically over the past two decades, we've just gotten better at making it look more sexy on the user end. A large number of cheap PCs clustered together is still just a bunch of cheap PCs. Too much money has been invested in infrastructure and in software and vendors are going to milk it until there is no other option but to move forward. It's much like gasoline powered automobiles where ubiquity, infrastructure and financial interests have kept us driving cars with the same or less fuel efficiency and the same form factor for the past 60 or more years. It seems only crisis will force a revolution in design.

I've been reading Company lately and have been enjoying its satire of American corporations. At one point in the book, management lays off all of IT and the network goes down.

Throughout the building, Zephyr Holdings is slowly getting back to full operating speed. Not because the network has been fixed; oh no. The east wing of level 19 remains a barren wasteland. No server lives there. No hub can flourish in 19's harsh, inhospitable conditions. Dry, gasping network cables search for data they will never find. IT is dark and dead and will not recover.

But there is work to be done, network or no network. Two weeks ago the network went down; soon after Senior Management assured the company it would have the problem fixed within a few days; now everyone is realizing it is never going to happen. Work-arounds are springing up everywhere you look, like new grass after rain. In the absence of e-mail, employees are discovering the art of speaking into phones. They are realizing that discussions that previously required three days and six e-mails can, with phones, be settled in minutes. Spam and computer viruses, both of which IT claimed were unsolvable problems, have vanished. The plague of e-mail jokes, funny at first and then not, has been eliminated. The pressure to forward chain letters under threat of personal catastrophe has lifted. In-boxes no longer fill with desperate sales pitches from co-workers trying to shift their cars, or kittens.

To transfer documents from one location to another, workers tighten their shoelaces and stretch their legs. People pass each other in the corridors, papers in hand, exchanging happy greetings. Their brains dizzy from unexpected exercise, they stop to chat and laugh. No one realized there were so many people in Zephyr. Until now, you never saw them. Until now, most people arrived at work, planted their buttocks in a chair, and the twain didn't part until five thirty. Now the corridors are like maternity ward waiting rooms, filled with excited voices and good cheer. Lower-back pain is clearing up. Color is rising. Workers find each other more physically attractive. And nobody receives suspicious looks for leaving the department anymore, not so long as they're clutching a sheaf of papers.

Network - what was that thing ever good for?

What, indeed.

pic via

« A lovely almond cake topped with soft, caramelized apples, ice cream and golden caramel sauce. »

I've noticed lately that, as work gets more stressful, I've been baking nearly every night when I'm not so tired as to fall asleep on the sofa by 10pm. I'm not entirely sure why, but it keeps me out of the pubs and (mostly) out of trouble.

I was leafing through the hefty The Professional Pastry Chef after having so much success with the semlor/laskiaispulla and found a recipe for an apple and almond cake. I became suspicious of the author as I found a lot of almond-based recipes as I was browsing and wondered if he might be from somewhere around here since nobody loves the almond quite as much as the Nordics do. I've come to think that almonds and berry jams are foods worthy of their own food group in the Nordic region. There needs to be an annual almond festival and a monument erected to pay homage to the most revered nut. Apparently, "Chef Bo", (Whom I have affectionately dubbed "Chef Bo[rk Bork Bork]") is in fact Swedish. His cookbook is ace which is likely why he doesn't have a show on FoodTV and a line of his own merchandise as he's too busy actually working in the field to be a celebrity.

I have made this recipe four times in the last two weeks and not a single cake has made it into the office which might indicate how absolutely terrific this cake is. The soft, sweet apples partnered with the ice cream, caramel and light almond cake is a really amazing taste sensation. It looks pretty, too. I tried several different brown sugar variants and found the 'farina' sugar to be the best as it appears to be somewhere between light and dark brown sugar. The original recipe asks for dark brown sugar, but the molasses overwhelms the delicate flavour of the apple and the almond cake. If you don't have ramekins, you could probably use sturdy coffee mugs with straight sides.

One caveat is that you shouldn't allow the apples to cool too much before adding the filling since I discovered after taking Otava out for a long walk between baking stages that if they are too cool, the filling doesn't bake properly and you slice the cake only to find uncooked almond goo on the inside. I could ramble on about how good these are, how easy they are to make and that everyone should enjoy the wonders of a cake this good fresh from the oven at least once in their lifetime, but I'm working against a deadline this week and am too tired to be entertaining so you're left to your own devices on this one.

Caramelized Upside-Down Apple and Almond Cakes

Makes: 6-8 cakes depending on the size of your small ramekin
Special tools: ramekins, a.k.a. annosvuoka (small, round ceramic dishes), that have about 250ml/1 cup volume
Time: about 2 hours
Source: The Professional Pastry Chef

• 150g or 5oz light brown sugar or raw sugar
• 100g or 7 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• about 6 medium golden delicious or granny smith apples (about 1 apple per ramekin)
• vanilla-almond filling (see below)

1. Grease the inside of the ramekins with butter.
2. Cream the brown sugar, butter, cinnamon and nutmeg until smooth and lightened in colour. Divide the brown sugar mixture in half and spoon about a tablespoon into the bottom of the ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet and set aside.
3. Peel the apples, trim off the ends, cut in half crosswise, remove seeds with a melon baller or the end of the peeler and proceed to slice apples crosswise into thin slices. Place one slice into the bottom, pressing it down over the brown sugar mixture. Layer more slices in the ramekins, filling them almost to the top and filling any holes where bits of core were removed. If any slices are too wide for your baking dish, gently pare away the excess with the peeler. Brush a bit of the brown sugar mixture over the top apple slice so it doesn't dry out.
4. Cover ramekins with a sheet of aluminum foil (to keep the splatter of the butter to a minimum) and bake at 190C/375F for about 30-40 minutes or until the apples have cooked down to about half of their original volume. Remove from oven and set aside to cool for at least 30 minutes to an hour. When cool, take a sharp knife and run it around the sides to remove any caramelized sugar. Brush a small amount of butter on the sides before adding the almond filling.
5. Place the vanilla-almond filling into a pastry bag with a large plain tip. Pipe the filling on top of the baked apples, dividing it evenly among the forms. (Use a ziplock bag with a corner cut off if you don't have a pastry bag as you want to disturb the apples as little as possible when placing the almond filling.)
6. Bake at 190C/375F for about 20 minutes or until the filling is just baked through and light golden brown on top; be careful not to overbake the cakes, which will cause them to become tough and dry. Let the apple cakes cool until you can pick the ramekins up with your bare hands.
7. Run a knife around the inside edge of a warm cake and unmold onto a plate. Serve with a scoop of vanilla or cinnamon ice cream and caramel sauce.

Vanilla-Almond Filling

• 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar or the seeds of 1 vanilla bean added to the granulated sugar
• 55g or 2oz granulated sugar (about 1/2dl)
• 80g or 3oz almond paste
• 80g or 5.5 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 80g or 3oz bread flour (about 1.5dl)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1. Sift the flour with the baking powder. Set aside.
2. Place the vanilla sugar and granulated sugar in a mixer bowl with the almond paste. Beat together and add butter gradually to avoid getting lumps in the batter. Cream the mixture together for a few minutes until it is smooth and light in colour. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, scraping down the bowl as needed. Add flour mixture to the batter on low speed, mixing just until it is incorporated.

Fortified Caramel Sauce

Makes: about 2 cups/4 dl
Time: about 20 minutes

• 225g granulated sugar
• 40ml or 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
• 180ml or 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 25g or 1/4 stick butter

1. Place the sugar, water and lemon juice in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil. Brush down the sides of the pan with a clean brush dipped in water. Add the light corn syrup. Cook over medium heat until the syrup reaches a golden amber colour (about 5-10 minutes).
2. Remove the pan from the heat and add the heavy cream carefully. Stand back as you pour in the cream, a little at a time while stirring constantly, as the mixture will splatter. Stir to mix in the cream. If the sauce is not smooth, return the pan to the heat and cook, stirring constantly, to melt any lumps.
3. With the pan off the heat, add the butter. Keep stirring until the butter has melted and the sauce is smooth.