Weekend Dinners, Pt. 1

…And speaking of time (and not only lack of it), timing is everything when cooking a menu. Generally, cooking a dish, even a complicated one, doesn’t represent a challenge even for a chef of modest experience; cooking starters, mains and a dessert and serving them all hot, the pasta al dente, and the steaks just right is a lot more likely to cause problems, and then you also want to be able to enjoy the food and the company.

Of course, thing’s will be easier if you have two chefs (like we had here) or if you can cook in between courses. It’s best to prepare everything you can beforehand, so it’s easier if you plan the menu the previous day. Setting the table should be done first.

Menu

Snails with Blue Cheese

Slow-braised Lamb Shanks in Red Wine
Oven Root Vegetables
Green Beans

Pear Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream

The lamb was going to be in the oven for at least two hours, so it was the first thing to get going. Brown the lamb in butter on a frying pan, adding salt and pepper.

 

 

 

Butter an oven pan. Peel and halve the shallot onions, peel the garlic cloves and put in the pan. Add the browned shanks and pour the red wine and add meat or vegetable stock until covered. Add a couple of rosemary sprigs. Put in the oven (200°C).

 

 

Prepare the pear pies. Mix wheat flour, sugar and butter (1:1:1). Don’t knead too much.

Individual portion pans are easier with this course, as cutting and transferring the slices onto another plate with this pie isn’t always easy. Press the dough to a 5 mm layer at the bottom of the pan. Add half a cubed pear, a little lime or lemon juice and a little cinnamon. Put in the refrigerator.

Potatos and yellow root go in next. Peel and cut in quarters or eighths. Put on a buttered pan, add olive oil, honey or maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Fry until tender (which is about an hour, or 15 minutes more than we did!)

You can cover the pan for half of the time.

 

Then snails. The queue to the cheese counter was about 25 people, so we stuck with Bleu D’Auvergne for the snails. Rinse the snails and fry on a pan with a knob of butter and a little pepper. Put some butter in the snail pans, add the snails and a little blue cheese on top, and fry until the cheese starts to brown. (Our oven started to get quite crowded at this point…)

 

The snails here might have needed a teaspoon more of the butter, but they were great nonetheless… Bleu D’Auvergne worked just fine. Serve with champagne/sparkling wine and white bread for cleaning the pan!

 

 

 

Steam the green beans, add a little butter.

Put the potatos and yellow root at the bottom, add the shanks, onions and garlic. Put the beans on top. Serve with a cabernet or pinot noir.

 

 

Put the pear pies into the oven before starting the main course. Turn the heat down to 150°C. They should be done by the time you’ve finished your lamb. The bottom starts picking up caramel flavors at the same time the pears start to brown. (The one in the picture here is maybe a little too brown.)

With two table spoons, form a ball out of the vanilla ice cream, lay on top and serve.

Ingredients

Snails with blue cheese

1 can of snails (6 per person)
Blue cheese
Butter
Pepper
White bread for serving

Lamb in Red Wine

1 kg of lamb shanks (3 per person)
1/2 bottle (375 ml) red wine
Shallot onions and garlic cloves (3 per person)
Stock (vegetable or meat)
Rosemary sprigs
Butter
Salt, Pepper

Yellow Root and Potatos

Potatos (2 per person)
Yellow root (2 per person)
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Honey or maple syrup
Salt, pepper

Pear Pie

Flour, sugar, unsalted butter (one part each; I think we used about 100 grams each for four pies)
Pears (1/2 per pie)
Cinnamon
Lemon or lime juice
Vanilla ice cream

Faster Food, No Junk

Welfare is one thing that’s measured very differently from a hundred years back. Food, among other things, was something that people couldn’t always count on, but all that has changed: now we get much more than we actually need, and it’s now the rich who, on average, are thin and fit, whereas people with a smaller outcome are also more likely to suffer from obesity.

But there’s something else that’s changed. It’s not always material things that people so desperately crave for anymore, but rather the abstract; first, there seems to be a constant shortage of space.

Our grandparents, having lived through a world war or two and gotten used to surviving with the bare minimum, gathered loads and loads of stuff around them and were wary of throwing anything away once there wasn’t a constant shortage of everything anymore – just in case the bad days were to return.

So first they built warehouses in their yards for all that stuff they couldn’t throw away, but in the end the yards got filled too. Of course, the bad days never returned and nowadays discarding something you don’t need to reclaim the space it takes in your surroundings is often seen as pure pleasure. (I know: I’ve helped to empty and tear down one of these warehouses. I went home and got rid of everything I didn’t need afterwards and it felt good.)

Second, and even more important, is time. That’s something nobody seems to have too much of today. You used to be able to call someone to see if they were around to meet you the same evening, and usually they were. Now you have to book weeks ahead via email, and then you get pulled a rain check the same day. Sure, it has a lot to do with turning 30, but then, time is all older people seem to have.

Which is why I constantly find myself trying to come up with dishes that I can prepare in 10 or 15 minutes. Here’s the quickest recipe I’ve come up with – perfect for those times when you spend your 5-hour nights dreaming of 5 hours more and the latest blog entry was three weeks ago.

Taste this and you’ll know where to shove that microwave pizza.

Cold Smoked Salmon Pasta (serves a few people)

A pack of cold smoked salmon
A small bag of pasta
Some garlic
A lime
A splash of olive oil
A pinch of black pepper
A bit of salt

There’s no time to measure the exact amounts now! Put some water, oil and salt in a pan on high heat while you boil a full can of water in a water boiler. This way you’ll get a full pan of boiling water in less than 5 minutes. Put the pasta in.

Meanwhile, cut the salmon as small as you can bother to. Small slices work just as well. Set aside.

Squeeze the juice of the lime in a cup. Crush a garlic clove or two with freshly ground black pepper in the juice. Add olive oil. Mix.

When the pasta is nearly edible, pour almost all the water away (if you leave the pasta a little wet you won’t need as much oil.) Mix in the salmon and the liquid. Put on a plate, sprinkle some salt on top and, preferably using a fork, stuff down. Winner!

The Piece of Bread Called "Pizza"

Finnish tourists in Italy have bumped into a small, delicious piece of bread, pizza, the stuffing of which varies from county to another. It’s eaten everywhere in Italy. There are extraordinary quick snack bars and kiosks, pizzerias, where people, standing up, hurriedly stuff down a few pizzas.

– Erik Haack, Gastronomian maailmasta (From the World of Gastronomy), 1968

I found this little gem at Hagelstam, the place for old & antique books in the Helsinki centre. As you can read from the excerpt above, it’s from the distant times before pizza, a dish now known to everyone, had made it to Finland. (He also describes how you can use “a little marjoram” to garnish it; the word “oregano” was also yet to be imported).

The book is mainly about food in foreign countries, and while making a good job of it, the author ( actually manages to tell us more about Finnish food culture at the time of its writing, 1968. Just imagine going to your nearest supermarket only to find they don’t have olives! He does give Finnish cooking the credit it deserves, yet goes on to say that there are few Finnish dishes that are truly remarkable internationally – kalakukko or mämmi certainly do not cut it!

Here’s one big part of the Finnish food culture that the author feels deserves sharing a recipe for:

Different alcoholic drinks have different consequences, that can be observed, for example, in a hangover. The worst hangover follows when you consume a mix of many different types of drinks. For example, by starting with beer at 9am and carrying on until noon, followed by wine until 3pm, when switching to jaloviina [a Finnish mixture of cognac and a sort of a vodka], which is followed by aperitifs at 5pm, and as the night progresses, with budget allowing, having a mix of licquer, rum, etc., whatever.

What follows is the mother of all hangovers, that Eino Leino [a Finnish author not least known for his great translations of the literary classics of the World, but also for his fondness of alcohol] writes about: I feel a pressure in the head, a sickness in the stomach; the vigorous smiths arrive, the hammers strike.

I should think so. I don’t know if this was how our fathers spent their days off, but I can tell you I’d be under the table before the aperitifs.