Saucisse, Dumplings and More!

Saucisse (raw sausage) is often used in soups in Finland. It usually divides opinions, some like it and some hate it. For me it works even in ramen! This is a specialty I came up with on my own. I quess it was because Finnish sausages are so plain and I wanted to add more taste and colour to them. Additionally, saucisse is quite high up with fat, so adding vegetables introduces a more healthy aspect to them. And they taste better, too!

Saucisse Dumplings

For these you need 1 kilograms of (plain) raw sausage, 2 largish carrots, 2 onions, 2 garlic cloves and 5 cm long piece of parsnip. Roughly, you should have vegetables 1/4 - 1/3 of the amount of raw sausage. To spice it up you need black pepper and fresh parsley.
Begin by peeling veggies, grate carrot and parsnip. Dice garlic and onion very thinly (because big pieces stick out of the dough and make the dumplings fragile).

Heat up a frying pan and put in some olive oil. Put garlic and onion in first, saute lightly and add the rest of the veggies. Let them heat up but do not fry them, in other words, saute them so that they became soft and loose some water but do not allow them get brown. Put the softened vegetables in a bowl and let them cool a bit. Then squeeze raw sausage out of the skin to the bowl and mix thoroughly.

Put a very large kettle of water to boil. I usually use my pasta kettle but anything big will do. Cover with a lid and start making the saucisse dumplings. It helps to have cold water running (or in a bowl) for dipping hands when the dough starts feeling sticky (same trick with regular meat balls). Place the dumplings next to the kettle and when the water starts to boil put them in. Beware splashes of hot water! First the dumplings will sink but they rise to the surface of water when they are ready. You can check that they are ready by picking one up and halving it.

They are great with pasta or potato, for sauce you can use (for instance) yoghurt with garlic or a plain tomato sauce. Here's a recipe to my very simple tomato sauce.

2 onions (and garlic, if you like)
10 cm piece of celery
(a small piece of yellow bell pepper)
a small cart of crushed tomatos
Black pepper, salt and 1 tsp sugar

Dice onions and celery stick. Heat oil in a pan and saute onions, add vegetables and let them become slightly softer. Add tomato and let simmer. Put in the spices, mix and let simmer some more. Ready!

You can make a smaller batch or freeze them, though freezing doesnt really compliment their taste. When Im making this dish at my mom's, I dont have to worry about how to freeze or use them later on; they tend to disappear from the fridge overnight!

Macaroni Bake and Cherry Pie

Here's a macaroni bake I conjured up for my daily lunch. This is what most Finns of my age grew up with! Good stuff for making in large quantities and then freezing for later use. Normally macaroni bake is quite simple, and this isn't much more complex, but I added bell peppers and blue cheese for extra taste and colour. If you want additional softness with bell peppers, you might lightly sauté them before adding them to the mix but it is by no means necessary. Also other stuff might suitable to the mix, such as corn, peas and tomatos. For spicing you might use black and white pepper, chilli, marjoram, garlic and paprika, for instance.

For this you need macaroni, mince meat, milk, eggs, some vegetables and cheese. Macaroni and mince should be about equal amounts. For 400 gr (14.1 oz) unboiled macaroni you need 7 dl (1.23 pints) milk and 3 eggs.
Boil macaronis and fry mince that while. Remember to fry the meat in small enough portions, so that it will actually fry and not boil. I mean this. If there's too much meat in the pan, the juice coming out of meat wont vaporize but makes an area of liquid on the bottom and the meat will boil in it. Depending on meat you are frying, it should cover only 1/3-1/4 of the bottom of the pan.
Slice the bell peppers in small dices, and break the blue cheese in small crumbs. Mix boiled macaroni, fried mince and bell pepper dices together and pour into an oven proof casserole. Whisk milk, spices, eggs and cheese crumbs together. Pour over macaroni mix and stir. Bake the casserole at 200c (Celsius) for an hour. In Finland, ketchup goes traditionally with this food.

This is my favourite berry pie. Cherries! Oh! Ah! Traditionally this kind of crust goes with blue berries but I find it very good with cherries too. The crust is simple to make (I found this recipe off a flour bag ages ago):

4 eggs
3 - 4 dl sugar (use more sugar for sour berries)
4 tsp vanilla sugar
6 dl wheat flour
3 tsp baking powder
300 gr butter (melted)
2 dl milk or juice

The recipe says to use 6 dl berries but I used 2 L cherries. Slice and take the stone off before you do anything else.

1. Beat eggs & sugar together.
2. Mix the dry stuffs
3. Add flour etc., butter and milk/juice. Stir until even.
4. Cover an oven sheet with parchment paper. Pour the dough over it and add the berries evenly.
5. Bake at 200c, for 25-35.

Ramen

Ramen, my favourite comfort food. Cheap, versatile, low-fat, quick and yummy. What else you could ask from your everyday grub? Basically a bowl of ramen consists of broth, veggies, meat (not necessarily tho) and noodles. Be careful when you choose noodles, some brands (most that are available in Finland) contain needless amounts of fat. Traditional recipes usually contain fish or seafood ingredients, so I have omitted those.


Cut the veggies so that they will become "aldente" in boiling water in 2-3 minutes. Veggies are not ment to be soft and soggy! On a lazy day, I dont bother to boil noodles separately but just put everything in and cook them together. For meat I usually choose pork or chicken (my first experiments with beef didnt turn out too well :D ). You can fry the meat separately and just add it to the bowl just before serving. I often buy larger quantities, dice, spice and freeze in portions, for quick everyday food.

Basic ingredients for the broth:

• Chicken stock
• Garlic
• Ginger
• Chilli
• Soy
• Dry sherry
• Salt
• Sugar
• Black pepper (ground)
• Sesam oil

For veggies I often use:

• Onion
• Celery
• Bell pepper
• Bamboo shoots

... also tomatos, button mushrooms, carrots and broccoli.

There are some things to watch for, such as overcooking the veggies, adding too much vegetables and amounts of spices. Personally, I tend to end up with too much vegetables, so especially if you are cooking for just one person, watch closely for quantities. Vegetables-meat-noodles-broth ratio must be kept such that it is still a soup, not a stew!

Welcome to Blunt Cook!

Hi there! Welcome to my food blog!

Greetings from sunny *cough cough* Finland. I begun this blog to share my experiences, keep a public food diary and maybe have discussions with other food lovers. Ah well, but most of all to spare my friends from the continous cavalcade of food pictures in Facebook.

I was practically brought up in a restaurant kitchen as my mom worked in catering and restaurant business, so food and experimenting with new ideas and foodstuffs have been with me from very young. Although I do something else for my living, I love cooking, trying out different things and feeding my friends. Ah, there's nothing better to see when your guests lick the plate clean when they've finished!

And I am blunt. Those who have had the bad fortune to cook with me, know that I can get very bossy and dish out orders. For some miraculous reason, I've been forgiven. I usually tend to get straight to the point and say things as they are. So there.

Generally, I prefer Asian and Italian foods. That is not to say that I won't present anything profoundly Finnish but usually I do something entirely different. Another preference is that I will not make anything that has fish or seafood, kiwi, avocado and gooseberry in it because of food allergies. That is one reason for working around traditional recipes. Thirdly, I am rather health conscious, so no exessive use of fat, cream and sugar here!

These are tenets of my food philosophy
1. I rarely use measures, except when I am baking. For the most part, I am tasting my way through cooking and sizing up proportions visually.
2. Learn to differentiate between real, valuable time savers and pure ignorance and laziness. For instance, for me it is ok to use sometimes premade red wine sauce but to use salsa from a can is totally unacceptable.
3. Avoid useless trickery, instead enhance what is genuine and natural.
4. Follow your own taste.
5. Develop your memory for tastes, this way you can unite flavours and have new ideas.
6. Have fun!