A Tin Can…

…save your day. Or rather a few tins of canned food - or cans of tinned food. Whatever you wish to call them. I choose to call them tins today.

I was planning to make pancakes for the kids for their after-school snack, but I was busy doing this and that as it is my older daughter’s 17^th birthday tomorrow (so it is kind of a secret what I did all morning). 

Just before collecting my younger son from school I looked into the kitchen cupboards, found a few tins and ended up making Tuna and Sweetcorn Sandwiches. - Basic ingredients which we always have in the house: tuna, sweetcorn, mayonnaise, mustard, lettuce and toast. 

One of my favourite kitchen gadgets is this electronic tin opener:

It is handy, safe and fast. I don’t find it noisy but for some reason when I use it a cat always appears in the kitchen, usually not fully awake, probably sleepwalking from upstairs, coming to see what is in the tin I am opening. Today I tried to fool her and let her smell the sweetcorn but she was very persistent so I did give her some tuna before I started making the sandwiches.

Tuna and Sweetcorn Sandwiches

(enough to feed four hungry children)

Pack of sliced bread (I had 16 slices of toast)

Filling:

2 tins of tuna (net weight à 185g - minus about 1/4 of a tin I gave to the cat)

1 tin of sweetcorn (80g)

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tbsp mustard

2,5 dl / 1 cup mayonnaise

Lettuce

1. Toast the bread slices.

2. Mix the tuna, sweetcorn, lemon juice, mustard and mayonnaise. Add more mayonnaise if the mixture is too dry.

3. Take two slices of toasted bread at a time, put about two tablespoons of the tuna-sweetcorn mixture and some lettuce if you so wish and press the slices together. I usually pile up the sandwiches and let them rest a few moments (putting something heavy - but not too heavy -  on top helps, too) so the filling will not burst out so easily when cutting the sandwiches.

4. Cut the crusts off first for the sandwiches to look prettier, then cut each sandwich into four triangles, pile them up and put a cocktail stick through each pile of four triangles to hold them together. Decorate with cherry tomatoes, olives, pieces of cucumber or pickles.

Lime Cheesecake

I have been asked several times what my so called signature dish is. Do I have one and is it really something so unique and extraordinary nobody else is able to make anything even close to. Hmm. 

Lime Cheesecake may or may not be my signature dish but it is definitely my "most famous dish". It did not only win the 1^st prize in a Finnish magazine’s (webpage only in Finnish: Kotiliesi) cheese dish competition in 2006 but a piece of my cake was also shown on the Finnish TV the same year in a very popular Finnish soap called Salatut Elämät (see Wikipedia in English ‘Secret Lives’). They used to have a shop in the soap and the soap shop sold, with other real-life products, this very magazine where my piece of cake was pictured on the front page and you could see the magazine on the shelf of the soap shop at least twice and at least for a couple of seconds both times...  - The circulation of the magazine in 2006 was about 160 000 and the soap was attracting about one million viewers per episode so even with overlapping readers and viewers at least one million Finnish people have seen my piece of cake. – To be precise, I did not make the very piece of the cake for the cover page; it was made by the cooks/food editors of the magazine, but it was my recipe!

This Lime Cheesecake I made last weekend. Please find the recipe below.

 Lime Cheesecake

Crust:

150g Digestive cookies, crumbed

75g butter, melted

Filling:

300g Philadelphia Light Cream Cheese (or equivalent, I use e.g. cream cheese brands of Lidl, Tesco or Aldi)

1,5dl / 2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla sugar

6 gelatine leaves

juice of 2 limes

3 egg whites

Decoration:

zest of 1 lime, grated

1. Mix the digestive cookie crumbs and melted butter.  Press the mixture into the bottom of a loose base cake pan, base covered with baking parchment. Let the crust cool and rest in the fridge while you make the filling.

2. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for 5 minutes.

3. Mix the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla sugar.

4. Heat up the lime juice and melt the soaked gelatine leaves in the hot juice and pour the smooth liquid into the cheese mixture. Mix well.

5. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them very gently into the cheese mixture trying to keep it ‘airy’.

6. Pour the filling on the crust and chill in the fridge at least four hours until firm.

7. Remove the firm cake from the pan very, very carefully on a serving plate and decorate it with grated lime zest. I have this lemon zester which I find very handy:

8. Enjoy!

++++ If you didn't do it yourself already, let your cat lick the crumbs from your plate. 

Welcome to My Celtic Cross-Kitchen!

This is the food blog I have been planning for some time now, the food blog I have been encouraged to start writing, the food blog where I will share not only my recipes but anything I experience in the culinary world  – and where I will definitely emphasize love and beauty and well-being what comes to cooking, baking and eating. 

My Celtic Cross-Kitchen? - I have always loved the Celtic crosses – the fine balance combining handcraft and artistry, and their attention to detail. That is a philosophy I try to implement in my cooking as well. Living in Ireland I try to use local ingredients as much as possible when cooking Irish, Spanish, Hungarian, French, Greek, Oriental… - and obviously never forgetting my background as a Finn, and the culture I grew up in. So very cross-kitchen this is. I love to make it simple and I love tastes as they are. That does not mean I don’t like spices – spices are an essential part of cooking as long as they are not overwhelming. And that does not mean I don’t like combining tastes - some ingredients may work perfectly well together even if you first didn’t believe so.

I have been living in Ireland for 5 years now with my Finnish husband and four children. We are all blessed with no allergies so our kitchen is always open to new experiments. Of course we all do have our odd dislikes (‘mental allergies’ as I call them) - even an adult’s taste buds sometimes need to learn to like something new but open-mindedness is the key word to describe cooking and eating in our family. - For example, all this goes without protest: cooked globe artichokes, oysters, mussels, squid, escargots with garlic butter, lamb, venison, Polish sausages, sour cucumbers, sauerkraut, quail eggs, smoked or cured salmon, Finnish-style sour rye bread, sushi, chicken korma, spinach soup, feta cheese… just to mention a few of the most unusual ones, that is, those not on the daily/weekly menu.

I am happy my family is interested in food and cooking, too, so if I run out of ideas what to have for dinner, somebody always comes up with suggestions and wishes which I respect with enthusiasm, or takes action in the kitchen. Friends are always welcome for dinner and there are many unforgettable culinary moments we have shared. We have also had our children’s birthday parties at home where we have baked or cooked (cookies, pizza, meatballs, to mention a few) with the young guests and the parties have been a great success.

I have shelves full of cookbooks and there are certain food magazines I buy every month; I watch various food programs on TV and I love spending time in shops exploring what is new, what seasonal products there are, what the theme of the week might be in a supermarket, and I search for information where the nearest farmer’s market is or if there is a food fair somewhere. From all of those I absorb new ideas but I very rarely use any recipe as it is. I may combine, substitute, leave out, adapt or add. The result needs to look like mine and taste like mine. Baking, as being a more exact science is the only exception unless I want my cake to turn into a hard brick or my buns not to rise enough.

To be honest, there is never enough time, peace, space (for example, I suffer from a ‘my fridge is too small’ –syndrome) and/or money in my life to cook or bake as perfectly and devotedly as I would love to. So I end up making mistakes or trying too hard, or sometimes I don’t concentrate enough, and I do make shortcuts, too. My lasagne may taste like c**p or my beautiful creamy sauce may turn into something that looks like liquid black pudding. In the morning hassle I may mix up my children’s lunchboxes so that the child who absolutely dislikes a salami sandwich and sliced apples will have a full load of them while the equally unlucky sibling gets crackers with blue cheese and carrot sticks he cannot stand. Sometimes I try to cheat my family by telling that there are actually no kidneys in a steak & kidney pie, or that the pieces of turnip in a stew are potatoes which just look like turnip... - And, worst of all I, every now and then, instead of cooking at all, serve chicken nuggets and chips or frozen pizzas (‘cause they were only 99 cent each, you know…’) and do not even feel guilty when doing so.

After revealing all that, I still dare to say that my cooking is ambitious and I do take it seriously. I am interested in food and culinary cultures more than anything else. Why I never chose cooking as a career is still a mystery to me, but you are never too old for a career change, are you? Nobody can live without food. Some people can live without cooking but I couldn’t and most days I do spend a lot of time in the kitchen. 

If the weekdays fly by with no cooking or baking worth mentioning, Sundays are always the days I take my time and make proper gourmet with thorough planning and first class ingredients. I can spend hours in the kitchen to prepare a 3-course meal. Cooking is not only ‘me-time’ but it is very therapeutic and stress relieving in addition to being an excellent way to test over and over again my creativity and to improve my skills to reach the beauty I am after. And finally, when the meal is served, not all the satisfaction comes from the food itself but from the precious moment when I have my whole family sitting together at the dinner table. 

Nice to meet you all in My Celtic Cross-Kitchen! The story is to begin now...