The indexes are not 100% complete yet, so some more recipes will appear there once I finish going through the recipes and tagging them appropriately.

We hadn’t eaten black-eyed peas for a while, so the peas and rice did taste extra delicious. Anni commented how the taste of the black-eyed peas combine the sweetness of chickpeas and the flouryness of regular beans. I think that’s an apt description!

Here’s what I used:

• 2,5 dl dried black-eyed peas
• a piece of kombu
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• about 2 teaspoons of cumin
• about 1,5 teaspoons of coriander
• 2 chipotles in adobo sauce, finely chopped
• 2 dl tomato sauce, passata style
• 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

About two hours before I started to cook, I quick soaked the peas: I rinsed them, put them in a bowl filled with boiling water, and covered the bowl. (Obviously, they could’ve been soaked overnight too, but since I forgot to do it, I had to quick soak them.) Then, two hours later, I began with boiling the black-eyed peas. I threw soaking water away, put the peas in a kettle over low heat, added the kombu and plenty of boiling water.

While the peas were simmering, I prepared the sauce. First, I put a frying pan over medium high heat, added the onion, and fried it until quite brownish. I kept stirring the onion a lot so that it wouldn’t burn. Then I added the garlic, cumin, coriander and the chipotle, and fried them about half a minute, stirring continuously. I poured the tomato sauce in the pan, stirred, lowered the heat, and waited until the black-eyed peas were done. I drained the peas, removed the kombu, and added the peas into the frying pan. I mixed the sauce and the beans, added the salt, and checked the taste.

This is what we used:

• Bunch of fresh chard (enough to cover two baking sheets)
• 1 teaspoon nutritional yeast
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon Japanese seven spice (shichimi togarashi)
• olive oil for spraying

First we set the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Then we prepared the chard: washed the leaves, removed the stems, and cut the remaining parts into bite-size pieces. Now we crumpled a baking parchment, spread it on the baking sheet, and sprayed some olive oil on it. Then we covered the baking sheet with the chard pieces, taking care that individual pieces didn’t overlap, and sprayed them with some olive oil. We ground the nutritional yeast, salt and seven spice in a mortar, and sprinkled half of the spice mix on the chard bits. We made two sheetfuls of chips, so the rest of the spice mix was for the second batch.

Now we baked the chard for 7 minutes. They burn really easy, so we started watching them after 5 minutes or so. When they were dry and crunchy, we took them out of the oven. They are best eaten right out of the oven, since they lose their crispness fairly quickly. We devoured two sheetfuls of them in no time – their airy texture and spicy taste is quite addicting!

Dandelion, pictured above, is a wild veggie classic, but sadly not held in very high esteem in Finland. I think it tastes a lot like arugula. We ate the leaves almost every day in salads with a vinaigrette sauce.

Greater plantain is widely know in Finland to be a plant with medicinal properties. I remember my parents making a plantain poultice to treat a cut I got at the cottage when I was a child. The leaves are also a great, milder tasting addition to salads.

Fireweed is a delicious wild vegetable that can be used like asparagus or water spinach. It’s best used when the stalks are between 10 and 20 centimeters. We ate it on two separate occasions. The first time we steamed them and ate with olive oil and salt, and the second time I fried them in a pan and added garlic and soy sauce.

Lady’s mantle is a family of plants of which all the species are edible. The umbrella-like leaves were quite mild tasting, and we used them in salads with a vinaigrette sauce. Supposedly they go well in soups too.

Winter cress (Barbarea vulgaris) is an excellent but little known wild veggie. It’s name probably comes from the fact that its rosette stays green all through the winter. Its buds and uppermost leaves are used like broccoli. We fried them in oil together with some fireweed. This is what the buds looked like when I picked them:

Most of the wild veggies are best eaten in early spring, because their taste gets more bitter into the summer. It’s a short, very special season, which makes me think about the time before greenhouses and imported vegetables. Last spring we made a nettle casserole and a goutweed soup, this spring it was mostly salads. Also, check out the pesto Goddess of Cake made from goutweed.

Before gathering wild veggies, you’ll need a guide or a guidebook. For use in the Nordic countries, I recommend the book by Pelle Holmberg, Marie-Louise Eklöf and Anders Pedersen called Mauste- ja terveyskasvit luonnossa (2009), or Vanliga vilda växter till mat, krydda, hälso- och kroppsvård (2007) in Swedish. It has great photos of the plants, making it easy to identify them, and also  information about their medicinal properties.

This is a very simple method for bread baking – no need to worry too much about kneading or shaping. This bread keeps well for a few days, stored in a paper bag that is wrapped in a kitchen towel.

This is what we used:

• 3 dl wheat bran
• 1 1/2 dl spelt flour
• 2 dl white wheat flour
• 3 dl whole wheat flour
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds, crushed
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 dl water, warmed to about 37 °C
• 2 tablespoons muscovado sugar
• 25 g fresh yeast
• for decoration: about 2 teaspoons caraway seeds

I started by mixing the bran, the flours, salt, and the crushed caraway seeds in a bowl. Then I mixed the sugar with the water, and stirred with a fork until the sugar was diluted. Now I diluted the yeast into the water, crumbling it first with my fingers and then stirring with a fork. I poured the liquid into the bowl with the dry ingredients, and mixed it quickly into a dough. We spread the dough on a baking parchment placed on a baking sheet, and flattened with our hands until it was an evenly-shaped square, about 30cm x 30cm. Then we let it raise for 40 minutes.

The oven was set to 225 degrees Celsius. Before putting the bread in the oven, I sprayed it with some water and sprinkled caraway seeds over the top. I baked the bread for 15 minutes on the middle rack of our oven. Now the bread had browned just a little bit on the top, and I removed it from the oven and put it on a wooden rack to cool. Once it had cooled enough that I could touch it, I cut it into squares. We immediately enjoyed it with some soup.

The secret of this soup is how we used tahini as a thickener, which produced an almost coconut-milk-like creaminess. It really worked well in this recipe, and we’ll be sure to try tahini in other soups in the future.

This is what we used:

• 3 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 teaspoons cumin (jeera)
• 2 teaspoons coriander
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 onion, chopped
• 5 cloves of garlic, crushed
• about 6 dl of vegetable stock
• 5 medium potatoes, diced
• 1 can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained
• 2 teaspoons tahini
• 1 – 2 tablespoons lime juice
• salt to taste
• sugar to taste
• pepper to taste
• chopped fresh parsley to garnish

I began by prepping the potatoes, onion and garlic. Since we were hungry, I diced the potatoes into smallish cubes to reduce cooking time.

I heated the oil in a thick-bottomed pot and added the cumin, coriander, turmeric and paprika. I stirred with a spatula, until the fragrances were released. Then I added the onion and garlic, and sweated them for a few minutes. Next I put the potato cubes in the pot, and poured in the stock, just enough to cover the potatoes. I brought the soup to boil, covered the pot, and cooked until the potatoes were soft.

When the potatoes were done I added the chickpeas in the soup. Then I took about 1 dl of the liquid from the soup in a cup, mixed in the tahini with a spoon until no lumps remained, and poured it back into the soup. Then we added the salt, sugar, pepper and lime juice, and checked the taste until it was to our liking. Before serving, we sprinkled our soup with some chopped parsley.

Back in Finland, my first shot at cooking tempeh was not very successful. Fortunately I had that great first experience tasting it, so I didn’t give up on it. Unless you’re really used to its strong, often overpowering taste, it can be a tricky thing to cook. Fortunately, there’s a very simple way to cook it – the way I had it the first time.

Kering tempe is Indonesian for dry or crispy tempeh. Most of the recipes in the internet that go with that name also make a spice mixture with fried onions, which is mixed with the tempe before serving, but I’m partial to a version where the tempeh is simply eaten as it is, without any garnishes.

Here’s what I use:

• 1 dl oil (per frying pan)
• 250 g tempeh, cut into 3 mm thick slices
• salt to taste

I start by heating oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Using two pans makes the whole process a bit quicker, but (obviously) uses up more oil. Then I fry the tempeh slices on both sides, maybe about 3-5 minutes per side, but this depends on how hot the oil gets. It’s really easy to burn the tempeh, so I check the undersides often. The tempeh slices are ready when they are golden brown and feel crisp and hard in the middle when touched with a spatula. If they’re still soft, even just a little bit in the center, they are not ready yet!

After frying I put the slices on a kitchen towel to drain off the extra oil, and add the next batch to the frying pans. When I’ve fried all the tempeh I have, I put the slices in a bowl and add salt to my liking.

Fried tempeh keeps well, at least a couple of weeks if kept in an airtight container in the fridge. It’s a great snack, can be added to a salad or a sandwich, or eaten as a main protein in a light meal. Many people find tempeh’s taste a bit weird, but I guarantee that cooked this way it’s both delicious and addictive!

After googling, reading and watching through a plethora of kimchi recipes, I settled on the one that looked most promising, and adapted it to my liking. Not only it proved to be really easy to make, but supremely delicious too! I am already planning my next batch of pickled vegetables. Even though making kimchi is easy, it does require some planning ahead. During the first day, there are two separate stages of preparing, and a six hour wait between them. After that, it takes three or four days of fermentation before the kimchi is ready.

This is what I used:

• 650 g chinese cabbage
• plenty of salt
• 1 beet, grated
• 2 red onions, chopped
• 2 – 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
• slice of ginger, about 1 cm thick, crushed
• 2 teaspoons hot chili powder (or to taste)
• 4 teaspoons sugar

When making the kimchi, I mostly followed the instructions from the Pyongyang metro kimchi recipe.

I began by rinsing and chopping the cabbage, resulting with pieces of cabbage about 5 cm in diameter. I made layers from the cabbage in a plastic bag, sprinkling salt liberally between each layer. At this stage, it’s important to ensure that the cabbage is thoroughly salted, so next I poured some salt over my hands and rubbed the pieces of cabbage between my hands. I added some more salt, and repeated until I’d gone through all of the cabbage. Then I squeezed the pieces of cabbage between my hands to extract as much water out of them as possible. I did this over the plastic bag, so that all the extracted water was collected in the bag. I tied up the bag, and let it sit for 6 hours.

At this point, the original recipe said rinse the cabbage “if necessary”, and remove the extra water, but since my cabbage wasn’t that watery, I decided not to remove any water. Moreover, I didn’t rinse the cabbage, since I hadn’t used that much salt. Most of the saltiness disappears in the fermentation process anyway. Now I put the cabbage in a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid, and added the rest of the ingredients. I put on my kitchen gloves, and started squeezing the ingredients in my fists. I continued squeezing the cabbage mix for a couple of minutes.

All done! I tasted it a bit, and it was already really yummy, a bit salty perhaps. I closed the lid, and put the kimchi box into our coolest cupboard for 3 days. I think I read from one of the recipes, that the place to keep the kimchi should be under 20 degrees Celsius.

After three days, the kimchi was ready! I kept it in the fridge now, so that it wouldn’t go extra sour too quickly. We ate it as a side a couple of times, and I had it over rye bread a few times. We also made kimchi fried rice, which was really great! I followed this recipe pretty closely, except I substituted the meat for tofu, and omitted the eggs, of course. Oh, and I used 2 or 3 times more tamari than the recipe calls for, adding more of it in the end, tasting until the balance was right.

Kimchi fried rice with some steamed bok choy

Soup ingredients:

• olive oil for frying
• 2 onions, chopped
• 6 cloves of garlic, crushed
• half of a medium rutabaga (about 275 g), diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 teaspoon hot chili powder
• 4 teaspoons of ras-el-hanout
  
• 4 dl (about 275 g) dried split fava beans (you can use whole beans, but they take longer to cook)
• enough water to amply cover the vegetables and beans (about 1 – 1 1/2 liters)
• 3 teaspoons vegetable stock powder
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• juice of 1 mandarin
• salt to taste

Harissa yogurt ingredients:

• 1 teaspoon harissa
• 1 1/2 dl soy yogurt
• pinch of salt
• pinch of pepper

About 4 hours before starting to cook the soup I speed soaked the fava beans. Speed soaking means I simply rinsed the beans in cold water, put them in a bowl, poured boiling water on them, and covered the bowl. Of course one could soak the beans properly too, overnight in cold water.

After the beans were soaked, we started by chopping the onions and crushing the garlic. While I diced the rutabaga and the carrot, Anni put some olive oil in a pot over medium-high heat, and fried the onion and the garlic until the onion was translucent. We then added the chopped rutabaga and carrot, and fried them for a minute or two more.

Now we added the chili powder and the ras el hanout, stirred the mix for a while, and then added the beans, water, stock powder, sugar, and vinegar. We covered the pot, and simmered until the beans were soft. This took about one hour.

Anni then proceeded to purée the soup using our immersion blender until it was smooth, and adjusted the taste by adding the olive oil, the mandarin juice, and a pinch of salt.

We garnished our soup bowls with some harissa yogurt – the yogurt was simply made by combining and mixing all the ingredients in a small bowl.

First, we washed our apples to remove dirt – some of the apples had been picked from the ground. Then we removed the cores with an apple core remover. Next, we cut the apples into thin slices, about 4-5mm each. Then, utilizing a needle and a thread, we pulled a thread through a bunch of apple rings, about 30 to 35 rings in one thread. Now, we had a couple of threads with apple slices, which we hung on our doorways, like pictured below:

The tricky part was the hanging of the thread without the apple rings tearing. It’s done best with one person holding the apple rings and another person tying the knots. Once the thread was in place, we carefully moved the rings apart from each other, like pictured above.

The apple rings were dry in about 5 days. Of course we could’ve dried them in our oven as well, but this way we saved some energy, and got to admire the pretty apple bracelets in our home for a few days! It’s easy to develop an addiction to dried apples. We’ve been snacking on them steadily, and our stocks are already running low. Next fall we’re going to make more of them for sure.