Recipe: Fennel and celery soup with blue cheese cream

Yeeessss, my prayers have been answered: it’s snowing!! I’ve been walking around smiling like an idiot, it’s so incredibly beautiful and fresh and.. ah! I just love it!

Autumn and winter call for warm and hearty meals, which means that I’ve been consuming soups in absolutely ridiculous amounts. A few days ago I did a carrot & tarragon soup with feta cream (I’ll post the recipe later), and I got really excited about the feta cream thingy. I’d made carrot & feta soup before of course, but always had the problem that the feta just didn’t melt properly (no, I didn’t use the low-fat stuff), but stayed in rubbery lumps no matter how much you molested the blender. But as a cream it worked much better, blended in smoothly and as a bonus you had clear flavour contrasts with the sweet soup and salty cream.

I figured this cream thing could be used with all sorts of cheeses, and as my dear parents know so well, I’ve adored blue cheese ever since I was a kid. The smellier and stronger, the better. So what to match that blue cheese with? My first thought was endives or chicory, but they’re so mild in flavour that I’m not that sure how they’d work in a soup. And a big point is their mouthfeel, anyway. From somewhere between the endives and the aniseedy flavour of tarragon in the carrot soup came fennel! My newly found friend celery would go along just perfect, and with the blue cheese cream they would make a perfect threesome. It was heavenly, even if I say so myself.

Oh and one thing I’ve also just recently discovered: puréeing! I don’t mean just with a hand mixer or blender, but passing the whole thing through a sieve after that. I used to think it was just some foppish thing involving extra work phases and more dishes, not to mention throwing away whatever stays in the sieve instead of eating it, but I’ve made a full turn on this matter. The consistency is just SO much smoother and more pleasant, it’s definitely worth the effort. I often have the problem with puréed soups that after eating them for a few days (as you always end up doing, for it is simply impossible to do a soup of just 2–3 servings), they start to feel as baby food in my mouth. Then I get disgusted and feel tempted to just throw the rest away, if there’s still some left. Baby food problem: solved.

So, now finally to the recipe.

Fennel and celery soup with blue cheese cream
Serves 4–5

Soup:
3 small fennels or 2 medium sized fennels, tops trimmed, ends cut and then thinly sliced
4 sprigs celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
good-quality vegetable broth
1 glass dry white wine
100 gr sour cream
a splash of lemon juice
freshly ground salt and black pepper to taste

Cheese cream:
100 gr strong blue cheese, crumbled (I used Bergader Edelpilz)
100 gr natural organic yoghurt (a low-fat will do, but a completely fat-free version won’t mix well with the soup), or about the same amount of cream
1 tbsp (walnut) oil
water, to thin out

1. Sauté the fennels, celery and onions until tender, season with salt and pepper.
2. Add the white wine and broth, leave to simmer until the veggies are all tender and the alcohol has evaporated.
3. In the meanwhile, make the cheese cream: mix all the ingredients together with a (hand) blender, add just enough water to thin the cream out into... well, a cream. Quite runny but not watery.
4. Purée the veggies as smooth as you can with a (hand) blender. The smoother you make it, the more you can pass through the sieve and the less goes to waste. Then, as said, pass it through a sieve: use a metal sieve with small holes and push the soup through with a ladle (using a little force is allowed). Be sure to scrape the bottom of the sieve! Don’t feel to bad about what little goes unused – I tasted it and surprisingly, it tasted like nothing! Which means that the soup is even more intense in flavour :p~
5. Add the lemon juice and sour cream, and blend it once more to be sure to have a smooth and lean consistency. Check the taste and add salt/pepper/juice/whatever is needed. Bear in mind that the blue cheese cream is very salty!
6. Serve with the cheese cream and roasted walnuts.

Maybe the dullest-looking soup ever. In real life, the colour is a bit greener, though.
And what’s most important, it tastes good!

An emotional walk

On days like these, I know why I love this city.

Lately I’ve been doing loooong walks. Just walking around, listening to music, with no particular destination. It seems to be some kind of autumn thing for me. I do like taking walks all year round, but during autumn it almost gets out of hand – the shortest walk I can manage is 1,5 hours. Usually it slips to two hours or more. It’s just the most relaxing thing there is for me right now!

Last autumn, I had the exact same thing in Helsinki. And I waked, and I walked. But the problem with Helsinki is that it is quite small, despite being a “small big city”, and I soon was very familiar (i.e., bored) with all sorts of routes within a reasonable (~10 km) distance from my place. Of course I developed various favourite routes, but nevertheless it really took my imagination some exercise, or then the effort and bore of travelling someplace, to keep it varied and interesting.

Here it’s quite different. This city is SO immense, there’s always some area remotely nearby that I don’t know that well and is interesting to discover or learn to know better during walks. Everything within 2–5 km from my place is already familiar to the point of boredom, so here’s what I do: I skip the dull part and hop on the U-Bahn, and begin my walk straight away in an interesting environment. The U-Bahns and S-Bahns can take you quite far in 10 minutes, whereas the subway network is very modest in Helsinki. And trams and buses take forever to get anywhere. Did I ever mention that waiting is not one of my strengths...?

Today was again one of those days my walk slipped to nearly three hours. Despite having walked dozens of times along the Landwehrkanal, which runs just nearby my place, I’m not bored with it yet. And it leads to Puschkinallee, which for its part leads straight into Treptower Park, so there I had the beginning of my route. I don’t know Treptower Park more or less at all – I’ve been there a couple of times, but I definitely have no clear picture of it in my head. And still don’t! It’s so big and undiscovered to me that I still have many wonderful walks ahead there :) I wandered around in zigzags, according to my “oooh! what’s that over there? / what a nice trail! / I wonder what lies behind that / etc.” impulses and stumbled upon all sorts of things.

”Stumble upon” should maybe be awarded the prize for understatement of the year when it comes to the Soviet war memorial. It’s a bombastic war memorial and military cemetery honouring the memory of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin, and celebrating the victory over national socialism. The Battle of Berlin (April–May 1945) was the final big battle of WWII ending in the unconditional surrender of Germany. Check it out if you have the opportunity, it’s... big.

”The war memorial depicting a Soviet soldier holding a child that he saved and stepping on a crushed Swastika”
From: Wikipedia

There are also a few cute ponds in the park, and guess what I saw there? A stork! This was exceptionally cool, for storks aren’t common in the city, and just two days ago my friend told me with amazement how she had seen a stork in the middle of Berlin :) Or some sort of stork-y bird, I don’t know all that well the differences between storks and herons and cranes and what other kinds there might be.

As I wandered ahead, I noticed the cutest bridge ever, and to by excitement it was open. It took me to the most wonderful little island ever, in the middle of Spree. The island is called Die Insel der Jugend, which means “the island of youth”. I don’t exactly know what it was, but the whole moment was just so overwhelmingly wonderful it almost brought me to tears. I was on a beautiful small island, surrounded by glistening water in the yellow street lightning, with frozen grass and leaves rustling under my feet. Bliss.
Check out some wonderful pictures on the island’s web site: Insel der Jugend / Treptower Park.

I continued to walk along the Spree, and where did it lead me? To Spreepark! It’s an abandoned amusement park whose owner fled the country to Peru some ten years ago, leaving the bankrupt amusement park behind. I had heard of it, but all I knew was that it was somewhere in or near Treptower Park. Deserted places like that always give me the creeps. It was really weird to imagine how that particular place had once been filled with people amusing themselves in e.g. the ferris wheel, which now lay in the the gloom completely abandoned and just waiting to slowly fall apart. Creepy and sad – and yet somehow very, very fascinating.

This city is just so much more than just the bars and clubs of Kreuzberg and the cafés of Prenzlauer Berg. <3

Blogging in darkness

Whoa, sorry for the blogging break! I can’t even blame it on being busy, because I haven’t. Well, this week has actually been somewhat active (I held a presentation on the Berlin blockade for my German course and made a day trip to Leipzig, among others), but otherwise I’ve been busy procrastinating, tops. Some sort of autumn coma going on here.

The clocks were turned backwards on the last weekend in October, due to shifting to standard time, which to me means that the sun sets an hour earlier. I have to say I’ve been quite dismayed and disheartened by the early and profound darkness. Finland is so extreme with its lightning (it’s all the time light during summer and dark during winter), but in Germany it actually gets dark in the evenings during summer, so I somehow assumed that darkness during winter would also keep to a moderate level. Boy was I wrong! In addition to the standard time, things are worsened by the time zones, something I hadn’t thought about at all: when the sun sets around 5 PM in Finland, the time is only 4 PM in Germany. Ok, the sun sets around 3.30 PM in Helsinki and at 4 PM here, so the day is still longer here and basically I shouldn’t have anything to complain about. But nevertheless it just somehow feels a lot... darker here. I guess it’s due to the lack of snow and decent street lightning or something?

Well, luckily I assume that the worst part is soon over, and with a sigh of relief I’ll have to conclude that it has lasted only a short time. Even November has been nice and gentle to me, to some point: it’s been quite warm, the trees have still kept on to their beautiful leaves, it hasn’t been terribly rainy, and even when it has rained, I’ve managed to enjoy the melancholic beauty of wet streets and leaves in yellow street lightning. Only during the last two weeks or so has the novembery November been depressingly present, and now the temperature is already dropping fast. Next Wednesday it should be snowing, so I have really high hopes that winter’ll be here soon and replace the darkness with a lovely blue light! :)

Now that I think about it, it’s crazy how the weather has changed in two weeks! Now it’s maybe –3–4°C, and exactly two weeks ago it was +17°C (!!). Of course, it was exceptionally warm then, but still! That Sunday I made a day trip to Potsdam by bike and it was absolutely fabulous. It was my first visit in Potsdam, but unfortunately I still can’t tell you much about the city as it was so dark that I didn’t see much :D And Potsdam certainly hasn’t invested in city maps, so most of the time I had absolutely no clue where I was. I guess that trip was more about the journey than the destination :)

I would have liked to see the Sanssouci palace and park, but as said, it was pitch-dark, so I had to give up on that idea. Well, the main reason I wanted to see them in the first place was the name, so I guess I’m not that passionate about the whole thing :) But I wonder how French names for places always are so sympathetic? Sans souci means “without a worry” – sounds quite stress-free to me :) Then there’s Monbijou Park, where the former Monbijou Palace used to exist: mon bijou means “my jewel” or “my piece of jewellery” – how romantic ♥ The third example that comes to my mind is the park Mon Repos in Vyborg, Russia. (Apparently there is also a palace by the same name in Germany!) Mon repos translates into “my rest”. I guess the normal association would be a place where one relaxes during holidays or something, but for some reason I find that the name has a beautiful and sad tone to it: it makes me think of someone’s last residence before death – the final, yet peaceful rest on earth.

In this melancholic feel I end this post and drag myself to bed for the final rest of this week. Good night, sleep tight.

Recipe: Roasted pumpkin and garlic soup

I made this soup already in September, but it’s still pumpkin season, so I have a hunch it will be making a comeback in the near future.

I love roasted vegetables! Roasting just gives them such an earthy sweetness, it’s absolutely irresistible. Pumpkin is available everywhere for a very reasonable price, and so the thought of a soup made with roasted pumpkin was all too tempting to be ignored. When I thought of roasting also garlic, and of course adding pumpkin’s best friend, sage, I had no choice but to start cooking immediately.

Roasted pumpkin and garlic soup
Serves 4–5

ca 1 kg pumpkin, peeled and cut into even-sized cubes (keep the seeds!)
1 whole garlic, head trimmed off
1 huge onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced
200 gr sour cream
1 dl white wine
vegetable stock
sage leaves
salt and black pepper, to taste

1. Preparation: Place the pumpkin cubes, pumpkin seeds and a couple of sage leaves on a baking tray with a generous piece of baking paper, sprinkle some vegetable oil, salt and pepper over them. Wrap the garlic along with a dash of olive oil in tin foil. Shove the pumpkin and garlic in a 180°C oven for about 45 minutes. Roughly turn them over once, so that they roast evenly.
2. Sauté the onions and celery in a pot.
3. Add the white wine and let it simmer on low heat until the alcohol has evaporated.
4. Press the garlic cloves out of their shells and add them to the pot. Throw along also the pumpkin pieces, sage leaves (maybe 5–6, taste your way through as they can be quite strong in taste), vegetable stock and the sour cream.
5. Purée the soup until smooth; if you have the energy and pedantry you can thereafter pass it through a sieve in order to get a really silky consistency.
6. Check the taste, add e.g. salt, a dash of lemon juice, honey or other spices, when needed. Serve with your home-roasted pumpkin seeds and crispy butter-fried sage leaves. Yum-my!

Sigh, again an incredibly dull and ugly food picture.
Photographing inside at dark sure doesn't bring the best out of the looks of my food.

Dresden, part 2: !!

Finally, in the afternoon, we headed out of old town. By this time I was feeling quite fed up with the city and wondered whether it was just as dull everywhere. As Leonard Nimoy puts it on the Simpsons: “The answer is: No.” We jumped on a tram heading east and reached the Elbe Valley. My goodness, my opinion on Dresden changed immediately. It was absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It actually reminded me quite a lot of Heidelberg, with which I am completely in love.

Elbe Valley

Castles!

The bridge Blaues Wunder (“Blue Wonder”), or officially Loschwitzer Brücke. A blue wonder means an unpleasant surprise in German, but I’ve no clue why this poor bridge carries such a nickname.

There were lots of cute birds on the bank. These swans weren’t even scary or vicious.
Also note the funicular! Guess how much I would like to ride it? A lot.

We took a break at Schillergarten, a biergarten by the Blaues Wunder before crossing Elbe. Lucky I wasn’t especially hungry, for the only vegetarian alternative the whole place had to offer were french fries... After that, we headed towards Weißer Hirsch (“white red deer”, heh), a posher villa area in East Dresden, higher up the valley. It was very bourgeois, but in a very pleasant way.

A very sympathetic sign at the Schillergarten, warning about falling chestnuts.

Weißer Hirsch, near the bridge.

Time for some climbing!

Come on guys, we haven’t got all day. It’s just a little steep.

A villa in Weißer Hirsch. A bit modest for my taste, but I could maybe show the mercy of living in a place like that, if I was asked very nicely (and if I were, say, 20 years older).

Another villa.

Street view.

After climbing up, we took the tram back down, to Äußere Neustadt (“outer new town”). There we wandered around in shops and eventually found a very nice flea market! I saw a cute Kiwi bird that just had to come with me. I named it Kiwa das Kiwi; “kiva” means nice in Finnish (but as the bird is German, its name would be pronounced “Kifa” if it would keep the original spelling, hence the w) and actually, the grammatically correct genus would be masculine. However, we had sarcastically been making jokes about postmodern feminism and its postmodern jargon, so I decided to take a critical stand towards the heteronormativity penetrating (!) our society, and went for the neuter instead. Very gender neutral, jawohl?

Kiwa! He... I mean, "it" was a bit nervous about being photographed, so I couldn’t get it to smile, but it’s really a very relaxed and easy-going fellow.
It actually also features in a previous picture, sitting on my bed.

There was also a baby at the flea market, but the sign explicitly reads that it is not for sale (“Baby = unverkäuflich”). Bummer.

Then it was time to head home. We had huge plans of going out for some partying, but everyone passed out in the train (just of exhaustion and fresh air) around nine, so the somewhat anticlimactic result was that everyone just crawled home to get some sleep. Maybe just as well, all in all it was a day well spent!

Dresden, part 1: Meh.

Ha, finally a post about Dresden, where we went for a day trip a month ago (that is, in the beginning of October).

Short introduction/FYI: Dresden is the capital of Saxony in East Germany near the Czech border, about 160 km from Berlin. It is situated in a valley through which the river Elbe flows. Thanks to the Elbe Valley, Dresden was granted UNESCO world heritage status in 2004. However, it lost it in 2009 due to the construction of a highway bridge. Dresden did mention the construction plans when running for the status, but the location of the future bridge was reported incorrectly – wtf? “Umm well we didn’t know where we were gonna build this bridge we’ve been planning since the 90s. Sorry bout that, UNESCO dudes.” When UNESCO found out that the futuristic-looking, massive bridge was going to be built close to the old town, it obviously went pretty berserk and eventually removed the Elbe Valley from the world heritage list. Quite an absurdly tragicomical story.

We started our day trip by wandering around Altstadt, the “old town” of the city. It actually in practice is the newer part, as it was completely destroyed in the bombings of WWII and thereafter rebuilt. I don’t know if it was precisely for that reason, but the old town seemed very impersonal and clinical, as if it were just a façade built for tourists. It didn’t have the feel of a place people live in. It was nice to see, but is hardly worth another visit.

View to Altstadt from the bridge Augustusbrücke.

Minerva at the Augustusbrücke, Altstadt and of course Elbe in the background.

A bit of the Füırstenzug (“Procession of the Princes”, but can also be translated into “train of princes”, which is much more amusing – at least if you’re humourly challenged as I am), a ridiculously big mural representing the Princes of Saxony.

Some disturbing statues/decorations at Zwinger, a baroque palace.

It got even more disturbing.

Recipe: Comfort casserole

I used to have a cooking blog, but I eventually didn't have enough enthusiasm or motivation to keep it alive. My pictures sucked (and still do, admittedly), which of course is a bit discouraging as several other food blogs really have great pictures, and I just didn’t update it often enough.

Now I thought I might try to revive the food blog section. As this isn’t strictly a food blog, I won’t have to worry about not posting enough recipes, I’ll just post when I feel like it. And now I do! The recipes will for the most part be vegetarian, but occasionally some seafood might swim in too.

As autumn creeps in, I always start craving for stews, soups and casseroles – warm, comforting, hearty meals. I like to use seasonal ingredients, and when I saw delicious-looking string beans and Brussels sprouts in the grocery store the other day, I got the idea of a very cheesy casserole with sour cream. I had made wild mushroom bisque the other day and had still some mushrooms left, and I figured they would go along perfectly in this autumnal meal.

I don’t mean to brag, but by god, this was good! (Or is, I still have a good deal left.) I named it “comfort casserole” because that just sums it up. To add up the luxury and cosiness, a splash of white wine would not hurt at all. Smoked tofu would also go along very well, in the casserole itself or then served with it. But so, here’s the recipe:

Comfort casserole
Serves 6–8

ca. 300 gr string beans, ends trimmed
ca. 500 gr Brussels sprouts, halved
30 gr dried wild mushrooms
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced
2 small parsley roots (parsnip will also do just fine, or why not carrot), thinly sliced or cut into juliennes
2 onions, chopped
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
200 gr sour cream
1,5 dl half cream (15%), I used a wild mushroom & white balsamic flavoured, but you could use just regular cream and add a dash of balsamic vinegar, or all sour cream
(1 dl dry white wine)
200 gr strong grated cheese, I used mature cheddar and Emmentaler
3 organic eggs, lightly beaten
rosemary, salt, white pepper

1. Soak the mushrooms in warm water for about an hour, squeeze out the excess water and chop them very finely. Don’t throw away the soaking water! Pass it through filter paper or a cheese cloth and use it for the casserole.
2. Blanche the string beans in salted water for a few minutes. This is important, because even string beans may be toxic uncooked.
3. Sauté the onions, celery and garlic, season with salt and rosemary. Move into a large bowl along with the beans and parsley root.
4. Move the Brussels sprouts on the pan and fry until golden brown. Add the mushrooms and about a dl of the mushrooms’ soaking water. Leave to simmer until the liquid has evaporated and/or the sprouts are al dente, then add to the veggie bowl.
5. In a bowl, mix the sour cream, cream, white wine, some of the mushrooms’ soaking water, eggs and most of the cheese. Season with salt and white pepper, and some more rosemary if you feel like it. You won’t want the mixture to be too running, otherwise your casserole will run all over the place. If you feel it’s too fluid, you could add another egg or some all-purpose flour (just be sure to whisk it together with some liquid so that you won’t bump into yucky lumps).
6. Combine the two bowls and pour into a casserole. Sprinkle over the leftover cheese and bake in.. umm, 180°C for about an hour. I’m not too sure about the time, just check on it and take it out when it’s got a golden brown crust. Let it settle and cool for a while, and dig in!

Haha, it sure isn’t a looker. But it compensates in taste what it lacks in looks.