Update on Krieks
Just wanted to say that what I guessed in my last post was right– the Belle Vue Kriek is superior to the St. Louis one. No sugary flavor, just a good sour cherry taste, with a bit of earthiness, like the cherry pit got in there too. It’s sharp and robust. And I have one chilling in the fridge right now…
Brussels
So… I’m in Brussels! I arrived yesterday morning after a night of about 3.5 hours of sleep and went straight to work, but luckily the people I’m working with are really nice and helpful and didn’t seem to mind that I was functioning on a less-than-optimal level. Last night I got a good night’s sleep in the wonderful apartment I’m staying in, and today was a full day of work followed by a trip to the grocery store. I’m getting good at asking people if they speak English when I answer the phone at work, but the grocery store still offers up a challenge. Sometimes it takes time to figure out what I’m looking at. I can understand a bit of the French because it’s similar to Italian and of course a lot of food words are French, and the Dutch offers up some clues because it’s a lot like English, but still, it’s an adventure.
Now I’d like to present some of the interesting goodies I picked up today:
This Cote d’Or Noir spread looked so amazing. And the selection of spreads here is incredible too– not just Nutella, but chocolate spreads, nut spreads, fruit spreads… I need to take more time to examine them all, and I imagine some will come with me back to Estonia. This Noir reminded me, quite honestly, of the chocolate cream in Golden Oreos, just a bit darker. It was actually really good when I mixed it with some plain yogurt I got, since that added bitterness and actually made it seem richer.
Both of these cheeses are actually French. I’ll try to get some Belgian stuff next time. I hadn’t had goat cheese in a really long time, and the other stuff just looked good– it’s soft and mild (sorry for the lame description).
And finally, some beer. I know some hard-core beer lovers consider fruit beers sacrilegious, but I love lambics. I drank the St. Louis Kriek tonight and enjoyed the sweet flavor followed by a more sour finish. The Belle-Vue one is probably better, though; I seem to remember a more sour, refreshing taste throughout. I’ll let you know later 
.
I was kinda on a…
(the second post from guest blogger J)
…diet (yeah yeah, I know) and I knew Marika was coming to spend the weekend at my place. I wanted to surprise her with a dinner, but since she is such an enthusiastic cook herself (like you probably know already), I didn’t want to serve her ground meat or canned tuna, nor beef jerky. I wanted to make something fairly light but still tasty, like… a normal dinner. I had cut more or less all the carbs from my daily diet, so that posed a slight problem, but I came up with a solution that would serve us both (not too much fat and low on carbs).
I was wandering around the grocery store and I got the idea of making some chicken breasts in the oven with some stuffing in them. I pondered different combinations I could stow in the breasts, with the only constant component being blue cheese. I mean, even that would have rocked, but still, I wanted to give her the impression (or maybe an illusion, more like) that I can actually cook. And score some points with that, of course… 
After more than a half an hours of mindless roaming in the shop I was ready. In my trolley I had pesto, a few pears, bacon and blue cheese. I had also found some wooden skewers, some frozen veggies including broccoli and some other… green thingies, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and a bag of pre-made sauce with some random herb-taste. As for the drinks I had gotten a cheap, foil-packed carton of red wine, which was bad, but it didn’t matter ‘cause I ended up drinking more or less all of it while cooking. My diet is kind of a flexible one…
I made the chicken breast flatter so that I could put the stuffing inside and kinda roll the breast around it, but since I don’t own a steak hammer, I had to use a slightly more primitive way to flatten them: I put a chicken breast on the table, placed an empty casserole dish on it, and with a little help from raw muscle power and gravity I got the job done – I had three beautiful, flat breasts on my table waiting for me to give them some dimension. I cut some pretty thin slices of pear and placed them in the middle of the breast, covered the pear slices with chunks of blue cheese and lastly pour a pretty good amount of pesto on top of them. I guess I got too excited while filling the breasts ‘cause I had pretty hard time to “roll” them shut. The wooden sticks helped me on that and the result was tolerable. Finally I covered the chicken creations with bacon, and utilized the skewers to hold those chicken-thingies in form. Threw them in the oven and turned on the TV.
I continued sipping the wine while surfing the TV-channels (it was bad, but I was doing it for her – the more I drank before she arrived, the less she would have to deal with it). I have this one channel which shows music videos from the early 80’s, they were so ridiculously bad and tasteless that I just had to keep on watching… what they were thinking back then? At some point I managed to lift my ass from the couch to toss the frozen veggies into the oven and they served only a slightly shorter sentence in the heat than the meat. I also cut some fresh vegetables onto the plates to wait for the other stuff. I guess it took altogether something like ~40 minutes for the chicken to be serviceable, and just before I took them out from the oven, I simply heated up the sauce (water, sauce-flavor and some butter).
Look at the pretty bacon…
Just a few seconds after she came – I didn’t allow her to come to the kitchen – everything was set. I still had some wine left to serve with the meal, but politely she switched to water pretty quickly – so I had to deal with the rest of the wine. All in all, it was a success, in every sense. I even think I saw some elements of a positive surprise on her face, but might be she was just acting or I was hallucinating. Or drunk. I mean, she knows I can easily eat ground meat with macaroni and ketchup weeks in a row and live a happy life doing that, so I guess she wasn’t expecting anything so… different. It was a good dinner, the company was sweet, plus she liked it too – score!
-J, The Cooking Poro
Ei paremat pole kuskil maal…
There’s an Estonian folk song that declares “ei paremat pole kuskil maal kui suisel ajal Saaremaa,” which means “there’s no better place in the world than Saaremaa in summertime.” It wasn’t yet summer when J and I visited Saaremaa, Estonia’s largest island, in April, but we were blessed with gorgeous weather nonetheless. The weekend was a trip down memory lane for us, since we visited Saaremaa together back in October of 2005. To encourage our reminiscing, we even booked a room in the same home-stay in Kuressaare we stayed in 2 and a half years ago (our friendly host Ülo didn’t remember us).
I had my heart set on enjoying a meal at one of the many spa hotels in Kuressaare. After some research to weed out the options that were just too expensive, we made a dinner reservation at the Arensburg Boutique Hotel & Spa.
At Arensburg, we were served a meal that was simple, healthy, and well-prepared. It started with these sun-dried tomato rolls and dill butter. We also ordered a bottle of white wine, but sadly, I didn’t take a picture of it and thus can’t remember what it was. It was very refreshing though, a bit fruity but still dry.
We shared an appetizer of shrimp with a balsamic reduction and dill mousse (yeah, the dill seemed to be everywhere in this meal, which is typical in traditional Estonian food but sort of unexpected at a spa restaurant). Note that shrimp this size are called hiidkrevetid– giant shrimp– in Estonia, since the usual shrimp you see here are very tiny. I miss big, meaty shrimp, but these satisfied my craving, the firm shrimp nicely offset by the sweet vinegar reduction.
For my main course I had butterfish with hollandaise sauce. It was one intense piece of white fish, dense and filling, like a steak… made of fish. I liked that the buttery sauce was off to the side so I could choose myself how mush I wanted on my fish and the accompanying fresh vegetables.
J had salmon with a lime sauce, which I don’t remember too much about, except that the fish was lovely and the sauce slightly sweet. (And note the sprigs of dill on both of our plates!)
After our relaxing, satisfying dinner, we indulged ourselves with a trip to the hotel’s cigar lounge, where we took some very dramatic pictures against the remaining daylight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling window.
Yeah… we know we look good .
A word about the Swedish…
This is the first post from my new guest blogger, J:
Oh, Sweden… the land of happiness and tall, blonde women. In any part of their country, you encounter smiley faces and a warm, welcoming atmosphere. The nation that puts the individual before the system, gives men the right to paternity leave, where you don’t have to spend your teenage years in the army – how could you not like them? Sweden… probably even the grass is greener there.
There’s also an idiom, “The Swedish do it better.” Personally, as a born Finn, I doubt that. They just have this magical ability to get the credit for everything, even the stuff they have nothing to do with. They even had the guts to declare good ol’ Father Christmas as their own, bastards… As far as I know, the old man still has the Finnish nationality on his papers – keep it going, pops! You Swedes can keep ABBA, Eriksson and those damn rotten herrings you like so much (!!!), but don’t come across the border claiming something that is “legally” ours to be yours. Swedes… who likes them anyways!*
Nevertheless, it’s time to get down to business, and this time I thought to make some so-called Swedish meatballs. It has been many, many years since I last had some, so why not, I was hungry anyways. A quick glance in the fridge revealed some ground meat and cream, so I went to the shop on the corner and got some onions and tomato purée plus potatoes, carrots and beer to go with the balls. I didn’t have any breadcrumbs, but I thought to try to make them without that stuff this time. I used a tiny amount of flour though, but just to maintain the overall manageability of the meat-dough.
I mixed all the ingredients and spices (at that point only salt, black pepper and paprika) and let the ugly mass cool down a bit. While waiting, I refreshed myself with some beer – I especially liked that part of the process. Before I actually started to cook the balls I fried a tiny piece of the reddish bulk on the pan, just to ensure the taste. It was perfect. For a fraction of a second I traveled ~20 years back in time, all the way to my grandmother’s and the table served… a plateful of brown and greasy meatballs, peeking out from a steamy pile of mashed potatoes, grandmother’s familiar voice, persistently but lovingly telling me to take more, more, more… A sip of beer and the nostalgic moment was gone. Oh, the golden memories.
I made a panful of traditional meatballs without adding any other spices. The texture, even without the breadcrumbs, was all good and the taste was just what it should be. Then I thought to be a little more adventurous and separated a hunk of the meat-mass and added some extra-hot chili and Tabasco to it. Fried them up, and goddamn they were good! I fell in love with that stuff, I even wrote down the exact amount of the ingredients and spices I used for next time. With all due love and respect, Grandma (rest in peace), why didn’t you ever try that?!
As soon as I got the first batch of balls done and their remains were stuck to the pan, I started making the sauce. I used beef stock and flour mixed together with the leavings; the result was good but slightly lumpy. But hey, I’m no pro – taste is all that matters. As a final product, the meatballs were served with boiled potatoes and carrots and some delicious sauce splashed all over them. Oh, and I found some cucumber and tomatoes from the depths of my fridge, so I just cut those up to give the meal some healthiness and color. More beer was also involved while killing the dish. All in all, a nice’n easy improvisational meal. I guess I could call it Estonian meatballs.
P.S. Marika made some yummy cranberry jam, seen on the plate… mmm…
-J, The Cooking Poro
*All the Swedish readers, please don’t take it too seriously. The actual author of this blog has nothing to do with my individual opinions or criticism concerning the Swedes. You know how it goes… J
