kitchen garden

Hunted, Foraged, Traded, Inherited

I was doing a freezer audit the other week. (There’s a longer story there involving some truly ancient beef liver and a reckoning with inherited food packrat tendencies, but that’s a confession for another day.) The point is: I found treasures. Vacuum-sealed venison osso buco from November 2024, bought through our local food circle from a university student who hunts with his father. Foraged chanterelles from autumn, fried in butter the day I picked them and frozen in little golden nuggets. A friend’s homemade berry wine I’d traded for with strawberry runners from the garden.

And suddenly I knew what dinner was going to be.

Here’s the thing about living somewhere long enough: your pantry starts telling the story of your life there.

In California, dinner came from Trader Joe’s. Maybe Costco if we were feeling ambitious. The ingredients had no biography beyond “aisle seven” and “on sale.” Which is fine! That’s how most people eat, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

But nearly fifteen years into Finland, my freezer reads like a local census. The venison came from a kid paying his way through university by selling what he and his father hunt – I bought a whole deer in one go, so this cut was maybe €5. The chanterelles came from a three-minute walk past my driveway, which happens to be forest. The berry wine came from a friend who wanted strawberry runners from my garden.

This isn’t virtue. It’s just… accumulation. You live somewhere long enough, you start knowing people. You trade things. You learn which parts of your own backyard forest fruit in September.

And apparently, you braise it all in a Taiwanese rice cooker.

The Tatung deserves its own paragraph. My dad worked for the company in the States – they sent him there from Taiwan – and when we moved into this house thirteen years ago, he had them send me a new one. Same model my parents have been using since I was a kid. It’s not a slow cooker – it’s a steam braiser. You put water in the outer pot, your ingredients in the inner pot, flip the switch, and walk away. When the water evaporates, it pops and clicks off. That’s it. No temperature monitoring, no timers, no anxiety.

My mom made aromatic beef stews in hers – the kind I still want to learn to make properly one of these days. I’m braising Finnish forest deer in mine. The Tatung doesn’t care about nationality. It just makes meat tender.

The actual cooking is almost anticlimactic after all that provenance. Brown the osso buco in cast iron until it develops that gorgeous crust. (Don’t skip this. Don’t crowd the pan. Patience.)

Deglaze with the berry wine – it’ll sizzle dramatically, scrape up all those beautiful brown bits. Nestle the meat into the Tatung with some celery and a bay leaf, pour the wine over, lid on, switch down.

Three hours later, the house smells like a restaurant and my kid walks in asking “what’s that smell?” in a tone that is, against all odds, not suspicious.

For the sauce: those butter-fried chanterelles go into a pan, hit them with a splash of the braising liquid if you want, then pour in the ruokakerma and let it simmer until it coats a spoon.

The cream mellows everything, so taste and adjust. Finnish cooking cream is one of those ingredients I genuinely miss when I’m back in the States – it’s meant for sauces in a way American heavy cream isn’t quite.

The verdict:

My son, who is eleven and has been known to reject entire meals over Wrong Onion Energy, ate braised venison osso buco with foraged chanterelle cream sauce. His complaint? The black pepper made it “a little spicy.” His negotiation? Cherry Coke to wash it down.

Reader, that’s a win. I’ll take it.

And me? I kept the marrow bones. Chef’s privilege. If you’ve never poked osso buco marrow out with a chopstick and eaten it straight, I recommend the experience. It’s buttery and unctuous and feels vaguely illicit, like you’re getting away with something.

If you saw “Braised Venison Osso Buco with Wild Chanterelle Cream Sauce” on a restaurant menu, you’d expect to pay €35 minimum. This cost me about €5 for the venison (bought in bulk, whole deer), maybe €2-3 in cream and seasonings. The chanterelles were free if you don’t count the walking, which I don’t, because that’s the point. The wine was traded for plants I was going to dig out anyway. The Tatung has been earning its keep for thirteen years.

But the real currency isn’t euros. It’s time. Time in a place. Time building the life that puts hunted venison in your freezer and foraged mushrooms in your butter and your friend’s wine in your braise.

This dish doesn’t have a nationality. Finnish ingredients, Taiwanese equipment, Californian cook. It just has a biography.

Mine, apparently.

Tatung Braised Venison Osso Buco with Chanterelle Cream Sauce

Serves 2-3 hungry people

For the braise:

  • Venison osso buco, ~600-700g
  • Red wine, ~½ cup (for deglazing)
  • Water, 1 cup (for Tatung outer pot)
  • Meat bouillon cube, 1
  • Celery, 2-3 stalks cut in chunks
  • Bay leaf, 1
  • Salt and pepper
  • Oil for browning

For the chanterelle cream sauce:

  • Chanterelles, fried in butter (fresh or frozen)
  • Ruokakerma (Finnish cooking cream), ½ to ¾ cup
  • Splash of braising liquid
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Brown the osso buco in a hot cast iron pan – 2-3 minutes per side until you get a proper golden crust. Work in batches. Patience.

Deglaze the pan with wine, scraping up all the fond.

In your Tatung (or slow cooker, or Dutch oven at 150°C): add water and bouillon to outer pot, nestle meat in inner pot, pour wine over, tuck celery and bay leaf around. Lid on, switch down. Walk away for 2.5-3 hours.

For the sauce: warm the butter-fried chanterelles, add a splash of braising liquid, pour in cream, simmer until it coats a spoon. Season to taste.

Serve over crusty bread. Keep the marrow bones for yourself.

My Favorite Matcha Smoothie (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Drink from the Blender Cup)

Full disclosure: this is probably the first time I’ve poured a smoothie into an actual glass in years, but blogs require pretty pictures, right? If we’re being real, I just chug this straight from the blender cup when I’m done because why the hell else would I buy them in that format?

I have a thing for smoothies. Always have, but you’d expect as much given my past. I also tend to get really obsessed with certain ones and have them on repeat for weeks on end, which seems to be my current situation with this banana matcha smoothie. I’ve even started adding the occasional splash of lavender syrup, just to give it that coffee shop flourish. Because really, the closest Starbucks is three hours away, and although it brings back fond memories when I see one, I’m not that devoted to the chain.

This one in particular is great because it actually keeps me full until lunch – so much so that I can pass by my son’s jars of breakfast cereal without wanting to pour myself a bowl. Which, if you knew how I feel about cereal, you’d understand is a significant achievement.

The Sourcing Problem

The one thing I’d like to improve upon with this recipe is sourcing. You know how they say you should always grow what you’ll eat in the garden? Next year, spinach is rocketing up to the top of my list next to strawberries and potatoes for things to plant enough of to last the year, because I’m going through frozen spinach like a Finnish winter goes through daylight hours. It would be so fulfilling to know I’m supplying my own, though I know it’s not particularly expensive. We have room in the garden and I need the motivation, so it works.

But enough philosophizing about spinach. Want to see the recipe?

The Base

  • 1 cup oat or almond milk
  • 1 tsp matcha powder
  • ¼ cup rolled oats
  • ¼ cup vanilla protein powder
  • 1 banana (sometimes frozen, sometimes fresh)
  • 4 cubes frozen spinach

Add-ins (as many or as few as you’d like – indulge your inner mad scientist)

  • 1 tbsp hemp powder (gives it depth and nuttiness which goes well with matcha)
  • 1 tbsp chia seeds (I’ve found this makes the taste a bit sharper, but do enjoy the thickened consistency)
  • 1 tbsp lavender syrup (for when going out for that matcha latte isn’t gonna happen)

Notes

I’ve used ¼ cup powdered milk with 1 tbsp vanilla sugar when out of protein powder before, and would totally do it again if I had any need to use it up. It gave a nice creamy consistency but changed the nutritional profile a bit.

Directions

Pop in ingredients in the order given, whiz until drinkable, give it a good shake to make sure there’s no powder gunked in the corners to surprise you, enjoy a fast and actually healthy breakfast.

(And then, if you’re me, drink it straight from the blender cup while standing at the kitchen counter, contemplating how happy you are not to have to do more dishes.)

Six on Saturday | 22nd June 2024

Happy Midsummer weekend! With last week’s rains, several days of clear sunny skies and only a couple hours of twilight to call night, our garden has been growing at a breakneck pace. We are absolutely inundated with leafy greens at the moment and I have already started showing up to friends’ houses bearing whole lettuces. Not a terrible plight to be in, but funny all the same.

1. The last day of school was this past week and one of my students brought me this little beauty. There were a couple of other plant-themed items as well. My kids know me too well. Does anybody know what that is in the bottle? I’m not very good at identifying houseplants.

2. Paeonia herbaceous hybrid ‘Lemon Chiffon’ was the first of my peonies to bloom again this year. Well, the first of the ones I planted myself, to be precise. The very first is the big pink-flowered shrub that came with the house, which I featured last week. But anyway! ‘Lemon Chiffon’ flowers are supposed to have more petals as the plant matures, and this one does look fluffier than last year’s.

3. ‘Rosamunda’ potatoes have started flowering, and they are a very pretty lavender with white edges. The potatoes themselves are maincrop with pinkish-red skins. It’ll be fun to see all the different colors of potato flowers since I have six different varieties.

4. Lots of broad beans on the way as well. I rarely see black and white flowers, so find these quite cool. I only tried a few plants last year but liked them so much that they got their own bed this year. Figuring out a support system was probably the trickiest part since I didn’t expect them to get so tall so fast. They’re currently being held up by a grid of twine zigzagged through wire supports along the edges.

5. Rodgersia aesculifolia, whose tropical-looking leaves and giant flower spikes surprise me by returning year after year, despite our not giving it a bit of protection or care. It really is the most reliable of perennials and I’ve grown very fond of it.

6. Last Sunday I attended our local garden society’s plant sale. Yes, of course I signed up to become a member as well. It never even occurred to me to look, for some reason, but after a year of being around the SoS crew, the idea of hanging around with more gardeners in real life seemed very appealing. I came home with three large scented pelargoniums and a baby peach tree (‘Reliance’) as well! More updates on that after it’s been planted.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 15th June 2024

I am determined to actually do this on the proper day this week, yes I am! The clear weather today after a week of thunderstorms (some of our friends had localized hail!) made it a very pleasant day for photography. Sadly, I will have to wait until next week to share whatever I pick up from the university seminar garden’s plant sale tomorrow. Did I mention I haven’t attended a garden event for almost two decades? I’m very excited.

1. Paeonia officinalis ‘Nordic Paradox’, the midsummer peony. Named so because it usually flowers around midsummer. Except, like the midsummer rose from last week, it has also started a bit early. These have a habit of shattering pretty fast, so they might very well be gone by midsummer this year.

2. Actinidia kolomikta, the variegated kiwi vine. For the longest time, I was worried that the white tips on this plant’s leaves were from sunburn or indicative of some other problem. Then I finally got around to looking it up and discovered it was just doing what it was supposed to do. This became more apparent as it grew larger and more obvious variegation appeared, rather than just the random few leaves we used to get.

3. Aquilegia atrata, dark columbine. These self-seed along the walls of our house and barn, and just about nowhere else. I love the dark wine coloration – they look almost chocolate-burgundy on dark days – so different from the pastel columbines I usually see in seed catalogues. I’ve seed-traded these with quite a few friends over the years. I’m considering growing other colors next year, but they would have to be positioned far away from these clumps so that they don’t get diluted.

4. Tragopogon porrifolius, salsify flowers. I planted these last spring and didn’t get around to harvesting them over the cold season, so now I’ve got a bunch of these cute purple flowers. The entire plant is still edible, so I will probably pull up a few later this week for dinner. If nothing else, I’ll be set for vegetable seed for a good long while.

5. Vitis vinifera ‘Zilga’. A nice juicing grape that I didn’t get around to cutting back earlier in spring. It has now gone wild and escaped through every opening in the greenhouse. I’ll have to give it a pruning next week so that it has more room to breathe.

6. Herbal tea tubs! I mentioned having lemon verbena for tea last week but didn’t show the other two herb tubs. The one on the left has Moroccan mint, strawberry mint, pineapple mint, grapefruit mint, and chocolate mint. The one on the right has lemon balm, sage, catmint, oregano and yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii).

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 8th June 2024

I had the photos taken for this post back on Saturday but wasn’t able to post until today. Still, I’m not ready to throw it out yet, since it’s not quite next week’s post yet! Just have to hang on for one more week, and then there will be much more free time to catch up on blogging stuff.

1. Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’, also known as the Midsummer Rose. Well, it used to be known as that but it might need renaming if weather patterns persist. The unseasonably summery conditions of May had this thing blooming an entire month earlier than it was supposed to. Of course, the flowers are welcome at any time, and I hope that it will continue blooming all summer since we’ve been getting a healthy amount of rain this month. As you can see, it is very overgrown and will need to be cut back after it’s finished flowering so that we can use that emergency ladder again.

2. This is a self-seeded lilac that landed in a perfect location on a sunny slope next to our swinging bench. I keep on questioning if I perhaps bought and planted it, and then forgot about it, but I’m pretty sure no such thing happened. It has grown to a very manageable height of 1 meter with a couple of sturdy trunks, where I would like it to stay, so I will try to groom it to look like a standard in the next few weeks. It does seem that the temperatures made this year’s lilac bloom period very short, which is unfortunate. They’re one of my favorite spring flowers.

3. Rhododendron ‘Helsinki University’ has offered one small set of blooms this year, which I wasn’t even expecting, given the neglected state of that part of the flower field. It’s my oldest rhodo and has been looking a little droopier than the others all this spring. The entire area needs a good weeding, mulching, and feeding still. Happily, the summer holiday is only a week away, then there will be much more time to give everything the care it deserves.

4. Just like last year, the spinach bolted! This might sound not so surprising to many people, but you have to understand that up until a couple of years ago, my spinach beds lasted for most of the summer. When you’re close enough to the Arctic Circle, bolting from warm spells isn’t something you usually worry about. Except… yeah. Here we are again. Looks like spinach is officially moved to autumn crop status now. This time, I wasted no time in harvesting every single plant right away. They were pureed and frozen, for future use in sauces and soups. The bed is now hosting a few rows of rainbow chard.

5. A visit to my favorite nursery resulted in a couple of new herbs I’d never seen before. I got them more out of curiosity than anything else, and am still trying to think of ways to use them. The one with the small thin leaves on the left is Olive Herb (Santolina rosemarinifolia ‘olivia’) and the one on the right with the fat glossy leaves is Mushroom herb (Rungia klossii). They both smell exactly how you’d expect, it’s so cool. Two lemon verbenas destined for tea-making round out this bucket.

6. Finally, a shot of my dicentras taking over the front steps. They are getting bigger and bigger every year, just as I’d hoped. Not shown, but there are more on the other side of that little pine on the right, too. They pretty much take over the entire area for a while in spring, before dying down when the heat gets to them.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 1st June 2024

Well, if today isn’t an auspicious date to begin this year’s SoS posts, I don’t know when is. Being mostly a garden blog, I went dormant last December when the polar nights of Finnish winter made it pretty much impossible to do anything else. I’d meant to start back up earlier when I started sowing vegetables in the snow in April, but various other spring projects (like participating in an amateur theater production) ended up taking precedence. Here we are at that perfect moment of late spring/early summer, though, when everything is fresh and growing, and I just have to share it with my fellow gardeners!

1. I am excited to announce that this is the first year I have been able to harvest from our asparagus bed. Both ‘Gijnlim’ from store-bought roots and ‘Mary Washington’ grown from seed are in this bed, so I have no way of telling which is which at this point. I only took the first four fat spears to pop up (sauteed in lemon and butter, served over toast), but am delighted to know that there will be a much larger harvest next spring. Perhaps even enough to share with the rest of the family…

2. The apple trees are in blossom! As are the plums and pears, but the apples are the biggest and most floriferous by far. The garden smells amazing right now. That’s the ‘White Transparent’, our oldest apple tree, in the photo. I love how the entire tree sounds like it’s buzzing, from all the insects gorging themselves on nectar. Hopefully, this will shape up to be a good year for fruit, since the usually fickle May weather has been warm and calm enough to keep them on the trees for a long time.

3. Forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica)! Not to be confused with blue-eyed Mary, which we have plenty of. These were winter sown in early 2023, then transplanted out to the flower field that spring, where they sat forgotten for a year. I didn’t realize that they were biennials so was puzzled as to why they never flowered. Well, they most definitely made up for it this year. They all opened overnight early this week and now there’s this pretty haze of light blue amongst the tulips that is very noticeable even from the road. I hope that they self-seed, so I won’t have to wait two years between flowers in the future.

4. First stinging nettle harvest. I used these youngest leaves to make a lovely cream soup with the last of our homegrown onions, parsley root and potatoes. As the plants grow, I snip off leaves every morning to mix with other fresh herbs for a pot of tea. It really helps my asthma and allergies!

5. Cheating a little, because I couldn’t resist putting in some photos from earlier this month when all the spring bulbs started popping up in the flower field. This was one of my major reasons for having a dedicated flower field in the first place. I only put in varieties that can naturalize, so they will hopefully spread and return for a bigger display next year.

6. The vegetable garden is 90% planted and sprouted. It should’ve been done by now, but the high temperatures burned up two beds worth of baby Chinese greens. They shall be replanted this weekend with the addition of sun protection tunnels.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 9th December 2023

I’ve been waiting later and later every Saturday before writing these posts, hoping that I might snap a picture of something that will make its way into the collection. It’s made a little difficult by the fact that I can only take pictures on the weekend since it is dark when I leave the house and dark when I come back during the week. Today’s sunrise was at 9.33 with sunset at 15.18, with usable light being something less than that. That’s still luxurious compared to the northern part of the country, though, where they saw their last sunset on November 25th and won’t see a sunrise until January 17th. Yep, for nearly two months, the newspaper just prints a date for sunrise instead of a specific time.

1. Snowy viburnum berries that the birds haven’t gotten to yet. They already polished off the ones on the older shrub, but this is a newer plant and the berries are kind of hidden by surrounding branches.

2. A bargain amaryllis I got with my spring bulb order. I think three stalks are coming out of it! Hopefully, it will bloom in time to be on the table for Christmas dinner. I wonder what color it will be?

3. Cascading cymbidiums blocking my view of the veg garden over the winter. One’s white and one’s light pink. They really *really* need repotting after they flower this spring, pretty sure I’m going to have to cut them out of those pots by then. They seem happy, though, so that’s good.

4. I always thought staghorn ferns were these dainty things, more difficult to care for than other plants. This one, however, barely asks a thing from me and is increasing in size so steadily that I’m starting to think it might need a bigger pot. It doesn’t seem to have any issues with the lower winter humidity, either, while the Boston fern next to it has once again started to shrivel. Mental note, humidifiers must be brought out this weekend!

5. A Tale of Two Pothos. These two pots are only separated by a few feet and receive the exact same care. The one on the left is a pot full of cuttings taken from the one on the right, which just up and shriveled last month. I need to take it down and figure out what to do with it since it looks like it’s not actually dead but just extremely unhappy. It is the first plant that I got in Finland, as a cutting from a friend when I moved here more than a dozen years ago. It has managed to come back from looking worse and having been horrendously neglected, so I’m still holding out hope.

6. Finally, the resident furbeasts. I might as well draw the angel wings and devil horns on these two. The one on the left is not interested in plants at all, barely leaves floor level unless it is to attain lap level, and just likes to keep us company. The one on the right is the reason all of my larger plants, fish, and other small animals reside in my office instead of the house.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 2nd December 2023

I was going to skip SoS this week since I’m still catching up on reading the last couple of weeks’ posts from everybody and didn’t think there was much to share out here other than more snow. Yet here I am again because I realized that I’ve never tried documenting winter in the garden before and even if I do nothing more than post pictures of the snow getting deeper, it’ll be useful for looking back on for next year. So here I am, with a garden that is growing a prolific layer of snow if nothing else! I also apologize to those of you who will get random late comments in the coming days.

1. We hit our lowest temperature so far this past Tuesday, -13°C. It might reach that again tonight, but it’s been mostly hovering in the -5°C range the rest of the time. I was going to walk around and see how the cutting garden was doing, but the snow was so deep that it started getting into my boots, so I’ll probably have to strap on snowshoes next week if the weather keeps up. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get good photos of animal tracks for next week at least!

2. A closeup of snowy plum trees.

3. Little feathered friends are constantly coming and going now that their favorite winter cafe is open for business. The first to arrive after a refill are usually the fearless tree sparrows (Passer montanus). There’s a family that builds its nest in the eaves above our front door every spring, so we hear cheeping babies whenever the door opens. They’re so used to us that I’m not surprised they don’t flinch at me coming over with a camera on the other side of the kitchen window.

4. After I stay still for a while, the great tits (Parus major) usually arrive in a mob and start pushing each other about because obviously, the seed that’s already in their friend’s mouth is always The Best One. One particularly cheeky one had a staredown with me for a good several seconds!

5. The shyest of the bunch are the blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). They’re also the smallest, so tend to get pushed around a bit in the frenzy. They manage to get in there when the others aren’t looking, though, and get their share. I also put up tallow balls on several of the trees, so that they have different places to eat if the main feeder is too crowded. I hope that we’ll get a few more different birds this year — I’ve seen one with a bit of red come by in past years but haven’t figured out what it is yet.

6. With darkness arriving by 4 PM, we’ve got plenty of hanging lanterns outside. The candles last two evenings if I time it right and look pretty flickering from various points in the night.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 25th November 2023

The snow I promised to photograph arrived this past week. Today was a clear and crisp and very brisk -7°C, so I crunched around outside in my biggest pair of boots to show you the current state of the garden.

1. Standard view of the veg garden, winter edition. The ground is frozen and it’s best to avoid disturbing the snow so it insulates what’s under it. If we get a normal to decent amount of snow this year, you will not be able to see the beds by March. I must strap on the snowshoes by that point, to avoid sinking hip-deep with each step. Any crops still out there (just the salsify and experimental lettuce) are on their own until spring melt.

2. The chunky Norway spruce which I would personally like to remove completely because it’s casting an awful lot of shade and most likely killing the nearby fruit trees. It’s not like we don’t have an entire forest of them already. The husband is fond of it, though, and even I must admit that this one has a particularly pleasing shape. Our compromise was that he would keep those bottom boughs trimmed so they allow a bit more light through and don’t keep thwapping everyone who walks past.

3. A limber young birch arching gracefully under its load of snow.

4. And we’re back inside again! I got this little olive tree a couple of years ago and it started putting on a good amount of growth this summer. I was very relieved since it lost a lot of leaves last winter when it came inside. This year, I put the grow lights closer to it and the leaves are looking much perkier. Now I just need to read up on how to prune this thing, since some of the branches are getting long.

5. Pelargoniums got brought in for the winter because I read somewhere they make good houseplants. I always thought of them as needing a lot more sun, but they seem to be growing well enough. With some luck, they will be big by spring and ready to flower when I put them out. Considering how slow they were to start as little plug plants last year, it’s worth a try.

6. Two Camellia sinensis that are overwintering in the kitchen. I hope to eventually plant these outside in a sheltered location with winter protection since they are supposedly hardy to zone 7. They seemed a bit too tiny to try that with this year, though.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!