Cheesy oven sausages and baked potatoes

 

How are you all holding up? It seems like every day is the same and there is not much to do on the weekends apart from going on walks. We have now found fancy making a small campfire in the woods on our weekend walks. It’s quite nice to have a little break, light a warming fire and have snacks. We even bought a small axe for this purpose and it really is good fun. We’ve had a little bit snow and ice in Copenhagen this week, which is absolutely fantastic and all the lakes look so beautiful. It means we will soon be out and about today as well and just explore the icy city.

Before that I’ll make a quick food post. I made this very comforting dish of cheesy baked oven sausages with these newish vegan BBQ sausages. They were really good. The cheesy oven sausage is a classic 80s dish from my childhood, I just made a vegetarian version of it. I had cheesy baked potatoes, steamed brussels sprouts and salad on the side. It was a really nice winter dish and I can only recommend it.

 

Have a great weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

 

Finnish Christmas tarts

 

I baked Finnish Christmas or star tarts with puff pastry, but a less traditional version, as I used Finlandia marmelades as the filling, which traditionally is prune jam. I also made savoury tarts in the same shape with cheese and smoked paprika filling. Both versions were very tasty and disappeared in no time. This means I’ll have to make another batch closer to Christmas.

 

Your VegHog

 

Karjalanpiirakat

 

It’s Finland’s independence day today, so I’m again sharing my favourite Finnish pies with you. These are savoury Karelian pies or pastries. The filling is rice pudding and the crust is a mix of rye and wheat flours. The crust is very similar to a pizza dough, it’s just rolled out very thinly for these pies. In my childhood I often made these pies with my grandmother, so she taught me also the method of closing the dough in a pretty way on the top. I thought that these turned out really nice and I scoffed them all in no time. I also made some with potato mash filling, which are my partner’s favourites. 

 

Before baking

 

With potato filling

 

Your VegHog

 

Christmas porridge

It’s December and I have made a practice run of Finnish style rice pudding, which we also call Christmas porridge. The porridge is traditionally eaten with sugar and cinnamon and there is usually also a hidden almond. Whoever gets the almond on Christmas eve, can make a wish. This time I didn’t put an almond in. I cooked the rice in oat milk, so this is also a vegan version.

Are you getting prepared for Christmas? How will your Christmas be different this year? Are you anxious, happy or something else? I would like to hear a little bit about your feelings when we are going towards the festive season. For me Christmas this year will be very different. I have always spent Christmas at home in Finland, but this year I won’t be able to travel, so my partner and I will spend Christmas in Copenhagen. It will be just the two of us and no doubt it will be quite quiet and calm apart from a few video calls to family members. I will try to bring my Finnish Christmas traditions here as much as I can and we will make the best of it. 

Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

Fried potatoes with sausage

I got more of these excellent Snällkorv by Astrid och Aporna, when we visited Sweden again the other week. These are really nice juicy vegetarian sausages made from wheat gluten and soya. I also bought loads of other stuff there, which you will be seeing before long here on the blog. But now I felt like a veggie sausage dish.

For this dish I took inspiration from my childhood, from something that especially my father would frequently cook as a rather heavy evening snack: fried potatoes with fried sausage pieces. I of course made a vegetarian version of this dish, and added just some onions and garlic, salt and pepper, and fried the pre-boiled skin-on potatoes with the veggie sausage pieces. It was very nice grub for the winter.

This dish is also quite good for the cheap eats category, as I'm still trying to save some money when cooking. Actually veggie food isn't that expensive when you cook yourself, but sometimes I want to use just basic ingredients, and still make sure that there will be some protein in each dish. That reminds me that I want to write about the local vegetarian restaurant and café scene in Copenhagen soon. There are too many good options, so I'm only getting through them very slowly.

Your VegHog

Finnish Your Dinner

We held a small event in our shared courtyard yesterday, and invited our neighbours to come over to try some Finnish food. This was all because I saw on Friday that there was going to be a worldwide cooking event to celebrate Finland's approaching 100 years of independence by offering Finnish food to your friends and neighbours where ever you are. The independence day itself is on the 6th December, and last weekend it was 100 days until that day. The theme was "Dinner under the Finnish sky", and we actually got lucky and had a blue and white sky.

It was a bit of a short notice hearing about this two days before cooking, so I decided to keep it simple, and make just a couple of small snacks. I also made my own leaflets inviting the neighbours to the event.

I made three dishes for our Finnish Your Dinner event:

- Finnish potato pies, a dish that I've already shared here on several occassions. You can find the recipe here.

- Chanterelle tart, of course I had to use seasonal mushrooms, which are very popular to be used in Finland in this season.

- Kropsu, a thick oven pancake from my region, served with fresh blueberries and raspberries. I've also posted a Kropsu recipe before, which you can find here.

There was also of course homemade salty liquorice vodka accompanied by melancholic Finnish rock music to make the right atmosphere.

It was all very rustic and homely, just like Finland is. It was also nice to get to know some neighbours with this weird excuse. I was afraid that people would now think that I'm a bit odd, which is actually quite accurate in the end, so it doesn't really matter. Sometimes it's good to try to be social. I find Danish people very friendly and talkative in general, so it's nice to have small gatherings over here.

Have a nice week everyone!

Your VegHog

Chocolate and buttercream cake

Yes, a chocolate and buttercream cake or a failed Swiss roll with the same filling. Indeed I was planning to make a classic Finnish recipe for a chocolate Swiss roll with heavenly buttercream filling, but something happened. I didn't spread the dough widely enough for the baking, so I wasn't able to roll it like a Swiss roll in the end. However this quick cake conversion with the buttercream in the middle was also very tasty.

I have now twice failed to make this Swiss roll properly, as the first time when making it with a slightly different recipe, the dough stuck too much to my baking paper, making a bit messy looking roll. It was a roll, though. That was a couple of years ago, and I didn't post that recipe at all, and now this happened... I will try the proper Finnish classic again, one day I'll have to manage.

I am going to share this recipe here, and you can decide yourself, with which format you would like to go. I can actually recommend either. I probably just should have spread the buttercream slightly more thinly or cut another layer to the cake, but that's just my preference.

Chocolate and buttercream cake

Adapted from Valio's recipe

Ingredients

Dough

4 eggs

1,5 dl sugar

1 dl wheat flour

0,5 dl cocoa powder

1 tsp baking powder

Filling

100 g double cream

1 dl icing sugar

100 g butter

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Coconut flakes and sugar

Method

Make the dough first by whisking the eggs and the sugar into a foam. Combine the dry ingredients and add them through a sieve to the eggs and sugar. Spread the dough on a baking tray on baking paper.

Bake at 200 C for about 10 minutes or until done.

Turn it over on a baking sheet with spread coconut flakes and sugar and let cool.

For the filling, whisk the cream. Add the soft butter and sugar to it and mix into buttercream.

Then spread the cake with the buttercream and either roll into a Swiss roll, or make a simple cake like I did, and cut it to pieces.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Spaghetti Bolognese Bake

Suddenly I remembered a 1980s school dinner from Finnish schools, Spaghettipaistos, which is in essence a baked spaghetti bolognese. Of course the school version was quite stripped down version of mince meat in a tomato sauce baked with some spaghetti. However it wasn't bad and it got us filled. Finnish school dinners tend to be of good quality and quite versatile. We were always served a warm meal with salads and bread on the side. I'm not fond of everything that we were served, and will surely never again taste some of those dishes in my life, especially because many of them contained meat.

I was somewhat of an oddball as a teenager when I became a vegetarian in a quite meat-centric eating culture in a small town, but most people showed respect to my new eating habits. In the beginning I was mainly leaving off the meat, and didn't necessarily eat versatile enough, but I slowly read more about vegetarianism and got acquainted with lentils and other vegetarian essentials. Even at school I could get through fairly well with my new vegetarian diet.

Now back to today's recipe. As I remembered this Finnish classic, I wanted to make a vegetarian version of it, and also make it a bit more posh by making a proper vegetarian bolognese containing carrots and mushrooms as well. This dish turned out to be really nice, and it was also quite a huge portion. It would be good, if you have many eaters, or want to eat this on several days. I froze a part of this so that I can enjoy it later on a day when I'm too lazy to cook.

Do you have any special memories of school dinners, or have you cooked some at home for nostalgic reasons?

Spaghetti Bolognese Bake - Spaghettipaistos

Ingredients

½ cup dried soya mince

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

3 carrots

1 tbsp olive oil

100 g closed cup button mushrooms

500 g tomato passata

Fresh basil

Oregano

Salt to taste

Ground black pepper to taste

300 g spaghetti

150 g grated cheddar

Method

Cook the dried soya mince as per the packet instructions, or use fresh soya or quorn mince.

Chop the onion, garlic and carrots finely, and start cooking the onion in olive oil. Cook until soft and browned, and then add the carrots and after a while the garlic.

Slice the button mushrooms and also add them to the pan.

Then cover the veggies with tomato passata ans let simmer, until the flavours have blended nicely and the vegetables still have a nice texture.

In the meanwhile cook the spaghetti separately until al dente.

Season the sauce with basil, oregano, salt and black pepper.

Combine the sauce with the spaghetti and place them in an oven dish.

Cover with grated cheese and bake for about 20 minutes at 180 C until the cheese has melted and is golden brown.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

New Finnish veggie protein products + Blog anniversary

I try to get into a more regular posting schedule again this year, but as always the year has started hectically, so I must apologise for the more quiet period. Even my blog anniversary caught me by surprise. I was fully aware the whole time that it would be coming, but I just didn't have the time to prepare anything special for it, and then the day suddenly passed. However I'm thrilled to be blogging still and want to say a big thank you to all my readers, you really make it worthwhile! I'm really motivated for the new blogging year, I just need to schedule my time better, more coming soon!

Last year I wrote about a new Finnish protein product Pulled Oats. It has become a big hit product, and also at the same time vegetarian eating in general has started to interest people more in Finland, and vegetarian meals and meat substitutes are selling better than ever. I really hope that my home country will embrace a more vegetable based diet with the time, as many of the traditional dishes tend to be heavy and meat based. When I went to Finland over Christmas, I was happy to detect new veggie products that are also already trending. I tasted Härkis, a broad bean protein product and Mifu, a milk protein based product. Both are from the chilled counter and basically ready to go, which makes this sort of vegetarian cooking with more substance really easy.

Härkis, which I would translate as Broadie (the name is kind of a nickname for the Finnish word broad bean Härkäpapu), is mainly made from broad beans and pea protein. It’s pre-prepared and then chilled, so it only needs warming up and it can be just fried briefly or added to sauces towards the end. It comes in fairly large chunks and the texture is soft yet firm. This product is suitable for vegans. I made a tomato sauce with Härkis to go with nice vegetable pasta, and it was very tasty. The product is very easy to use and I can’t wait to experiment more with it (once I can get some again). I could imagine that it makes brilliant burgers and meatless balls.

The second new product is Mifu (see what they did there, milk + tofu maybe..?), granules made from milk protein. It’s very much like Finnish cottage cheese (which is drier and has more defined granules in comparison to the British equivalent) with the one difference that this product can be fried. It currently comes in three flavours: plain, Mediterranean tomato and Mexican pepper. These are all lactose free, but obviously only suitable for vegetarians and not vegans. I really like the grainy cottage cheese anyway and the fact that this can now be fried only makes it better. I made mixed vegetables in a pan with the plain Mifu and served it with potato mash. The Mifu really added something nice to the dish, and I can see it being very versatile in sauces, pasta dishes, soups, salads, anything. I really want to experiment more with this product as well.

Your VegHog

Brazil and macadamia nut buns

Any nutty baking is nice for Christmas, and these nutty buns are just perfect for it. These are slightly naughty with a buttery filling, but not too sweet and very hard to resist. My partner's colleagues seemed to clean these away as if there was no tomorrow. I'm sure that these are very pleasing for many different occasions.

I adapted my nut bun recipe from the Pähkinäpullat recipe that I found in a Finnish magazine Kotiliesi. These could be vegan buns, if you don't use butter for the dough and filling.

This recipe makes about 12 buns.

Brazil and macadamia nut buns

Ingredients

Bun dough:

250 ml hazelnut milk

2 tbsp dry yeast

1 egg

1 dl sugar

½ tbsp vanilla sugar

½ tbsp ground green cardamom seeds

1 tsp salt

7 dl wheat flour

100 g butter or margarine

Filling:

1 dl macadamia nuts

1 dl brazil nuts

50 g butter or margarine

½ dl sugar

1 egg for brushing

Method

Mix the dry yest with the lukewarm hazelnut milk and then mix in the other dough ingredients. Let the dough rise for at least 30 minutes.

Prepare the filling by chopping the nuts into coarse pieces. Mix the soft butter or margarine with the sugar.

Roll the bun dough out, about 2-3 cm thick and spread the filling onto it. Roll the dough and cut into pieces. Place the pieces into muffin cases and let rise for further 15 minutes under a tea towel.

Brush the buns with egg and bake at 250 C for about 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog