Café Eloísa

Was a delightful pop-up restaurant to put up, the said delightfulness being heavily contested with it’s namesake Eloísa, my 1,5-year-old niece, who honoured us with her discerning presence. The weather was ideal, and we (myself and Samuli) found that we’d timed the event perfectly so the sun shined onto the terrace in Kumpula, Helsinki from exactly noon to five o’clock. All the food – quinoa, sauces, coffee and bread – went, and we raised over 80 euros to be donated Lastenklinikoiden Kummit ry. A big thank you to everyone – the bicycle gang, the army of prams and the guy with the scheming cat in a cage attached to the back of his bike – who made this hang out spread on the lawn, on the swings and the sandbox and far beyond what we expected.

 

As a gift, to enjoy today at home on a winters night, some recipes:

Quinoa

Rince, and boil for 15mins in the double the amount of water as there is quinoa.

Baba ganoush

Well known, with as many variations as there are recipes,

Slice aubergines (2 big ones), and roast them in the oven on both sides for 20-30mins until soft and slightly coloured. Remove skin, and mash into paste with a blender. Add tahini (2 ts), oil (2 ts), salt, leaf parsley and mix together. (feeds: not a lot of people, our lot from 5 aubergines, meant to feed 20, vanished within half an hour, feeding around 10 people)

Seca

Boil peeled and diced Swedes (1,5 kg) until soft, remove water (save it for later) and make into mash. Fry spinach (600g, should’ve been 1.5kg) in oil that you’ve just fried an onion in until soft. Add fried spinach and onion to swede-mash and blend together. Add coriander, salt, lime juice and pepper.

Asparagus mayonnaise

Make mayonnaise (Sami Garam’s recipe is simple as: eggs, mustard, salt, sugar, pepper, lemon juice/vinagre and oil in a tall jar – place hand blender carefully at the bottom, and mix at full speed. Keep doing so until all the oil from the top has been slowly sucked into the white paste at the bottom) using more eggs and less oil. Mash peeled and boiled asparaguses (from the can) and carefully add to the mayonnaise, keeping it airy. In the version with tuna, add one or two cans of (mashed) tuna to one can of asparagus. Chopped spring onions on top.

Buckwheat-carrot rieska

Boil ground buckwheat for 7 minutes, until it resembles porridge. Add grated carrots, some water and salt, and mix together. Pour mix onto an oven plate covered till the edges with baking paper, and make even (1cm-1.5cm thick). Cook in oven for c. 1h. Let cool before slicing into pieces for serving.

Toilet in tower

Rather than saying I had a dream, I’m going to say – like a mother-tongue Finnish speaker often does – I saw a dream about the WTC twin towers last night. Although I had conversations with surrounding people in the dream, the visuals of it were what made it worth writing about.

This is what I saw:

A new observation tower had been built on Ground Zero in NYC. It was made up of a thin concrete spire, the size of one or two elevator shafts, pendeling with elevators carrying around 5 people. The spire lead to a peculiar observation deck: It was made up of the top stories of both WTC towers, joined together at one of their four corners by a small bridge-like space, which served as the platform onto which people would move onto when getting off the elevators. The upper stories of the (former) two towers, both identical, were empty and very airy spaces with very large windows, and floors that tilted away into all directions from the central platform. The floors were thin, rather large slabs of smooth concrete that seemed to float solidly on top of the several hundred meters of air separating the deck from the street-level. The slabs were not joined together; where I expected to see the seams, there were long, thumb-wide crevasses through which you could see the city underneath your feet.

Although there seemed to be a strong wind blowing, and heavy occasional rain, the feeling in this strange, precarious bird’s nest was of gentle acrophobia. I didn’t seem to mind the fact that occasionally it felt as though you were dangerously walking on air, under an equally pseudo-inexistent steel-embroidered roof. Perhaps this was because I felt that I should make the most of it and stop worrying, I had after all paid to be up there and travelled to NYC with this as one of my ticks on the list. I recall there was a gift shop as well – can’t remember what I got from there if anything. Probably postcards. Or one of these stretched quarters that you could press yourself with a handle-operated machine. I think I’ve still got the one we made in 2000, when me and my family last visited NYC and it’s twin towers, because the queue at the Empire State building was too long (got to say, me and my sisters were disappointed that there wasn’t anyone selling Klav Kalash and crab juice at the WTC plaza. But we did test the toilets).

Can’t wait to travel there again later this year.