Eat Simply, Eat Well

Healthy recipes & tips to help you live the good life. by Ann Plough

Streat Helsinki 2015: a week-long festival of FOOD

March 23, 2015 by aplough

Oh Helsinki, you sure know how to put on a food festival, never mind the weather. 

The Senate Square was the perfect location for nearly 40 food trucks.
This delicious pulled pork sandwich on potato bread was courtesy of Kellohalli restaurant at Teurastamo.
The weather at the beginning of the week was so promising: warm, calm, clear.

My head is so full of new food ideas, memories of new flavors, thoughts leading back to a week full of inspiring discussions around food – in particular, Street Food.

Streat Helsinki – celebrating Street Food from all over the world, all week long – has just ended.

Thanks to Timo Santala and the entire team for a truly enjoyable heart-warming and belly-filling event!  I have so much to think about, so many new ideas to process, so many new recipes brewing inside my mind.  I’m looking forward to the continued discussion this year, and to the return of Streat Festival in 12 months.

Chanterelle Bacon Burger from Kantarellkungen, Stockholm, Sweden (Sunday’s fare)

The week kicked off for me on Monday evening at Kellohalli in Teurastamo (the site of the old meat factories in Helsinki; now the home of several really great, new restaurants) with discussions around the possibilities for street food in Helsinki, regulations, and what street food can, should, and will look like. Certainly there are obvious challenges in Helsinki given the fact that this place is chilly 7 months out of the year, but if we can pull of a successful Streat Festival in the freezing cold winds at the end of March, I have no doubt these ambitious and resourceful people can work further miracles.

This food truck made me smile.

Tuesday we enjoyed a presentation giving by a couple of entrepreneurial women who are pushing the envelope on street food in Berlin: Kavita Melu as the organizer of a new, modern street food concept in at Markthalle Neun in Berlin; and Susan Choi, an entrepreneur driving a successful food business under the memorable name of Mr. Susan. Lots of great ideas there – and I’m feeling the urge to book a flight to Berlin to eat my way through the available options: hand-pulled ramen noodles in particular seem like a must-have in the near future!

How good does that look?  Time for a trip to Berlin…

On Wednesday evening we enjoyed the brilliance of Sami Tallberg and his brave, bold treatment of local and seasonal ingredients: from red cabbage marinated in a fennel seed & mustard vinaigrette topped with dill, to roasted celery root delivered under two sauces: a brown sauce with smoked pike roe and toasted sunflower seeds and a brown sauce served with dried buttermilk and a few other delicious ingredients which I forgot as soon as I started eating because the flavors were so incredible. Thank you, Sami, for showing us what is possible with the ingredients in our own back yard!  That panna cotta with local berry, rose petals and bee pollen was so memorable, I can almost taste it now, as I type.

Sami (left) and team creating the first sampling.  Love his enthusiasm!
This dessert was amazing – this was taken before the final touch of bee pollen.

Thursday brought San Francisco to our doorstep as Geetika Agrawal from La Cocina, the incubator for food companies and organizers of a local street food festival came and talked to us about how they are enabling women entrepreneurs in particular to create a food business and support their families at the same time by providing the commercial kitchen spaces required for production; the financing required to get a business up and running; and the coaching that helps the entrepreneurs to create a viable business.  I have great respect for this new kind of impact investing through food entrepreneurship, and I am still dreaming of attending their street festival to enjoy the fruits of their labors myself.  Very, very impressive.

Slide from presentation; La Cocina Food Incubator, San Francisco

Friday and Saturday were full of other things that life brought our way, but on Sunday we joined the fun in the center with 67 food trucks around the Havis Amanda statue and in the Senate Square to taste the food on offer.  We started with a delicious Chanterelle Bacon Burger brought all the way from Stockholm by Kantarellkungen.

dining at Morton’s
Ham, Sauerkraut and quick dill pickles from Morton Restaurant (Sunday)

continued with a slice of ham and homemade sauerkraut from Morton Restaurant Helsinki, and then we topped off the lunch time meat fest with Beef Goulash cooked for hours and hours in an old German war-time wood-fired soup vat and served in a bread bowl.

Beef Goulash served in a crispy bread bowl – one of my favorite foods all week!
The lean, mean, goulash cooking machine

Bellies full and fingers freezing, we did the only logical thing and wandered off to find ourselves a good cup of coffee.  Kunst Coffee from Russia really delivered with a sampling of their cool, refreshing and bubbly Kunst Soda coffee made with Ethiopia Deri Kochoa, Guji Sidamo, Li Czhi from China, honey from Udmurtia and harvested near Sarapul and a few drops of lemon juice.  After savoring that for a few minutes, we followed the suggestion of the smiling ladies at the stand and sampled the lemon cream hot coffee – a truly surprising, special, belly-warming beverage.  I’d like to have another one today…and tomorrow…and frequently thereafter.  These two are doing things truly unique with coffee – a welcome change off the standard lattes, espressos and pour-overs.  Well done!

The brains and talent behind Kunst Coffee; that tall bottle holds the secret sauce: lemon cream.

 

We wrapped up the day with a Spanish hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla, and then scurried on home to escape the freezing winds, fully content.  As I said, I am already looking forward to next year!

So put this on your calendars:  Third week in March, 2016, Helsinki, for the Streat Festival.  You don’t want to miss it again. If you want to follow what’s happening in the food scene in Helsinki in general, follow the Facebook page, Lisää ruokakultuuria Helsinkiin, mostly in Finnish.

Here’s what I’m hoping for next year:

  • warmer weather (one can always hope!)
  • more vegetarian & healthy options (meat was really nearly everywhere)
  • more dessert trucks (Brooklyn Cafe held their own, here)
Until then, eat simply, eat well, eat happy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Sweet Potato Finnish Flatbread aka. Bataattirieska

January 26, 2015 by aplough

Sweet Potato Finnish Flatbread.  Mysteriously, there are already a few missing…

I know my last post was about sweet potatoes too.  I know.  But I had a hankering for a nice, soft, warm bread today, and rieska, a Finnish flatbread, came to mind.  Rieska is an unleavened flatbread made with barley flour and/or rye flour for a very thin bread that looks similar to crisp bread but is not dried completely; or in the case of perunarieska, with white potatoes that have been cooked and then mashed (a great way to use up your leftovers) for a thicker, softer, slightly smaller flatbread.

I didn’t want white potatoes and I didn’t want the white flour that is typically added to rieska nowadays either, so I decided that it was a fine day for a Finnish flatbread makeover to make these beloved treats a little healthier.

With a sweet potato staring up at me from the countertop, waiting to be used, the choice was obvious as to what could be swapped in for the standard spud: Sweet Potato Finnish Flatbread was born.

It’s easy.  It’s fast.  You can serve it up in all the places when you would use naan, soft flour tortillas (though these are a lot thicker than your standard tortilla), or if you have made rieska before, than definitely try this recipe instead. You can use rieska to make an open face sandwich; use it as a pizza base; serve it warm with a little butter alongside a light soup or salad, or, instead of making the larger version in the photos, make small ones and cover them with different toppings for an appetizer or party food (hello again, Super Bowl fans).

Keeping with my theme of trading up ingredients for their healthier cousins, I went back to the roots of the traditional Finnish flatbread and used whole grain barley flour instead of standard white flour and
reduced the sugar to one teaspoon (some recipes call for up to 1/2 cup!!!) – the sweet potato is nice and sweet on its own, so you could probably skip that too.  I used olive oil instead of the butter only because I didn’t want to melt butter, but either option is fine.

Boil the chunks of sweet potato; drain & mash. Add egg & oil.  Dump in flour and its friends.  Stir well with spatula to combine.  Bake.  Wait briefly.  Begin piling on your toppings of choice.

Today we topped the warm Finnish flatbreads with cold smoked salmon a.k.a. gravlax; a little plain yogurt with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, and some fresh alfalfa sprouts.  Perfection.  Go crazy.  Make a big pile.  They freeze really well, and all of your friends will want seconds anyway.

Finnish flatbread topped with cold-smoked salmon, lemon yogurt and alfalfa sprouts

Sweet Potato Finnish Flatbread a.k.a. Bataattirieska

1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large egg
1 teaspoon coconut sugar, Indian sugar, maple syrup or liquid honey (optional)
4 dl / 1.5 cups whole grain barley flour or whole wheat flour
1.5 teaspoons salt
1.5 teaspoons baking powder

Put the sweet potato cubes into a small pot and cover them completely with water.  Bring the pot to a boil; reduce the heat to a steady simmer, and cook the sweet potatoes until they are tender when poked with a fork; 15-20 minutes. Remove from heat; drain; set aside to cool.

Heat the oven to 200°C/400°F.

In a large bowl, beat together the egg, oil, and your choice of sweetener if using. In a small bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking powder.

Mash the sweet potato until it is smooth.  Measure 2 cups / 5 dl of sweet potato mash into the bowl containing the egg and oil mixture (save any remaining sweet potato for another use).  Whisk the sweet potato – egg mixture with a fork to combine.  Add the flour mixture, and using a spatula, fold and stir the mixture until the flour is fully incorporated.  Let the dough rest 10 minutes.

Spoon the dough out into 12 equal portions onto two parchment-lined baking trays.  Sprinkle flour over the top of each mound of dough.  Using heavily floured hands, pat each dough mound out into an even circle.  Poke each circle with the tines of a fork to make holes.

Bake for 15 – 18 minutes or until nicely browned.

Makes 12 flatbreads

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Roasted Sweet Potato Fries and Salsa Yogurt Dip

January 21, 2015 by aplough

Roasted Sweet Potato Fries and Salsa Yogurt Dip

I know this is old news for those of you who care about (American) Football, but the Seattle Seahawks are on their way to the Super Bowl for the second time in two years.  Woohoo!  Go Seattle!  Go Hawks!

Actually, I don’t really care that much about following football or any other spectator sport for that matter; however there is something different about a big game that carries big dreams and big hopes with it.  The Super Bowl.  For professional football players, winning the Super Bowl is the culmination of years and years of dreams and practice and sacrifice and hard work to get a chance to carry, kick and throw a beautifully shaped pigskin (by the way footballs never were made of pigskin) to victory, proving to themselves that it was all worth it.

It’s no different, really, than the striving of any individual to reach the peak of their chosen endeavor – whether it be in sports, art, medicine, engineering, teaching, business – anything that someone is passionate enough about to want to do well.  In his best-selling book The Outliers Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours it takes to become an expert.  Consider that there are 168 hours in every week, 8,736 hours in a year; 2912 of which, per doctors’ orders, we should be sleeping.  If during that remaining 5,824 hours, we are doing something other than working on the thing we are passionate about, it is perhaps safe to assume that no more than roughly 6 hours per day on average would be focused working toward the goal of being expert in our chosen subject, or 2,184 hours per year. That means that if we are really focused and really going for it on average 42 hours every week, it would take us roughly 4.5 years from today to become the expert we want to be in anything.

Roasted Sweet Potato Fries and Salsa Yogurt Dip

Is there anything you spend that much time on?  I love the subject of food and health and how good food is only one component in a healthy lifestyle; and some weeks I do indeed spend 42 hours working on learning more about it.  But life happens too.  We have other obligations.  We get distracted.  Our focus slips. We may lose sight of the goal. For these football players (and other young prodigies), they have become experts over 20+ years of practice while going to school, being kids, growing up, figuring out who they are.  That they were focused enough (or in some cases their parents were) to channel their energies primarily toward a single goal is remarkable.

Why do so many people watch sports?  Follow every game?  Cheer on their chosen team?  Feel, alongside of the players, both the pain of defeat and the exultation of victory?  It’s because anybody who has really put their heart and soul into become excellent is, when given the chance to to exhibit that excellence, a reminder to all of us of what a human being is capable of.  There is a video series on YouTube called People are Awesome.  It shows people performing athletic tricks that would sound impossible on paper, but which have been made possible through practice and determination and an unwillingness to give up when things get tough. It is, indeed, pretty darn awesome.

But for me, it’s even more awesome to watch the brave, 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai become the youngest person in the world to receive a Nobel Peace Prize or to see young entrepreneurs, who heard plenty of “no ways” and “it’s not possibles”, who went ahead anyway to follow their dream and create the companies that provide excellent products and services that the make life easier and more enjoyable for the rest of us.

The thing is, we all can be excellent at what we want to do; but for most of people, “pretty good” is satisfying enough; allows us to lead a comfortable life; gets us home to our families on time; allows us to live in a place we like with a lifestyle we enjoy.  That’s OK.  As Brene Brown has said, there is nothing wrong with wanting a good, ordinary life.  That doesn’t stop us, though, from enjoying the victory of a top performer in any field, and being grateful for the inspiration that they can all give us; for pulling humankind just one step further forward into what we are all capable of, even if it’s only by proxy.

If you follow the game on Feb 1, 2015, as you cheer for your team and your favorite player(s), and feel the emotional ebb and flow that comes with every play and point, enjoy as well the reminder that people are awesome, and that includes you.

In his book The Dip Seth Godin talks about what it means to be the best in the world, and about the “extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick).”  It doesn’t, he asserts, mean being better than everyone else in the entire world at what you do.  It can also mean being the best in your world at what you do: your family, peer group, business, neighborhood, city, state.  It means making a commitment to your own excellence, and continuing to deliver on promises you make to yourself, it means not giving up just because because you are stressed out in the moment, but it also means being brave enough to quit when where you are is on a path that leads to nowhere.

As you mull that over and get geared up to enjoy the game, you may be needing a few snacks.  Or if, like me, you’ll skip the game to focus on something else, you may still need snacks.  I’ll tempt you with an alternative that doesn’t include deep frying, and which your most awesome nutritional advisor would love.

Roasted Sweet Potato Fries and Salsa Yogurt Dip

Roasted Sweet Potato Fries and Salsa Yogurt Dip

1 large sweet potato
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground Chipotle powder
1 teaspoon smoked ground paprika
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup low-fat Greek or Turkish yogurt
3/4 cup hot salsa

Preheat oven to 200°C/400°F

Scrub the outside of the sweet potato well to remove any dirt.  Leave the skin on.  Cut the sweet potato into slim sticks.  In a bowl, combine the oil, cumin, chipotle powder, smoked paprika and salt.  Add the sweet potato pieces and toss well to coat them thoroughly.  Spread the sweet potatoes out on a parchment covered baking sheet.  Place into the hot oven and bake for 20 minutes, flipping the sweet potatoes once, halfway through.  Check for doneness:  they should be crisp on the outside and tender in the middle.  Remove from oven and serve with the Salsa Yogurt Dip.

To make the Salsa Yogurt Dip, pour the salsa and yogurt into a bowl and stir well to combine.  If you’d like the dip to be even spicier, add a little Sriracha or hot sauce.

Serves 4-6 as a snack.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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