jenni's Open Salon Blog

Rice Porridge

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:04:15 -0400

Rice porridge is a very traditional Scandinavian food. It is also incredibly versatile. It is traditionally served as the last course of the Christmas meal. When I was in elementary school in Finland the school cook would make rice porridge for the last meal before Christmas break. She would put one or two almonds in the porridge, whoever found the almonds in their bowls had to sing a Christmas carol for the cook. There are lots of variations throughout Scandinavia to what it means to find the almond. In some places finding the almond indicates that you'll get married in the next year, or that you'll have good luck.

Besides being a holiday food rice porridge is also commonly eaten for any of the three daily meals. It can be topped with fresh fruit, fruit preserves, jam, cinnamon or just a little bit of butter and sugar. I really like it with berry pudding. And since the ingredients are just rice, milk, butter, and salt its also a very economical food.

Coming up immigrants in recession time America

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:04:02 -0400

Growing up a foreigner in America is an indescribable thing. It has a way of steeping your perspective in comparisons and what ifs. You learn to be at first, overly defensive of the culture you came from, then you reject it to embrace American culture, then you go back again, until finally you settle into a kind of limbo when you realize that you don't fully fit into either world at all. Your reality and the way you perceive it are unique to yourself and others like you, other immigrants. So experiencing the recession as an immigrant is affected by that fact. I think it has been been more shocking for many people who came to this country to better their lives that it could have happened at all. So many of us foolishly believed that the America of our imaginations was impervious to defeat of any kind.

I was at my parent's house a week ago to visit my mom. My dad was out of town working, like he always is. I was sitting at the kitchen table when I happened to see mail from a debt counseling service. It was addressed to my mother, whose credit card debt is substantial. Added to this, her and my dad have also taken out two loans against their house, which they owe much much more on than they paid for it. They also have another houses worth of debt in hospital bills thanks to my dad accidentally burning almost a third of his body only a year and a half before my mom broke her wrist and their insurance company decided to drop them.

Ever since I saw that piece of paper I can't stop thinking about the path that their lives have taken since coming to the United States a little over ten years ago. We were miserably poor when we arrived, like a lot of immigrants. We slept in the office space of a factory that an uncle of mine owned, all five of us in one room. My parents had taken out a loan shortly before leaving Finland and lost every penny in a matter of months just paying for the necesseties; school supplies, vaccinations, clothing, etc. With another loan, handed down clothing, borrowed furniture and piece of shit Astro van we managed to crawl up in the world enough to move into a house in a modest neighborhood in a town a little south of Orlando, FL that was for lack of a better more accurate term, crawling with white trash. Instead of a desk my sister had a plastic lawn furniture table. There was no dining room table, no bed frames, just mattresses on the floors in the bedrooms. If I had been older than my eleven years of age I might have realized why my grandmother cried herself to sleep every night when she came to visit us.

My parents worked hard, harder than you might think a person can survive working, sometimes twelve to sixteen hour days, often at least six days a week. They worked for my uncle who would eventually screw them over and leave us with nothing, again.

Somehow, by some grace or some miracle, my parents made it. They built a life for us from scraps, from what seems like nothing in retrospect. They moved from Florida to Georgia and started their own business.

My parents worked hard, even harder than I had always seen them work. Eventually they were able to buy a house, a nice house. They bought cars, redecorated, remodeled, took vacations. Their business was successful. They bought into the American dream the way everyone else in America was buying into the American dream in the late nineties and early 21st centuries; by buying stuff. They bought a Cadillac Escalade instead of a Chevrolet Suburban, my mom ordered jewelry from QVC and HSN, we got iPods, digital cameras, XBoxes, Playstations, Nikes, American Eagle clothing, laptops, PC's, and it felt like we had arrived. We belonged because we bought the same things everyone else bought, wore the same brands, kept up with the same shows. But most of all we consumed, we shopped, we bought, we consumed.

And then the stockmarket took a nosedive. And all of a sudden there was no money for the American Express, the Visa, the mortgage. But the buying didn't stop. It was like the packages in the mail, the new video game for my little brother, the new blouse, or the new couch would provide the answer, like the American dream could be revived. My parents' debt mounted, their income dwindled. The buying finally stopped.

I had known for a time that my parents were in a tough financial situation. My dad confided the seriousness of it all with me on a rare occasion when I got to spend time with him on the road when he was working. Without providing any specific numbers he told me he would work every day until he died and he would never pay back what he owed. I think my heart broke when he told me that, I have never met another person who works as hard as my dad or is more selfless about it. That was about a month before I sat in my mother's kitchen and happened to glimpse a piece of paper revealing the staggering credit card debt she has accumulated over the last ten years. Much of it necessary, unavoidable, trips to Finland to meet my oldest brother's twin boys, school supplies. But so much of it accumulated from an effort to buy the feeling that we belonged in America.

I think about the path that my parents lives have taken and I wonder how it could have been different. But at the same time I know that it couldn't have been different because it was the same path so many people's lives took in America. They bought stuff to feel like their lives meant something, or meant the things they wanted them to mean.

And now my parents, who've aged twenty years in half that time from sheer physical exertion and exhaustion, are close to having nothing, again. The hope, the faith, the force of will that brought them from nothing to something to everything failed to provide them with protection from the recession and their bubble burst along with everyone elses. And even though it has been profoundly saddening to watch the hopes of so many Americans disappointed, and to see my own family so badly beaten by this recession, America for me is still a place where hope always has a place.

Homemade doughnuts, ooh la laa! Recipe included.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:04:41 -0400

When I was growing up in Finland, me and my older sister, Julia, would visit our grandmother the next town over. Our mom would drop us off at the train station and our grandma would pick us up at her end.

Visits to grandma's were especially fun when it was just me and my sister. Grandma would let us make forts out of blankets and chairs, put make-up on, and help her bake. One of the tastiest treats she made was homemade doughnuts. My sister helped her with the dough, I was allowed to powder the doughnuts. I used the same recipe she always used to make homemade doughnuts for a cook-out I was invited to. The recipe is a little more labor intensive than some doughnut recipes, the dough is made, leavened, shaped and the leavened again, but it makes for the most deliciously fluffy doughnuts. They were a huge hit at the cookout.

Deep frying, though somewhat intimidating, is easy if the necessary precautions are taken and you let the oil come to the correct temperature over medium, not high, heat. For doughnuts you need oil at about 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you reach that temperature, you reduce the heat. I keep the lid to the pot I'm using close by in case the oil cathces fire. A good slotted spoon with a long sturdy handle is also a must, I like using a wire mesh spider spoon with a wooden handle. You only want to fry a few doughnuts at a time, if you put too many in at once you'll bring down the temperature of the oil. The temperature is important because if the oil is too cool the doughnuts will absorb too much oil. If the oil is too hot the doughnuts brown too quickly and the center will be undercooked.

This recipe is given in the metric system, since it is Finnish, most volumetric cup measures also have mililiters (ml). The metric system is actually very simple. Each 100 ml is equal to 1 dl, and it takes 10 dl (or 1000ml) to make 1 liter.

For doughnuts you need

5 dl of milk

2 packets of dry active yeast

1 egg

1 and 1/2 dl sugar

2 tsps salt

15 dl all purpose flour

1 and 1/2 stick of butter

for frying;

about 10 dl of oil

Make the dough

1. Take the eggs and butter out and let them get to room temperature at least two hours before baking.

2. Warm the milk to about 100 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix in the yeast with a fork until it dissolves.

3.Add the egg, sugar and salt and mix well.

4. Start adding the flour, first using a wooden spoon, and finally kneading with your hands. Leave about 2 dl of the flour aside in case you need them toward the end and for when you shape the doughnuts.

5. Add the softened butter.

6. Keep kneeding the dough, add flour if the dough is not coming off the sides of the bowl. If you use a freestanding mixer eliminate about 2 or 3 dl of the flour.

7. Cover the evenly kneeded dough and let it leaven until it doubles in size. This will take at least 45 minutes to an hour.

8. Scrape the dough out of the mixing bowl with a plastic spatula onto a floured surface. Divide it into four parts. Roll the pieces under your hands into a long tube and then cut into small 1 and 1/2 inch pieces. Take the small pieces inbetween your hands and roll them into rounds. Let them leaven for another thirty minutes.

9. You can leave the doughnuts as rounds or push a hole in them and then spin the round into a doughnut with your fingers right before frying them. Test the oil with a small piece of dough. It should turn brown in about 1 minute. Fry 2 or 3 doughnuts at a time turning them once they turn brown on the sunken side. Set fried doughnuts on top of paper towels to drain and roll around on plate with sugar or powdered sugar while still hot.

Blueberry Bonanza!

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 19:04:07 -0400

April in Georgia is a funny thing. It typically brings the last frosts, the first scorchers, and piles of pollen. If you've never been to the south it might be hard for you to appreciate just how muggy and humid it is. The air is so thick it weighs heavy in your lungs and the pollen that literally coats everything with a fine yellow sheen just makes you feel all the more sluggish. Sweet tea was invented for this kind of weather.

April is also the perfect time to use blueberries. They start ripening as the weather gets warmer in the summer months on the east coast which reduces their price at the super market. I like baking with blueberries because their tart and sweet taste freshens up things like muffins or cheesecake. Instead of regular blueberry muffins I made blueberry coffee cake muffins which turned out incredibly moist and tender. The blueberry cheesecake was a recipe I found in a Splenda cook book which made each serving only 100 calories but lost none of the deliciousness you expect from a cheesecake. Blueberries are also excellent in parfaits, oatmeal, salads, with icecream or blended into a smoothie. Besides being tasty blueberries also have a slew of health benefits. They are loaded with antioxidants and are more effective at treating UTI's than cranberry juice, according to some studies.

Rye bread, easier to make than to deal with my mother

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:03:38 -0400

Homemade rye bread is one of the main reasons I took an interest in baking. This staple of the Finnish diet is as coveted by Finnish immigrants as sunlight and American clothing are by the Finns still in Finland. It's essentially impossible to find rye bread in the States that is anywhere close to the kind of rye bread you get in Finland. In fact, when my family moved to the States for the second time when I was ten (we had moved here for four years when I was a year old and then moved back to Finland) two of my biggest culture shocks were the lack of rye bread, and the frequency with which people expressed affection for each other (the Finns are a somewhat colder bunch).

The difficult thing about baking rye bread is the fact that you have to have either a piece of rye bread or a piece of dough from a leavened rye bread dough to make the starter with. Each batch of rye bread builds on the last batch with the aroma, flavor and texture improving with each generation. For the first batch of bread my mother actually had to get her mom to smuggle a few pieces of genuine Finnish rye bread to the States. The starter has to leaven for 24 hours and the dough has to leaven for another hour to two hours. The starter needs close attention and the dough is sensitive to over kneeding.

The other difficult thing about baking rye bread is that my mom is the keeper of the root piece of dough from the last batch, so to learn how to bake it I had to venture home to the land of a thousand judgmental jibes (that color makes you look fat) and endless guilt trips (I haven't rested since your brother was born) etc. Don't get me wrong, I love my mother, she is what one friend gently described as a 'battle axe' of a woman. She is meaner than Joan Rivers and crazier than Joan Crawford. In short, she is a bitch. She's had to be. She's been a mom since she was sixteen, emigrated three times, buried her dad when she was younger than I am now, and endured countless hardships to ensure a good life for her children. She deserves the respect she demands. She also, however, could probably use some well deserved mood regulators. Her tempermental nature makes being around her feel like you're a character in a zombie movie, just when you think you're safe you hear the piercing scream of a woman that is hungry for your blood. The first day, when we made the starter, everything seemed like it would be okay, a few jibes about how I'm not mean enough to my boyfriend, how I don't visit enough, how I'm too skinny (a month ago she was worried all the baking would make me fat) just the usual stuff. The second day we make the actual dough and I'm reminded of why I don't visit enough. Sparks flew as we made wild accusations to each other about who ruined whose life. We were able to put our differences aside because the dough had leavened and it was time to bake.

The loaves came out of the oven smelling wonderful, nothing smells better than fresh baked bread. And as tedious as the process had been, it was worth it.