While I've just gone drowsy / Kun minusta vain tuli raukea

Drowsiness of long, rainy days. The summer before—and the one before that and the one before that—was hot and dry, endless buckets of water to the vegetable garden, endless trips to lakes to dip in the cool water, endless days of sunshine. This summer I've thought I'm in a novel by Garcia Márquez, mold spreading from the corners of the tub I bought to cool down in on too hot days that never came, water pouring down from rooftops, damp wood in the stove. I'm already used to wearing thick woolen socks and yellow rubber boots, to covering myself with my yellow raincoat when I go outside to do the dishes or pick strawberries. Like in one hundred years of solitude, rain has become something that simply is. I bake cookies and drink endless cups of tea, read a book and see from the kitchen window how the forest draws closer when I don't weed tree saplings and lupines. Roses, bluebells, hays, tansies, thistles, all kind of flowers and bushes and trees, they have all gone wild, wild, while I've just gone drowsy. Rain fills my head with an heavy emptiness.

What I managed to do yesterday, however, except for not finding the murderer before Poirot, was to gather bunches of meadowsweet in the rain. Most of them I'll use later to dye wool, but some five litres of flowers I'm going to make into a drink today. I thought the recipe would be something like this,

Meadowsweet drink

2,5 litres meadowsweet flowers, buds are fine too
5 litres water
500 g sugar
25 g citric acid


Bring water and sugar to boil and pour the liquid on flowers. Let it sit over night. Sieve and add the citric acid. Bottle and store in a cool place.


Or, if I'd rather make it sima-like, then this,

Meadowsweet sima

5 litres water
1 liter meadowsweet flowers
1-2 lemons
400 g sugar
a pea-size clod of yeast


Rinse the flowers and leave them in a big pot. Peel the lemon and slice it on the top of flowers. Bring water to boil and pour on flowers and lemon slices. Add sugar. Let it cool until handwarm and add yeast. Let it brew approximately for 24 hours, then sieve and bottle. Store in a cool place.

Pitkien sateisten päivien uneliaisuus. Viime kesä—ja kesä sitä ennen ja sitä ennen—oli kuuma ja kuiva, loputtomia ämpärillisiä vettä kasvimaalle, loputtomia matkoja järvelle kastautumaan viileään veteen, loputon auringonpaiste. Tänä kesänä on tuntunut kuin olisin Garcia Márquezin romaanissa, home leviää paljun nurkista kuin ivaten ajatustani viilentyä siinä kuumina kesäpäivinä, joita ei koskaan tullut, vesi valuu katoilta, polttopuut ovat aina hieman kosteita. En enää kummastele, että vedän jalkaani paksut harmaat villasukat vielä heinäkuussa, kun menen ulos tiskaamaan tai poimimaan mansikoita vedän jalkaani keltaiset kumisaappaat ja niskaani keltaisen sadetakin. Niin kuin sadassa vuodessa yksinäisyyttä, sateesta on tullut jotakin, joka vain on. Leivon pikkuleipiä ja juon loputtomia kuppeja teetä, luen kirjoja ja näen keittiön ikkunasta, kuinka metsä lähestyy kun en jaksa kitkeä puidentaimia ja lupiineja. Ruusut, sinikellot, heinät, pietaryrtit, ohdakkeet, kaiken maailman kukat ja pensaat ja puut, kaikki ovat villiintyneet, villiintyneet, kun minusta on vain tullut raukea. Sade täyttää pään raskaalla tyhjyydellä.


Kaikesta huolimatta onnistuin eilen, sen lisäksi etten keksinyt murhaajaa ennen Poirotia, keräämään sateessa kimpuittain mesiangervoa. Suurimman osan niputin ja laitoin roikkumaan puutarhamajaan jotta värjään niillä myöhemmin villaa, mutta viitisen litraa kukkia jätin juomaan, jonka aion tehdä tänään. Ajattelin, että se voisi olla jotakin tällaista:


Mesiangervojuoma

2,5 l mesiangervonkukkia, myös nuppuisia
5 l vettä
500 g sokeria
25 g sitruunahappoa

Kiehauta vesi ja sokeri ja kaada huuhdeltujen kukkien päälle. Anna seistä yön yli. Siivilöi ja lisää sitruunahappo. Pullota ja säilytä viileässä.


Tai jos enemmän simankaltainen juoma, niin sitten näin:

Mesiangervosima


5 l vettä
1 l mesiangervonkukkia
1-2 sitruunaa
400 g sokeria
herneenkokoinen pallura hiivaa

Huuhdo kukkaset ja laita kuorittujen, viipaloitujen sitruunoiden kanssa suureen kattilaan. Kiehauta vesi ja kaada kukkien päälle. Lisää sokeri. Anna jäähtyä, kunnes se on kädenlämpöistä, ja lisää hiiva. Anna käydä noin vuorokauden ajan, siivilöi ja pullota. Säilytä viileässä.

Welcome, dandelions!

The first dandelions are rising their wrinkled heads. When I approach my vegetable garden in May, I sigh in deep despair when I see dandelions, persistently sprouting everywhere and apparently planning to occupy all the carefully nurtured, fertile soil. Like this very individual. She's bound to die.

But, outside my tiny vegetable patch, I love them. Their leaves are excellent salad and tasty in soups, and they clean your liver when drunk as infusion. Dandelion roots I am to thank for dissolving my gallstones. For real. They should be gathered either in early spring or late autumn, cleaned, chopped and dried. For two weeks you drink a big pot of dandelion root tea the first thing in the morning—preferably with dandelion leaves, calendula, yarrow, peppermint and nettle—and don't eat for an hour or two afterwards. Dandelion root increases the amount of gall and slowly helps you to rid yourself of the stones.

And they taste even worse than they look.

Dandelion flowers, again, have this awesome, honey-like taste. They can be used in salads, but as they are usually full of those tiny black insects, they lose their shape and prettiness before you manage to get rid of the bugs. That doesn't matter, though, when you brew sima, a Finnish spring mead, as you can give the bugs hours to leave the flowers (if you stir the flowers once in a while, they evacuate themselves faster). Recommended to do outside, though.

Dandelion mead

2,5 l      dandelions
5 l         water
1 dl       molasses
4 1/2 dl sugar
1           lemon
1/4 tsp  yeast

In bottles
1/2 tsp sugar
4-5      raisins

Gather dandelion flowers when it's sunny (otherwise they tend to be half closed). After removing the bugs, bring flowers and water to boil and let simmer for 15 minutes. Add molasses, sugar and rinsed and sliced lemon. Let it cool until handwarm and add the yeast. Ferment for approximately 24 hours (that is, just leave it to be). Sieve and bottle: add a dash of sugar and a few raisins on the bottom of the bottle and then pour the liquid over them. Put the bottles in a fridge. Your mead is ready when the raisins rise to the surface.

Kvass vs. sima

I like kvass, the Russian bread-based beverage.

The first time I tasted it was on Olkhon island at lake Baikal. I was coming home from Cambodia by train. Probably my memories are clouded with the fact that it was the most memorable travel I've ever done. In reality, the kvass may have not tasted that good. It was home-made and I remember it was yeasty and a bit cloudy, not at all how a good kvass should be. But I had just gone to a banya and had a dip in the (cold-cold) lake Baikal and was surrounded by these untamed Siberian hills and cliffs... I fell in love with kvass as well as with Siberia.

While living in Estonia I had quite unlimited options of different kinds of kvass, which in Estonian is called kali (like Finnish kalja). But moving back to Finland, I returned to a sad kvass-vacuum. I simply had to start brewing it myself.

I've mainly used this recipe, although there's too much yeast in relation to too little sugar. Once, I think, the yeast actually ate all of the sugar, and the result was surprisingly sour. A half teaspoon of yeast should be enough. Another time I used Finnish style rye bread instead of Russian style  ̶  which is often baked in a tin and closer to our archipelago style bread  ̶  and the result was like drinking jälkiuunileipä (a kind of semi-hard sour rye bread). I've spiced kvass with winter spices like cinnamon, cardamon, ginger and cloves; I've spiced it with fresh mint; at times I've thrown in whatever comes to mind. Once a friend actually went through the trouble of preparing and baking a mash of rye flour and malt for the base  ̶  it was awesome.

But kvass takes a lot of bread compared to how much of the ready beverage you get, and you have to know that you have time to sieve and prepare it the next morning and then bottle it the next evening  ̶  and quite often I don't know if I will  ̶  and then there's all the leftover mash that you simply have to bake to a bread, as otherwise it would be a terrible waste, so you have to know you have time for that too...

Not very surprisingly, I only brew kvass for very special occasions and have turned to much simpler mead-kind of drinks instead.


Sima is a Finnish spring mead. I have to admit I've never followed the basic recipe with only lemon and brown sugar to give it taste. My favourite is sima with dandelion flowers, as they give the beverage a wonderfully soft, honey-like taste. For some reason I'm convinced that lemon balm would make a perfect base, too, although just one glass would certainly make one quite sleepy. For that experiment I have to wait until the end of the summer, but nettle beer and spruce beer I can already try in May. (The latter I first heard of in Jane Austen's Emma: it happens to be a favourite of both Emma and Mr. Knightley.)

But, as my favourite spiced tea this spring has been decaf green tea with cardamon and clove, I begun the brewing season by turning some of it into sima. Doesn't look especially tasty yet, but we'll see in few days how it'll turn out. Hopefully it'll be ready just for the general birthday party on Saturday.

Voikukat ♥

En ole koskaan erityisen iloinen, kun kasvimaalla ei keväällä näy muuten taimen taimea, mutta voikukat kyllä nostelevat päitään. Niiden kukista on kuitenkin paljon iloa! Vielä viikko sitten mietin, mitä tähän aikaan vuodesta voisi hillota, kun puuronpäällishillot alkavat loppua kaapeista, kunnes välähti. Tein äsken voikukkasiirappia noin suunnilleen tällä ohjeella:

Laita irrallisia voikukan kukintoja (tai irti nypittyjä kelta-valkoisia kukkia) kattilaan, peitä vedellä, anna kiehua 15-30 minuuttia. Siivilöi, huuhtele kattila, kaada neste takaisin ja anna veden haihtua muutaman tunnin ajan hellan alimmalla lämmöllä. Kun kyllästyt odottamiseen: mittaa 2 dl nestettä, lisää siihen 450 g sokeria, kaada kattilaan ja lämmitä nestettä hämmentäen niin että sokeri sulaa. Älä kiehauta, ja jos sokerin sulaminen kestää kauan kannattaa nesteeseen lisätä 2-3 ruokalusikallista sokeroimatonta voikukkanestettä. (Lopun nesteen voi pakastaa tai siirapoida saman tien, mutta mulle jäi sopivasti juuri tuo 2 dl. Tuli puoli litraa valmista siirappia.)

Ja huomenna aion panna simaa näin:

2,5 l voikukkia
5 l vettä
1 dl  siirappia
4 1/2 dl sokeria
1 1/2 dl sitruunaa
1/4 tl hiivaa

Pulloihin
1/2 tl sokeria
1 rkl rusinoita

Kerää voikukan kukat puhtaalta kasvupaikalta aurinkoisella säällä. Kiehauta isossa kattilassa vesi ja kukat, anna keitoksen porista hiljalleen noin 15 minuuttia. Lisää siirappi, sokeri ja pesty, kuorittu ja viipaloitu sitruuna. Anna seoksen jäähtyä kädenlämpöiseksi ja liuota joukkoon hiiva (1/4 tl). Anna juoman käydä runsas vuorokausi. Siivilöi ja pullota juoma. Pane pestyjen pullojen pohjalle ripaus sokeria ja muutama rusina. Nosta pullot kylmään. Sima on valmista, kun rusinat nousevat pintaan.