This week seems a bit slow somehow,  post-Easter blues maybe?



Also I called Dad to wish him Happy Birthday. A month early. So now I'm obviously thinking I have early onset Alzheimer's.

Also I can't find a bag of pitta bread anywhere. I know I had one in the bread basket and it's gone. Either the mouse who sometimes visits our breadbasket has taken the whole unopened bag this time or, well, early onset Alzheimer's.

Anyway. What was I saying?

No point wallowing in negativity when you can also cook. So I whizzed together a quick dill pesto. If dill doesn't make you happy then I don't know what will.

I did a scrummy little filo tart. Which brings me onto a lunch on Sunday with a friend in the Real Greek in Shepherds Bush Westfields. They put the calories of each of the dishes on the menu. WHY? It's cruel. It's so unhelpful to anyone who wants to enjoy their lunch, but maybe helpful if someone doesn't, but wants to obsess about calories and eat carrots. Because a lot of the nice stuff like filo filled with feta was loads of calories and all the stupid stuff like crudites was reasonable calories. Like crudites 47 vs taramosalata abt 1000 kcal. How is that even possible, It's just fish roe for Poseidon's sake.

My fun when growing up was to draw family trees of Greek Gods, instead of hanging out in town with the cool kids because they had no understanding of Greek mythology.

Who would go to a restaurant and order crudites. Really. If you do, find help,

Anything with filo was around a 1000 kcal. And this whole fat math finally got me to choose some stupid green bean fava at less than 200 kcal instead of the probably awesome taramasalata.

And I think my friend liked the sound of the Greek Sundae for dessert, but after 6 shared mezze and several glasses of white wine the 1200 kcal sounded a bit much.

This little filo tart is probably not Weight Watchers approved either, but filled with healthy fresh stuff, tastes pretty awesome and not crazy on the calorie front. It would make a stylish starter or evening snack with a crisp glass of bubbly or white wine. Husband and I just had it as an after gym snack.

Dill pesto

1 - 1 1/5 cup (one big bunch) of fresh dill
1/4 - 1/3 cup of oil (I had half olive half vegetable)
1/3 cup grated parmesan
2 tbsp of pine nuts, pistachios or almonds
1 garlic clove
zest and juice of half a lemon
salt
pepper

Put everything in a blender and blitz until smooth. You can use less or more oil depending on what you are going to use it for and how thick or thin you like it (or you).

Smoked salmon, feta and dill pesto filo tart

1 pack of filo pastry
Oil
2 - 3 tbsp dill pesto
200g warm smoked salmon
1 courgette
1/2 red onion
2 spring onions
80 g feta
fresh dill

For fish in this I used a lovely flame smoked (hot not cold smoked) salmon, but you could use any salmon, also cold smoked, or even poached or baked.

Preheat the oven to 200C

Lightly oil a wide baking tray or pie dish. Layer 5 sheets of feta on the tray. Proper filo usage calls for brushing each layer with melted butter, but if you want a reasonably healthy weeknight meal just spread the shop-bought sheets on the tray and it'll be just fine.

Add the dill pesto on top of the filo and spread evenly.

Slice the red onion and courgette very thinly and chop the spring onion finely. Break the salmon into pieces with your fingers and drop on the filo, sprinkle on the onions and courgette slices. Crumble the feta on top and place in the oven.

Bake until filo is brown and crispy at the sides, about 15-20 minutes. Garnish with fresh chopped dill and serve with mixed salad.

Have you ever tried Finn crisps? They are fantastic, thin, sour dough rye crackers or crispbreads. From Finland obviously. They are nothing like Ryvita. Ryvita is giving crispbreads a bad name, I think. Ryvita is probably the world's worst crispbread. If Carlsberg made crispbreads, they definitely wouldn't do Ryvita. It's like cardboard, not even crisp really, just wafery and sawdustlike. Ryvita is your frumpy aunt Edith in her pleated skirt on a rainy day in Hemel Hempstead and Finn Crisps are Gisele Bündchen in a polka dot bikini playing beach volley on Copacabana. Get it? Totally different.


Finn Crisps are dense and hard and the taste is intensely sour. They make stylish hors d'oeuvres with smoked salmon or caviar, they can be used to make a pastry base for a savoury tart or as breadcrumbs to top baked dishes.

They are also the ultimate little evening snack and a great way to delude yourself. They are so thin that they hardly have any calories in them and because they are so small and narrow anything you can pile on them is of debatable calorific value as well. And you only eat one at a time. You never make a big plateful of these. So they are perfect for dieting.


You take one cracker and slather it with butter. No need for silly low-fat margarine, because you're only having one small cracker. Good covering of proper artery clogging animal fat is what you need here. After all you don't want to go all crazy with the health business and end up a dried up bony old witch. Then you add on some cheese very precisely covering the cracker, no overhang but nothing left uncovered either. Emmental or gruyere will be perfect, but any cheese you like really, as long as it's hard and fatty. Put away the Philly Light with Chives immediately, you can have that with your Ryvita whenever you want to add that little touch of depression into your Monday. You then slice cucumber or tomato and place on top.

If you want to go all fancypants you can also sprinkle some fresh herbs on.*

Then you put the butter and cheese and tomatoes back to fridge and go to the living room to enjoy your snack in front of TV. You eat your Finn Crisp in front of the TV in 25 seconds, decide you should have another, go to kitchen, take butter, cheese and tomato from fridge and make yourself another. Again things go back to fridge and you go back to TV. This lovely sour cracker cycle will continue until you've had 12 of them (you only do this when you are home alone). You go back one last time, now only take half a cracker and just put butter on top and stuff it in your face there by the fridge. You have burned off some of the calories by the relentless activity between each cracker, but in the end you have hoovered half of the daily energy requirement for an average adult.

They work well with cold cuts also, like a bit of salami on top. However greasy your topping, don’t ever leave out butter. It is the essential glue to keep the cracker and topping together.

Like I said they are also great for cooking – I made a cracker crusted salmon for our #FishFriday dinner this week and I will be sharing some more recipes, but I will need to get more crackers because I ate all that were left in the pack after the 6 I needed for my salmon fillets. Here in UK you can find these in most bigger supermarkets, Waitrose stock them and so do H&B and other healthfood shops.


In this Hapankorppupestolohi (hapan = sour, korppu = cracker, pesto = pesto (!) lohi = salmon) the crackers are used as breadcrumbs. Some recipes cover the salmon with a thin layer of Dijon mustard instead of the pesto and then the sour cracker pieces are placed on top. I first had this quite a few years ago on a skiing weekend with my sister and brother. We’d hired a cabin on top of a ski slope, which was great, every morning we’d just jump on our skis and down we went. And in the evenings my sister cooked us all nice dinners. That was before I learned to love cooking, so she was fully in charge. I helped with chopping or mainly just hung out with her in the kitchen with a glass of wine in hand. One evening she made this salmon and if was amazing.




I thought I had bought normal salmon fillets, but realized I had accidentally taken lightly smoked ones. But actually that worked really well, so use normal salmon or lightly smoked, both work beautifully in this recipe. You can use shop bought pesto. But I made my own, because I wanted to get some healthy rocket and watercress into our meal.

Watercress, spinach and Rocket pesto recipe

120g bag of watercress, rocket and spinach leaves
100g parmesan
Handfull of basil leaves (optional, I didn't have any)
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/3 cup olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
Pinch of salt


Blitz the parmesan chunk in a blender to crumbs, add the rest of the ingredients and blend well until smooth.

Finn Crisp sour cracker and pesto salmon recipe

4 fillets of salmon (or you can have a nice whole side if you have many eaters)
1/3 - 1/2 cup of pesto (or a couple of generous tablespoons per fillet)
lemon juice
salt
papper
6 Finn Crisp crackers

Heat oven to 200C.

Break the Finn Crisps into crumbs. You can try your food processor, mine wasn't able to crack these, so I put them in a plastic bag and hammered with my meat mallet.

Remove any bones from salmon, sprinkle with salt (if using smoked fish don't add salt, as they are already seasoned) and pepper and squeeze some lemon juice on top. Spread pesto on the fillet and cover with the cracker crumbs.

Bake for 15 minutes or until the fish is done depending on the thickness of the salmon. I served it with watercress salad topped with some of the pesto, roasted broccoli and steamed new potatoes.


*I don't think Aino in Vähäkyrö, Finland, much bothered with chopped basil as she in 1868 accidentally created the crispbread when her sourdough rye bread went wrong in the masonry oven. She forgot to prick the bread with a fork before baking and the bread went all hollow. Husband Väinö came home from the field where he'd been ploughing away with his Finnhorse Toijala. Aino gave Väinö the bread and asked him to take it to the stables for Toijala, it wasn't fit for human consumption. But Väinö was a frugal man and Aino was not a great cook, so the food waste levels were up as it was. Väinö demanded they eat the bread themselves. They immediately realised how amazing it was with freshly churned butter and patented the production process. They became Finland's first Crispbread millionaires. Väinö invested in some cooking lessons for Aino in the Kerkko Rämssi cookery school. Toijala was allowed to retire and he became quite the celebrity. A town was named after him albeit a very small and boring town, but a town that was an important railway junction and has the world's largest Mämmi factory. 

Finnish and Scandinavian Cuisine is not just about smoking, but smoke definitely features as I have mentioned. When we go back home for summer holidays and visit my siblings and parents in their respective summer houses by the gentle, quiet lakes or the sea we are often treated to beautiful, freshly smoked fish - salmon, trout, arctic char, vendace, whitefish or common bream.

It’s a taste and smell that immediately transports me to summer and Finland from wherever I may be. And this is the time of year I really start missing it. The nights there are getting whiter, the birch trees are bright green and people are escaping the towns every weekend.

After midsummer the country shuts down for an entire month when everyone just relaxes in their summer cabins heating their saunas, swimming in the lakes, where the water is pure enough to drink if you don’t mind a few bugs, reading old paperbacks in their hammocks, playing darts and barbecuing and smoking fish like there’s no tomorrow.

They also do other things and most Finnish babies are born nine months later in March or April. In our family the share of summer holiday babies is 60%, me included.