 Tervet to Loa and Kristen who's our Finnish representative Kristen is that correct? Thank goodness. I'm glad you're here. We're going to do Finland. We're going to Open face sandwiches which my fabulous volunteers have made they are gorgeous Which is simply rye crisp sort of bread or bread topped with cottage cheese and veggies We're going to have fish stew It will be white potatoes with white onions and milk and white fish And I'll demonstrate a little bit of the stew Kristen our Finnish person Heritage made the pool of bread and then we have lingonberry jam and rye cookies with caraway And can you imagine rye cookies with caraway are delicious? Oh my gosh? They are so good you will love to have those recipes this week and and I drove to Elkhart Lake to visit Pirka who runs the Nordic Accents gift shop in Elkhart Lake for 30 years, and she's from Finland and she said to us She likes to go back to Finland to visit her family, but she's not going to go this year. She's afraid of the Russians Yeah, because and Oh, yeah another part because then of course there's the winter war for Finland 1939 Russia did to Finland exactly what they're doing to the Ukraine All right, we have geography for books. We have cookbooks Kristen Plucer from the Art Center has a Finnish background So I asked her all the Finnish words, and she knows a couple a very few Finnish words my mom's side of the family is Finnish American and my grandparents are first-generation Finnish Americans and grew up speaking Finnish in the home My mom did not of course she could understand a little bit, but she wasn't encouraged to speak Finnish It was you know in American. Yeah But when I did travel to Finland when I was in my 20s because I wanted to be back and you know the old country And I could say and puhutko Suomea and puhue Suomea, which means I don't speak Finnish Yeah, puhutko and glantia, which means do you speak English? But because I look pretty finished. Yeah A lot of people would not they kind of they didn't really think that I was being honest Maybe I don't know a lot of really weird looks like oh, you don't speak Finnish That's I was in Finland for about a month, but my mom's is a Lutvilla and From northern Minnesota, so she comes from a small Minnesota Finnish American community. It's a little town called Tamarack. It's just west of Duluth a couple of hours north Yeah in sort of like a wetland with Tamarack Forest, so it's beautiful up there. It's a beautiful area, but most of the people in Tamarack There's about 65 people that live there now our Finnish From and most of them are probably related to each other They have a tiny little Lutheran church with no running water. You have to use the outhouse when you're there And they have someone who comes through about once a month, you know, and I went once with my parents and I was like Oh, I'm related to like 75% of the people here Of course Tied, you know kind of close community But when we were growing up the when Marilyn and I were talking about food for today The things I remember mom cooking at home, which were you know from her background were Moeca, which is finished stew. So that's why we came up with the color Moeca is fish stew My brother and I probably didn't like fish and soup very much because kids don't but so we had a lot of venison Moeca reindeer Dear me never had reindeer But Moeca is actually a Finnish American word So if you went to Finland and you were gonna order fish stew It's a different word for it. Moeca is something distinctly Finnish American and not related to Finnish from Finland. So so we grew up with Moeca and Pula bread Visiting it's the Scandinavian cardamom bread. And so it's got a different name in each Scandinavian country It's pretty much the same thing everywhere but at least in mom's family on Sundays and other times of the Week you go visiting right? So yeah Sunday afternoon I imagine everyone's trying to visit everyone else. So no one's home and some Right, they have little notepads outside. Yeah, right. They do on the door frame. Yep But it would be coffee with Pula So there's a pool of making day of the week where you know My grandmother would make bread and then when you visit you get coffee and you always get bakery to go with it Just like and you have coffee about six times a day So you have coffee with breakfast you have coffee in between of breakfast and lunch you have coffee at lunch You have coffee in between lunch and supper you have coffee at supper and then you have coffee before you go to bed So there's like six times a day like it is a coffee culture No, Kristen, I bought finished coffee at the gift shop in Elkhart Lake and we have it today and it is very gentle mild coffee And my grandparents always had a pot on the stove and I'd say probably with the stew My grandpa grew up in a family of 13 children Wow, and his father was from Finland and they live rural Minnesota quite poor and so They would eat whatever they could hunt or fish or trap or grow in the garden. So it was you know Whatever would go in the stew? Ah, yes with the with the potatoes The story on December the 13th with the teenagers serving the grandparents and so on the Candlelet That's sweet. I didn't grow up with that No, I had read about that. Yeah, it may maybe something that's done, but yeah, it's not a tradition Oh, yeah, that's a Swedish thing I think And Finnish is not like Swedish or Norwegian Finnish is a completely different language related to the Hungarian language Would you turn off the stove? Turn off the stove But I do I wore my Shaking a little non sisu is that one of those untranslatable words in another Culture so sisu is a word that in Finland. It's generally understood to be guts or determination so That's like a Finnish thing like if you have sisu you have guts. I've also read That it could be somewhat Ethnological so I watch out for it because it Determination in the face of repeated failure is also You just keep ramming at something even if you fail at it, but you'll just keep on going But I also since I'm a tattooed person I see right you are Is very like I'm close to that side of the family so I had sisu tattooed on my arm with some folk art Style art around it in order to just kind of remember, you know, where Nice very nice I have another question coming, but I'm going to tell a little story first My daughter Diane who lives in California and her partner Amanda they live out there And Amanda grew up in northern Illinois and she is a gift for languages for whatever reason But she spent a whole year in high school a school year in high school studying in Finland with a family and she tells the story the day she got there the family Greeted her at Helsinki Airport. They took her home. They had a nice big family meal soon as it was finished They all went outside. They went to the sauna. They all took off their clothes and Amanda said Okay, and she did the sauna When we lived on the farm in Minnesota until I was six the neighbor Mr. Berg There was a sauna this outside of his house now He never used it, but mr. Bugaman who lived there before used that sauna Well, mr. Berg just used it for storing logs And as a little kid when they talked about this the bath. I didn't comprehend a Bath, where's the water? But I was five years old. How would I know? Yes, and you with the sauna They made beautiful tapered beeswax candles to sell at the Christmas market So I went and worked for them for a month and where they had their candle making factory They there were other artists and designers with studios in that building and they had a sauna for the entire building And so my friend I was just too shy You were the odd man out As soon as you have your own bill you also have to have your When I see people's sounders here, they're usually beautiful, right? They've got Cedar line. Oh, yeah Yeah And my side of the family Get it hot It was very much like here we are and here's our outbuilding and this is Thank you Kristen, thank you. Let's start I'm turning them the fire on I have potatoes and onions and butter in here We have the big pot of fish stew in the kitchen and I have a piece of walleye and I'm going to skin this We start at the end and of course when you watch them on TV All they have to do is hold on to it and you pull this off That doesn't work with crap You have to keep cutting it and of course into this fish stew the recipe is potatoes onions fish some seasoning some Slurry to make it thick and milk So it's a nice white Gentle soup and this is walleye any kind of a white fish and I know Kristen said how about salmon and I said I Don't think salmon so she got the walleye, which is great and do we have any? You know what in there? Yep And I tried with tweezers and I discovered that doesn't work very well This is a boneless piece of fish. That's good and cut up into some pieces and You can see how carefully you have to do this and measure it carefully Put the fish in there When I was I was cutting up the fish last night and it took a while and no odor whatsoever, so you know that is fresh walleye No, I could smell fish a little bit, but that was wonderful and of course If you have a cat they would love this wouldn't they our son and his And his wife and the two grandsons their cat had died They purchased a Maine Coon cat Anybody know what that is that they grow to this be the size of a cock or spaniel, but it's a cat But I understand it's a gentle loving cat. Well, they ordered it and Picked it up close to Chicago and the cat Leroy had just come in In November probably the last it was born in November but came Here when he was four months old to Chicago the last plane out of Russia. He was yeah, right, right? so they have Leroy a nice nice cat a Very nice cat and of course they know enough to hold on to the tail and the paws and the whiskers as a kitten So that the cat will be used to that last night they started with a harness and of course Go Leroy did much care for that, but they kept feeding him and that was fine because mainly he's interested in food right now he's growing and And he's trained him to come with a clicker as a little kitten that's great A long one. Oh, you think you're Manx? Yeah, he does have a nice long tail I'm putting a little bit of flour into this and some boiled potato water and You know because you've all been cooking for a long time You never use warm water when you're trying to get the gravy or the white sauce to thicken right? Because you will have just lumps and nothing else now. We'll turn this up a little bit next month in April we're doing bananas So we'll do flaming bananas foster on banana ice cream and You don't find banana ice cream very often It was my grandfather's favorite of all, but he was born in 1889 and The only fruit that ever came in in the northern or in Minnesota were the bananas on the train So there in that part of Minnesota banana ice cream was very common So and he loved bananas, especially bananas that were overripe and mushy and He lived to be 102 and he drank lots of weak Scandinavian coffee Half a cup of coffee with half a cup of cream and we'll do the Torstones Which is the plantain that looks like a banana and we'll mash it and make little fried patties and then we will make Banana pancakes remember Faith Gruber. She's coming back to help. This is Faith Gruber's recipe a mashed banana With an egg and you make it onto a pancake. That's it two ingredients. Oh my that tastes great Oh, I have another spoon Christine want to taste it It's just a little bitty piece Yes, I know I hope the big pot is that good We'll add this to the big pot. Okay. Let me pull this out Let me disconnect and so far I have not tripped on the cord Yes, and and last time they were telling me to check the outlet check the out No, no, no. Well, they were absent the kitchen staff was absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong Yes Yes, and an extremely high standard of living and I think the best education system in the world And is it Finland or is it Sweden? No, no Switzerland that pays their teachers the same as airline pilots and physicians and Funny how that works out so well, right? Yes, what a surprise The lady from the gift shop insisted that I have this sugar for the pool of bread Well, Kristen didn't have it at home. So we're taking some out and we're just going to and it sort of looks like Pretend snow, but it's it's sugar. Yes And the Belgian oh, is it even bigger than this Well, there isn't much in this world that I don't like I must tell you And the lingonberries and when you taste these you will think that they're cranberries I read some of the one of some of the cookbooks of a sweet Finnish woman who lives in the United States and she uses cranberries And they do taste alike our open-faced sandwiches It's that Crispy cracker bread because that's easy to make and then I mixed together drained cottage cheese and cream cheese just to make it not so wet and it would spread better because we're making these ahead of time and Then we have carrots and radishes and egg and parsley and green onion all sorts of things on them And when you see the pictures of these Open-faced sandwiches and any of the Scandinavian company countries They put lots of toppings on it Can you bring the fish stew, please? You're gonna be impressed by that We purposely put it into this pot instead of a nesco because this will be much more entertaining than a nesco In here I have onions potatoes butter and then that's slurry and then um fish Look at that Vicki did you see Vicki's outfit? She put this together from St. Vincent Yep, and then you know Ryan Sorenson is going to be doing a German cooking class for us And that'll work for that one also I'm sure in Finland and in Germany. They could tell the difference, but we here in Sheboygan cannot and it just You see it is just white white fish white onions white potatoes and milk And let's put this flavorful one in there also. I Didn't think you needed to watch me peel potatoes or slice onions. I think you don't need to learn that You already know that Okay, then we need some servers with gloves Any questions Wasn't a lot of making demo in front of you today, but there will be in Bananas and there will be in I'm thinking depending upon them how the mayor decides to do his German cooking class Okay, and I would say You know somebody can use a ladle of this and the other person can use this half That works great, and I think we'll start at this end Bring your plate, and we'll have the open-face sandwich the soup the pool of bread The pool of bread the lingonberry and the surprise caraway rye cookies