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Thursday, March 02, 2006

Lehtitaikinalevyja vs Voitaikinalevyja

The Finnish Dinner party. Or at least my version of it.

It's always exciting to have people over to dinner. But even more so when they are infrequent visitors so you really want to be nice to them.

So I got some Marimekko napkins, made my Malaysian chicken curry the night before (still not sure if it was chicken as turkey is branded Chicky and the label said something about suik which I thought meant pork as well as broiler which meant chicken... Anyway...) tidied up and then decided to bake.

Bake. Me. Until Martha Stewart went to jail, we had nothing in common. But because Finnish dinner means come over at 5.30 I never know if people eat at that time, or it's just a national myth, so I wanted to have something for people to snack on.

Inspired by Nina's snotty winter hankies, I wanted to make an Asian style pastry. I had the filler in mind (kidney beans fried in sesame oil and mashed with spiced spinach for those culinary minded) but the pastry was proving a little harder. Lehtitaikinalevyja or Voitaikinalevyja? I could only understand a small section of that word and I thought it meant China. They were too long to text it to a translating friend and too hard to say without laughing. The S Market woman in the freezer aisle didn't want to disturb her stacking to answer questions about a pastry I couldn't ask ("excuse me which one might be like a winter hankie and which is better for something Asian"). Nina helpfully told me that filo is filo in Finnish. I looked at the drawings on the packet and bought one of each.

And so a pastry was born, and generally scoffed, and the curry bowls were cleaned and a good time was had by all, particularly when I opened the dessert they had brought and stared, long hard and puzzled, at the brick of ice cream in a box and wondered not so much how to get it all out, but rather how to get it back in...

The ice cream and pastry boxes are not sitting in my windowsill to keep frozen...

Below: Jatta and Papu with the aforementioned leftover pastries. "Smile, smile like you like to eat them."

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