MÄMMI TIME!

Altough being stacked up in every store for the moment, it still seems I am in the minority of Finns actually rejoicing that mämmi season is here! Well at least if you ask my Facebook feed, that is. It is a short and sweet (and a bitter one, if we are being literal and going after that taste here) season, lasting only for a week or two around Easter. Once my parents did this thing though where they froze mämmi and had it for midsummer dessert. With  Christmas dishes for dinner. (It tasted wrong on so many leves, but was rather fun of course)

Traditionally meant as a dessert, I like to have my mämmi (or memma, as we say in Swedish) for breakfast. I buy the version without sugar that is somehow sweetened slowly by itself. Don't ask, can't explain how it's done. As I posted here some seasons before, I started having mine with fruit and quark instead of the traditional cream and sugar. So I can both piss off people by saying I actually like mämmi, or then the tradtionalists by having mine in new ways. However, this year I noticed a version selling mämmi with quark in a duo-pack, so it is not just me! Or, then it was because of me.

I think the quarks with lemon or vanilla flavours taste best with mämmi, which makes it somethng of a double-easter thing, as I think flavoured quarks tend to resemble pasha, which we also have for Easter,  in taste. Pasha is a dessert that is served in Eastern Orthodox countries but also in Finland (having been part of Russia for 109 years just up until our independece in 1917 there are both linguistic and culinaristic remnants from that time) and, is unlike mämmi, perhaps easier to like. Kind of like it tastes good without having to think about it twice. It has quark and butter and cream in it with fruit and nuts and you get about all the calories you need for a week to survive in one serving. (BRING IT ON!)

Mämmi is bought in carton boxes made to resemble the original birch bark bowls it was stored and served in back in ye olde days. The dish is made out of rye flour and malt and baked in the oven. So it has quite a lot of protein and fibres and keeps your stomach full and well-working. Even though do I like it could still be described as what disappointment tastes like, because as I kid you'd picture it was some kind of chocolate pudding and then BOOM it was so much not that. However, if you ever find ourself over here at this time of year I do urge you to try this only-in-Finland dish!

YOUR EASTER WITCH

Ok, perhaps not exactly. But suitably for a time of growth, flowers, resurrection and Easter witches Asko and I did a photoseries for my act Happily Ever After, which is something of a reversed Sleeping Beauty ghost story.

Photos by Asko Rantanen / Asko Jonathan Photography
Concept and muah by me.

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW - IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE

Four things right-right now.

The books above my head.

A cat in the after noon sunshine.

Reading the Egytptian Book of the Dead (but now I got distracted with a documentary on Marie Antoinette's coiffures.)

I want Mikael Hadreas pants.

As a side note; this was the first time I made a post in one sitting without moving anything else than my arms to take photos and grab the laptop. So now we know that!

EASTER BRANCHES - VAIHTOEHTO VITSALLE

(Half of the headline is indeed in Finnish in case you had to look twice. It gives the content of this post away.)

Easter is just around the corner and over here, if you have kids, it's time to decorate some branches!
(If you can find some, that is, as winter has lingered around longer than usual this year...)

The branches are for when the small ones go out "witching", which can be compared a bit to trick or treat on Halloween, altough here no tricks are involved, just wishing well for the year ahead.* Tradition is to decorate the branches with feathers, but I tend to go for animal-free options, and often just a make-do of what I happen to have in the cupboards at home. I just saw a pretty funny video from one of the big supermarket chains though, saying their feathers are a certified left over product from the food (=meat)  industry, which I think is good; to take as much as possible into use as long as it's there. But I'll stick to my alternatives anyway.

Here are some ideas -

Wrapping ribbon.

Folder paper...thingies. With more wrapping ribbon.

And pom-poms!
As the old wisdom goes: when in doubt, go for pom-poms.
Ok perhaps that was just made up right now but pretty sure it works.

I just got this idea to make bows out of chocolate bon-bon wrapping but that would mean I'd have to go trough a whole bag myself and...OK, it is so going to happen.

*) I've written a few sentences more on the tradition of small Easter witches, which combines both pagan and Orthodox believes, before; you can find it under my Easter-tag.