Crayfish Party

This is how the party looked like before sunset and before we lit all the candles. 

Checked and Soup

All items from the previous post checked. A very special moment for this blogger. I still have some garden path weeding to do, but it will happen. Eventually.

The party was great and the starter a success. Here's the recipe of Beetroot Blue Cheese Soup:

Firstly, sow the beetroot seeds in May. Secondly, water, tend and love your plot over late May, June, July, August and early September. Thirdly, uproot your beloved roots. Then wash them and cut the tails and napes of the stems. For the soup you will need:

750 grams of beetroots
2 red onions
2 apples (small and sour Finnish kind of apples)
2 cubes of vegetable broth
1,5 tea spoons of black pepper
2 table spoons of vinegar (mine was raspberry vinegar, but only because I had to happen it in stock. You can use lemon juice instead as well)
2 table spoons of honey
1 litre of water

Boil the above for 40 minutes until the beetroots are soft. This was the base for the soup I made a day early.

App. 45 minutes before the guests came I did blend the soup down smooth and added:

3 dl of cream
150 grams of blue cheese

Stir the soup until cheese has melted. Mind you, that in this point the soup is easy to burn from the bottom and therefore the soup pot needs to rest on a very low heat, if not stirred. Check the salt. I did not add any, but your taste might be different from mine. Finally serve the soup with a bit of parsley as garnish and see your guests enjoy the beauty of rich red beetroot velvet in front of their hungry eyes.

Eve

Friday is the eve of the party. There are so many things to do for the reason, that today was not a good day. I did not do all the tasks I intended, and you know why - I was busy procrastinating. However, I managed to take some baby steps and I try to be grateful for those. I prepared the place cards, put all the shoes away and cleared the table tops.

Tomorrow I shall need to do tons. All the things I did not finish this week plus most of cooking and decorating. I plan to take it easy on Saturday. Here is the list to keep me on track:

- I'll uproot all the beetroots I have been tending over the summer. The yield this year was not great. All my beetroots are small in size. It was a cool summer.
- Then I'll cook them with other veggies and this will be the base for the starter soup. On Saturday I only need to heat it, blend it down smooth, add cream and blue cheese and serve it. Voilá!
- I'll do the desserts. One Grasshopper Pie and one White Chocolate Cheesecake with blueberry caramel with a hint of chili on top. Do not ask me about them yet. I have never tried them before.
- I'll mop the floors.
- I'll clear the garden paths from weeds (something I planned to do today).
- I'll collect the table decorations (rowan berries).
- I'll lay the table.
- I'll finish editing the video filmed in the past parties. I plan to air it on Saturday. (Not much left, WHICH IS GOOD. Hear me shouting it out loud to make it more convincing)
- AND I'll finish washing the porch's windows. This task has been dragging from Monday.... Well, let's face it.....from May. Shame on me. Shame, shame, shame.

Judging from the list, I shall be very busy fighting my "p" word demon tomorrow.

I do

It is time for celebration here. I do things. Today I got to cross out quite a few items from my to-do-list and I am indeed pleased with myself. Among many other things, I finally cooked the beetroot soup, which will be the starter and it tasted fab. Its colour was music to my eyes. Such lovely deep velvety red, and if you wonder, the picture provides a sneak peak to how I plan to lay the table.

Procrastinator Strikes Again

No, I did not reach my goals on Monday. I did not wash the last windows on the porch and I did not do the party's appetiser for tasting. However, I made a slide show on pictures taken in past crayfish parties and I plan to show it while we shall enjoy drinks at the start. The slide show is great, let me say. I put hours into it and managed to pull together a decent piece of work with carefully considered framing and moves from a picture to picture. Now I just need to decide on the music. There are four options and they are:

1.) The Divine Comedy: Charmed Life

A lovely song with exactly the vibe I am looking for, but it is almost a minute too long and I am not going to kill the audience with DPP (Death by PowerPoint).

2.) Dixie Chicks: Lullaby

As above, but even longer than Charmed Life.

3.) Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova: Falling Slowly

Impossibly beautiful song, perfect length, but might be too sad for a fun party.

The highlight my day yesterday was a documentary made in New Zealand I saw on the telly. Impressive. Beautiful. Touching. If you have a chance, do yourself a favour and see This Way of Life.

Week of Red

The doll house is getting ready for a party. The colour of the party is red like its main course. This is the 18th time the same group of 12 will get together for a meal of crayfish.  We shall sing some crayfish songs and toast for a tail or two. The party will take place on the coming weekend only, but I shall do something little every day to get everything beautifully ready well in advance. As you know I am a procastinator, but I hate the last minute rushes. Thus I shall take this opportunity to tackle some personal issues and grow in the area, which has bugged me for long. Therefore the generous time limit. Wish me luck!

The picture was taken on the catch of the 15th party.

Sun, Coffee and the End of Summer

This week has been marked by procrastination. Something I do and something I do not like. However, it has been a beautiful week otherwise. The weather goddesses have been smiling at Oulu. The sun has shined at us everyday. I have enjoyed the brightness by cycling to the town for a cuppa almost every day.

 

As illustration I had to use cafe shots from my May trip to Iceland. I have not taken any pictures this week while enjoying my coffees at Cafe Puistola in Oulu, where I am right on this moment. They do nice coffee here and over there in Island. 

The first and the last pictures were taken at Kaffismidja Island in Rejkyavik. The wooden thingies on the booksheves are prices won in barista competions, which can be considered as a proof of quality. The picture in the middle was taken in a super cool Hostel Kex's Bastur Restaurant, where decor was interesting, people beautiful, food tasty and coffee hot.

Busy Year

I have finished the project and I am back in the doll house looking for the next assignment. It was a busy year with hardly any pictures taken (in my terms) and only few blog posts published. Before moving on to the current affairs, here are some glimpses of last winter.

I made the place home.

 

I had friends and family over.

I made sushi three times

 and got to lay the table few times more.

I served breakfast

and dinner. 

I made a DIY candle holder for xmas and liked it so much that it stayed on its place until May.

I walked through a church park few times a week. 

I spent on flowers and moved back to Oulu.

I'll Meet You On That Other Shore

This time a year ago I was in Jamaica. It was tough, but beautiful. The island touched me deep and messed my head. While there, never on earth, I could have imagined that in a year's time I was back in my native country. Return has been tough. Tougher than Jamaica. I had totally forgotten how it really is here. It is nice, but it is just a place. It is not the dream land I had started mistakenly to remember it. Reality has hit me hard. I am adapting again like in any other new place.

And I miss Jamaica.

Decor Train Coming Back Slowly

Despite feeling blue about my new job, my decoration project has started to live again. Too bad the October light is so little and dim, that pictures do not turn out nice. My pictures are not top quality in any case and now they are just gray blur. 

The dishes in the picture are betel containers from Papua New Guinea. A present from a very dear friend. The containers drive me nuts, because their bottoms are round and they do not balance, but I like them. They have no place in that famous flea market plastic bag sitting on the top shelf of my closet right now. 

Missing Sauna

I have not have sauna since I left the doll's house. There is a sauna in my building, but you need to book a regular weekly slot and use it only at that certain time. I am not a certain slot time chick. I never know what I want to do at certain time. I want to be free to use the sauna when I feel like and I may not feel like it at my dedicated time.

I so miss the sauna right now.

Did you know that "sauna" is the only Finnish word adopted into English language?

Things Are Not the Way I Wish They Were

I wrote the sentence in the topic before the long blog break. I had it saved in drafts,
as if I had planned to start a new post. I completely forgot about it until now when I came back. Sadly the statement is still valid.

Life Lived and Shabby

Everything in my kitchenette is hand-me-down. The microwave came from a friend's mom, the boxes from an auntie and the faulty gravy dish from one of the nans. Mom's mom I think. The one I never met. The one who lived a scandalous life and left lots of silence behind.

My surroundings are filled with hand-me-downs and I like it that way. Lived, shabby and imperfect. Just like me.

Simple is Enough

The shrine introduced in the previous post was a mistake. After looking at it everyday over a week, I realised that memorabilia is clutter. I packed everything into a plastic bag and tucked it to the top self of my closet. It is there waiting to be moved to a flea market. Instead, two items found home from the ledge. Good so. I can rest my eyes on that spot again.

Long break in writing is due to lost decoration mojo. I lost it together with interest in my new job. 

Stuff Turning Decor

After years of trotting the globe, this is the first time all my stuff reside in one place. It is not a lot of stuff really, mainly memorabilia collected from different times and places. All packed in boxes and stored back at home. Half of them already forgotten.

Unpacking the boxes have revealed a mismatch of odd items. The oddest I collected to the kitchen's window ledge and made a little shrine. Never had one, or feel the need for one, but what else I can do? My goodness how knick-knacks can be confusing.

Russian dolls from childhood. The eyeless is a present from Sochi, the Soviet Union. The one with a blue skirt is a tea cosy. Under her skirt I keep my organic red.

Little girl in a yellow dress used to sit on my auntie's desk. Her cap is a cake decoration and adorned my graduation cake. The lady with a large head was made by my goddaughter in the kindergarten when I was in Asia. She handed it to me while I was on holiday in Finland. I left it behind and when my parents came to visit me, they brought it with them at her request. The trolls have heads made of sawdust. Definitely worth keeping.

Funnily walking Donald Duck has followed me from England to Finland. The chocolate box with kitchy wintry picture was my first nonsense-must-have flee market find from here. Viva la 20 cents. The ugly monster is a lucky charm from Japan. The vintage Echte Salzburger Mozartkugeln chocolate box was a gift from an elderly man in Salzburg, Austria.  I sang him the Edelweiss song and told how much I liked it. Few days later he came back with the box and said that he wanted me to keep it. Inside there are pressed edelweiss flowers wrapped in silk paper. When he gave the treasure to me he assured that the flowers were collected long before Edelweiss became protected. What a lovely old grandpa. The tea tin is just a tea tin.

My my. Can you imagine my shock, when I looked Edelweiss out from wikipedia just right now for this post and discovered that Edelweiss became a protected plant in Austria in 1886! Bloody old man! Nothing in this world can be trusted. Not even lovely old grandpas. I have treasured a crime from 1992!