Hmmmm…. while writing this, my stomach is newly filled with the delicious vadelma-toffeepuustit, that Pauliina and I baked yesterday.
We met at her place. This time, we wanted to learn more about food – vocabulary, making an order in a restaurant or café and beeing able to ask for prices or ingredients. But how can you talk about food and not cook or bake something in the meantime?
Both of us prepared a recipe for a typical pastry. Pauliina had a receipe for finnish Lingonberry-toffee-rolls (we changed the lingonberries to rasberries, that Pauliina picked at the mökki in summertime) and I had a recipe for a german Apfelkuchen mit Streuseln (apple pie with crumbles).
We translated all ingredients and figured out, that you just need to put an -a in the end of an ingredient, when you take an amount of it.
So yeast = hiiva. 50g of yeast = 50g hiivaa (okay, just a little recipe-“fun-fact”).
Pauliina made some very nice Apfelkuchen with a lot of love. First the dough, then placing the apple sclices on it and then making some nice Streusel to put on the apples.
Baking the finnish rolls took more time. We first prepared the dough, and since it included hiiva, we needed to let it grow for 30 min. Afterwards, we spread it out, put butter, brown sugar, toffees and rasberries on top (voi, fariinisokeri, kermatoffee-karammelli: Fazers Omar, vedelmat). Then we rolled the dough, cut them into trangles and again needed to let them grow for another 30 min. Then we pressed them down on the tray. It was very funny to read the finnish recipe, since they very detailed explanations of every single step.
- Cut two 30 x 50 cm squares.
- Cut the rolls into little triangles.
- Put the slices rolls with the thin corner on top and press it down a little.
But we did, and the result was fabulous!
Of course, we had some coffee with it. And of course, we all drank it out of a moomin cup.
Knowing some words for different ingredients and groceries, I told Pauliina that I sometimes have trouble in the supermarket, when I need to weight the vegetables and don’t know which number belongs to which vegetable, because I don’t know the finnish words for them.
So we learned some of the important ones.
Kasviksia – vegetables
Hedelmät – fruits
Porkkana – carrots
Peruna – potatoes
Sipuli – onion
Munakoiso – eggplant
(easy to remember, because muna = egg!)
kesäkurpitsa – Zucchini
(very funny to remember, because kesä = summer and kurpitsa = pumpkin, yay!)
tomatti – tomato
(thank you dear Finland, for having one easy word)
Omena – apple
banani – banana
kurkku – cucumber
Sämpylä – bun
Leipä – bread
kala – fish
liha – meat
keitto – soup
makka – sausage
viini – wine
olut – beer
maitoa – milk
… and a lot more.
And in order to be able to order something or ask for something, we translated some Survival-sentences:
Mulla on nälkä – I am hungry.
Mulla on jano – I am thirsty.
Hyvää ruokahalua – Enjoy your meal.
Saisinko….? – Can I have …?
Haluaisin … – I would like to have …
Ottaisin … – I would like to take …
(Did you notice? The form “isi” in the word is to make it polite! Nice to know!)
Voinko maksaa korttilla? – Do you take card?
Hauluaisitko …? – Do you want… ?
Missä … on? – Where is … ?
Mistä löydän … ? – Where can I find …?
Minkä hintainen … on? – How much is it?
I don’t know if this is just too stereotypically finnish – but Finns don’t have a word for “please”. It just doesn’t exist! So if you order something, you would just say “Kiitos” afterwads, but not “please”. I remember, when my mom told me always to say “please” after a question, when I was little. I wondered – what do finnish moms teach their kids then?
So I hope, my daily life gets a little bit easier now. Or at least, I am able to practise some spoken finnish in the supermarket!
Last but not least:
One fun fact that I needed to laugh about:
Toi voi = That butter.
Hän toivoi = he whished.
Ehm… yes.
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