Barley risotto with yellowfoot mushrooms and fresh garlic

A bit of experiment here; I wanted to make a risotto but using barley, because I still had lots from the barley casserole. I used too the mushrooms I picked and dried in autumn; yellowfoot.

Turn out really good recipe so I decided to share it with you!

Serves for 2

Ingredients

• 1,5 dl broken barley
• 10 fresh garlic
• 4 shallots
• Dried mushrooms, bit more of half a mug
• knob of butter
• Parmesan cheese
• 1,5L vegetable broth
• salt and pepper

Preparation

Start rehydrate the mushrooms with hot water and let it rest for 10 min. Meanwhile in a big sauce pan, add the butter and the finely chopped shallots and saute. When they change colour add the mushrooms and the fresh garlic chopped saute for 2-3 min.

Meanwhile your broth has to be ready and boiling.

Add the barley, mix all together and add the broth, slowly till everything gets soaked, from now on is a labour intensive process, you have to keep stirring with a wooden spoon and when the broth gets sucked, add a bit more. this process takes 20-25minutes.

When you have the barley at your desire taste, grate the Parmesan, give it a last stir and it is ready to be served!

Enjoy it!
Mr South

Mushroom soup with smoked reindeer and potato bread

Today comes the first recipe with reindeer, probably the most famous animal in Finland, for those who don't know much about this animal, here comes few facts:

• It is mostly grown in Lapland, in a sort of semi-wild fatten

• It is quite expensive, fresh is around 60-80€ kilo, frozen starting from 40€ kilo but you can find reindeer frozen minced meat for 10-20€ kilo (don't bother to buy it, it is disappointing)

Although today reindeer is not the main part of the dish, it gives a nice touch. So for this soup you can use fresh mushrooms as we did, or dried, if you use the dried normally takes 30-60 min to rehydrate the mushrooms with slightly hot water. 

As a nice side dish for this soup we cooked a potato flat bread, a really useful way to not waste that little bit of boiled or mashed potatoes that always are left behind.

This serving is for 6-8 people.

Ingredients

• 500gr of mushrooms, we used suppis
• onion
• 2tbsp butter
• 3tbsp regular flour
• 3dl vegetables broth
• 2dl cooking cream
• 75g finely chopped cold-smoked reindeer 

 For the potato bread

• 1kg potatoes
• 2 eggs
• 2,5 dl regular flour

Preparation 

Chop the onion in small pieces and saute it with butter for 5-10 min, add the chopped mushroom and let boil the excess water. sprinkle the flour with the help of a strainer and add the vegetable broth.

Let it boil for 10 min and then add the cream, let it cook 5 min and season at your desire.

Here you have a choise, if you don't like to find the little mushroom pieces, a blender and a stainer will make it a smooth soup.

Chop the cold-smoked reindeer and add it before serving.

For the potato bread, if you have already mashed potatoes skip till point 2

1. Peel, cut and boil the potatoes as for making mashed potatoes. Once soft, smash the potatoes and add a bit of milk to have an homogeneous mixture.
2. Add eggs and regular flour and mix it together, work the dough and make balls and flat them, use the barley flour to prevent the dough to stick.
3. Place the flat dough on a baking sheet and cook at 230ºC for 10-15 min until it gets a nice brown colour.

 Enjoy it!

Mushroom season

Autumn, one of my preferred time of the year...mostly because of mushrooms!!

Here in Finland, we have the luck of having so immense forests 30 min from downtown, where you can find so much mushrooms.

We have gone couple of times so far and we have found around 10 liters of "suppis" (Cantharellus tubaeformis) and few chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius). There are many recipes involving mushrooms, but today we are here for explaining how to preserve them.

• Freezing

For freezing you need to cook them slightly, so they drop a bit of their inner water, after that you can put them in freezing bags and straight to freezer, it is pretty simple and easy.

• Drying

 It is the slowest and harder method, we tried the oven method (we don't have a food drier, you can improvise something like that, but we couldn't) but didn't work, the mushroom burned because the lower setting of the oven was to high.

We tried the slow method; for that you need a lots of space and lots of newspapers. For that you have to cover the table or wherever you are gonna use for drying with newspapers and spread the mushrooms. Try that they don't touch between each other. Every day turn them around and change the newspapers (mostly the first days, later might not be necessary) after 4 to 6 days, depending on room and humidity you will have them dried.

EDIT:

As later we found out, not all the mushrooms we picked are Cantharellus tubaeformis, but as well we picked some Craterellus lutescens.

They are slightly different, and the most important, EDIBLE!! This reminds that even though you know what you are looking for, you have to be carefull and focused when picking mushrooms.