The Intrepid Sentimentalist

Rain and red onions

Sometimes there isn't the time, or the energy, to explore your culinary heritage. Sometimes it's a rainy Sunday afternoon after a very wet dog walk on the moors, and all you want to do is curl up on the couch with a bowl of steaming pasta. Sometimes you realise that you have absolutely nothing in the fridge but your stomach is crying out for something satisfying and savoury.  Sometimes you reach into your cupboard and decide that is it time, once again, for your favourite emergency pasta dish. Twenty minutes later, the first forkful of sweet red onion, softened sun-dried tomato and parmesan-speckled pasta enters your mouth. Bliss. Once again, you thank Jamie Oliver for the recipe that has seen you through so many empty-fridge-afternoons. Plus, there's something about red food on rainy days. It just works.

Hello, Challah

Challah is the quintessential Jewish bread. Bagels might well be more universally appreciated, thanks to their rotund form and suitability for filling with goodies, but when it comes to Jewish homes, Challah is where it's at. Friday night? The Challah has its own, special blessing. New year? The normal, braided shape is replaced by a lovely round loaf, representing continuity, a crown, or the circle of life, depending on who you ask. For particularly festive occasions, honey and raisins are added to bring joy and happiness.

Fish pie

To me, fish pie sounds like an unlikely dish. Accustomed to thinking of pie as a dessert - apple pie, cherry pie, banoffee pie - I don't think that the concept of fish in a pie is immediately appealing. Even after becoming reasonably assimilated and enjoying English dishes such as steak and mushroom pie, the idea of fish and pastry seems hideous and altogether wrong.

Luckily, fish pie involves no pastry. It belongs to a different branch of the pie family (along with its cousins cottage and shepherd's pie), which means that we are talking about a layer of fish and vegetables under a golden blanket of floury, mashed potatoes.

More to life than smoked salmon

When I was growing up, my family ate fish once or twice a week. Living by the Baltic sea, it was the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Tuesday and Saturday mornings my parents would go to the market and pick up some freshly caught fish, which we would cook and eat the same day.

It was usually perch, pike-perch or whitefish. Occasionally herring, but it was a little too fiddly for my taste. When I was very young and the Baltic was colder and slightly saltier, we often caught our own cod on long, cold fishing trips where we kept warm by drinking hot chocolate out of a flask. My grandfather fished with nets and brought home dozens of flat, brown delicious flounders which my mother and grandmother would gut and scale in the garden while I wandered around, eating redcurrants off the shrubs.

Purim and poppy seeds

Purim was the first Jewish holiday I ever experienced. As a 19-year-old volunteer on a kibbutz, I was most impressed. A holiday that involved fancy dress and copious amounts of free alcohol was a definite winner, I thought as I dyed my hair blue and shimmied the night away in the communal dining room.

In the beginning

Okay, I never thought I'd have a blog of my own. I work with websites all day - why on earth would I want to spend more time in front of the computer?

But then I kept finding myself drawn to the amazing food blogs that are abundant on the web. Somehow, the thought of creating one of those (although whether or not be it will be amazing remains to be seen) seemed appealing. I knew that Dave would be more than happy to take the photos, and I also knew that I'd never run out of material.

However, I don't want this to be a blog about everyday cooking. Okay, there'll be some of that, too, but the main idea is to explore the culinary situation in which I currently find myself. Namely, living in England, being newly Jewish, but having grown up in Finland and missing the food from my childhood. In other words, endless possibilities. I don't want to draw up any strict guidelines though - I'll just get started and see where it takes me.

In the future I won't be posting random pictures of food, but for now I just want to include something that looks at least vaguely edible so here's a picture of a yoghurt cake I made a few weeks ago. Yes, it looks like a dry lump of bread, but it was sweet, gooey and quite scrumptious.