Scottish Blogs.com

On our recent trip to London, K and I stayed with my friend Johanna's for a weekend. During that time we had the pleasure of feasting - literally - every morning. We had eggs benetine or florendict on Saturday (great poached eggs!) an omelette layer cake with smoked salmon and rocket on Sunday (an impressive-looking layered affair), and a savoury clafoutis with cherry tomatoes and rocket on Monday (a 'requested breakfast' dish - I had the pleasure of eating this on the morning after Jeanne's & Johanna's blog birthday bash in June 2006, and couldn't wait to have it again). Each one of those breakfasts sounded & looked fabulous and tasted een better. But it was the omelette layer cake with smoked salmon & rocket that kept haunting us long after we were back home in Estonia. So it...

About a fortnight ago K. and I went to a carrot farm, where I was given about 10 kg of crunchy, flavoursome carrots and where I also picked up a huge bunch or rhubarb. As it happened, a few days later I had to entertain and feed a hungry army of aunts and cousins. When you've got lots of visitors coming, but no time to shop (it was a weekday night, after all), you build a whole menu around things on hand - in this case carrots and rhubarb.One of the dishes I served was based on Alanna's great recipe for carrots with African spices - a heartwarmingly spicy concoction of carrots and, well, various warm spices - that I blogged about back in January. I treated my excited extended family to a slightly adapted version of Alanna's carrot salad, but this time served it on my newly acquired...

Here I am singing praises to the Queen of Vegetables, Alanna, again. I have discovered great carrot recipes in old handwritten cookbooks (K's grandma's carrot ragout); in heavy printed tomes (Moroccan carrot salad with cumin and garlic, Jazar Bil Kamoun Wal Toum from Claudia Roden's enchanting Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon); in online cookbooks (gingered carrots with feta cheese from the Swedish Arla site; carrots with rosemary and orange from the Finnish Finfood site). Fellow bloggers have inspired many a carrot meals of mine. Of course, there are those ever-wonderful roasted carrots with mushrooms, courtesy of Kalyn. But when it really comes down to it, then Alanna rules. I've already praised her carrots with African spices, and now I've discovered her cumin-scented...

Today is emakeelepäev (there's a mouthful!) alias the day of the mother tongue in Estonia. It's the birth anniversary of Kristjan Jaak Peterson (1801-1822), the father of Estonian written poetry. Since 1999, this day has been marked by various events celebrating Estonian language, the mother tongue of just one million people. It's a beautiful language, closely related to Finnish, and more distantly to Hungarian (and not at all to Russian, Latvian, English and other Indo-European languages). Apparently it is a pretty difficult language to learn. We have a funny letter Õ in our language (as well as more familiar Ä, Ö and Ü), we use lots of wovels, have three degrees of phoneme lengths, no grammatical gender (the word for 'he' and 'she' is both 'tema', no distinction is made), our nouns...