The final post in the July on Rails and Trails series is about food we ate and cooked on our vacation. Since we were going to spend most of the time by the lake in Finland, and by the seaside, or near, in Italy, we were really looking forward to eating a lot of fresh fish and seafood. During the first days in Finland we indulged in hot smoked fish for dinners, a treat one can’t find where we live, until we noticed it probably wasn’t the healthiest option or gentle to digestion, as those fish tend to be rather oily.
Our adventure started with quite an exceptional experience at Kabuki Canton restaurant in Grenoble. This is quite modern Japanese restaurant. We started with ceviche, and had beef tataki and tuna tataki for mains. For desserts we had mochi ice cream, matcha and black sesame. And then we admired our neighbors’ appetizer show. Kabuki may have been one of the best restaurant dining experiences we’ve had in France: food was delicious, although the portions were a bit too copious, and the service good, even if the place was full on the Friday night. Pricey too, but worth it!
Fast forward two days and we were in Firenze looking for a lunch place. There were a lot of Peruvian restaurants, kebab and pizza places, but nothing appealing enough to us. It was very hot, so heavy meat dishes were out of question, anyway. Eventually we bumped into Pitti Express that looked like a neighborhood bar even if it was located on Via Romano in a very touristy district. We had mixed salads with tuna and fried chicken, downed with Birra Morretti. Nothing spectacular but reasonably priced!
Several days later we were coming back from Pekilo and Mänttä Fine Arts Festival and found the bakery Diiva’s Juurileipä (“Diiva’s Sourdough Bakery) that had not been there before (the location used to be a bar, a very local one — we had beers there once): the taxi driver that took us to the railway station told us that it had opened just a couple of months before. We stepped in for an impromptu lunch, even if we did not feel that hungry yet. Tomi had a halloumi salad and Tei a Skagen sandwich — a traditional Swedish shrimp sandwich — that Diiva’s served with slightly sweet dark rye bread that comes from Western Finland by the seaside.
When staying in Kangaslampi we cooked several simple fish dinners with perch, salmon, pike, and vendace for dinners. All other fish we bought at the supermarket in Varkaus, but vendace from a guy who came to sell them on the parking lot of the local grocery store in Kangaslampi. Usually, he sold out pretty quickly. Following Tomi’s father’s hint we found chanterelles at the backyard and cooked them with one of the dinners, but I don’t remember which one, and our notes don’t tell.
One of the last meals we cooked in Finland was a burger made from the mix of ground pork and ground beef, something one can’t find where we live — actually one can’t even find ground pork here. And butcheries ground only beef to order.
The last meal we had in Finland was the overpriced salmon sandwich with caffé latte at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. Two of those cost 40€ altogether. I really did not remember the airport being that expensive.
Earlier during our vacation we tasted the beer by CoolHead Brew that was voted the best beer of this year. It was interesting but we did not immediately become fans. We also bought a selection of Poppamies spice mixes as souvenirs. We found this company last summer — especially their Louisiana Cajun mix is so good — and now they have expanded their selection or more supermarkets have started to carry more of their products. Finally we bought bottles of Lingoncello — produced the same way as Italian Limoncello but with lingonberries in Finland — for us and our neighbor who kept our plants and herbs alive for a month. And what a great job she did!
Already in the final stretches of our vacation, we were looking for a lunch place in Genova. After walking past several focaccia and pizza restaurants, we chose Japanese Nami Ramen. Not feeling like eating hot noodles we had Katsu don and Unaghi don for mains with Sapporo and Asahi. For desserts we had Daifuku and Black Sesame Gelato.
Our last lunch of the trip was at Fourchetta e Scarpetta in Torino. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we could have made a better decision, but were too hungry to think clearly. Tomi had spaghetti with porcini and Tei stuffed raviolis with “brown” sauce. Not too delicious but it took care of our hunger.
There were probably many other dining experiences worth mentioning or even their own post, but we did not think about it at the time, or just forgot to take pictures before everything was devoured. Definitely one of those is the breakfast buffet of Ibis Styles in Chambéry. French hotel breakfasts (buffets) are in general rather poor or uninteresting, but even to our Finnish standards Ibis Styles’ buffet scored quite high.
This wraps up our July vacation in Finland and Italy. Looking forward to future culinary and other adventures!