Rye bread and Fazer blue

I booked a flight ticket to Finland in winter, can you imagine. See you in March, folks! My original plan was to go to Greece but can you believe, I did not want to. I didn't want it at all. I read an article about travel burn out and realized that is what I am suffering from. I just cannot muster up enough interest towards Greece right now. I am sure it is an amazing place and some day I will definitely go there. When my mood is better and I can actually enjoy the trip. So I booked a flight to Finland cause that is where rye bread is. And oh yes, my family is there, too.

I feel ashamed to confess that food was an important motivator in choosing to go to Finland. I am not saying there is something wrong with Czech food but there is also no rye bread No Karelian pastries, no mämmi even though Easter is coming. Even chocolate doesn't satisfy the craving. Ever since I booked my ticket in January I've been calling Mom pretty much every second day to add a dish on my meal wish list. She keeps scribbling down the notes and last time informed me "there are 8 main courses now on the list, so are you planning to do something else than eat on the holiday or not?" Hell no. And I will fill my suitcase with 20 delicious kilos of domestic delicacies. In Prague I will buy an enormous freezer and stuff it with Vaasa rye bread.

Sometime during my studies we had intercultural communication lessons and one of the topics was missing home but it turned into missing food. Most foreign students told they missed the food they were used to eating. It does matter what you eat. When I was an exchange student in South Korea I also noticed I missed some dishes I wouldn't have touched in Finland. Like smoked salmon I used to blame for headache, fish soup and other strange things I never cooked and only ate if there was no choice.

During past 6 months here in Czech Republic I have constantly felt an empty hole in my poor belly that only rye bread could fill. Missing rye bread drains the life force out of me so better go to Finland for a hearty meal. Finnish food is not so well-known or well liked abroad (after all, it's not sushi or pho) because in all honesty it is weird. Nevertheless I decided to write a post about some dishes I miss, and probably other Finns abroad miss, too.

1. Rye bread. Not even Sweden can offer the same, even though their rye bread is not bad at all compared to the stuff other European countries try to pass as rye bread and sell to unsuspecting consumers. Trust me, the only rye in that bread is written on the package.

A breakfast that is not going to leave you feeling sad and hungry

2. Fazer's blue chocolate (no, it is not the chocolate that is blue, it got its name because of the blue wrapping) Yes, many people miss this stuff and now I am part of that group of desperately sugar-deprived poor devils. (I guess choco gods heard my bitter sighs, when I went to peel an orange in the kitchen my roommate offered me some chocolate and to my surprise and joy it was Fazer's blue. Her friend had brought it from Finland.)

3. Coffee. Some foreigners have insultingly called it tea because it is weak, watery like brew compared to espresso-style coffees. Finnish coffee must be drank from a Moomin mug or at least from a mug that is Iittala or Arabia.

Spooky coffee

 4. Karelian pastries. Dubbed as "the most pussy-looking food on Earth". When I go to Finland, I will bake heaps of them. Baking them is not technically very challenging but they need a very high temperature to bake, otherwise they will become chewy. Don't think anything else than wood-burning oven is strong enough to handle them. Or so I have been told.

5. Mämmi. (If Karelian pastries look like pussy, this delicious dessert looks like it was already eaten once.) I suggested Mom she could buy some for Christmas but she refused because "girl, mämmi is an Easter dish, they'd think I've lost my last marble were I to go to any grocery store to ask for mämmi just before Christmas".

Mämmi..

6. Salmiakki. Well, strictly speaking it is not food, because it is liquorice spiced with ammonium chloride. Anyway, I miss it. It's a great pity my roommate's friend didn't understand to bring this from Finland. Or maybe that was the good deed of the day, because consuming salmiakki is known to make blood pressure rise and cause unpleasant palpitations somewhere in the vicinity of heart. For example, salmiakki never made it to Japan because the country's health officials labeled it "unsafe to be consumed by humans". Make your own decision about touching this stuff. You have been warned.

Candy in Finland

7. Berries. Blueberries, gooseberries, lingonberries, cloudberries, currants. Last night I dreamed of sitting in our garden, vigilantly keeping an eye on the currants, waiting for them to ripen before my outbound flight. A very true situation in the real world, too. For years I have missed the gooseberry and currant season because the stubborn berries want to stay green and bitter. Based on that dream I assume food is becoming an obsession.

There are many more things I would like to add to the list but I must stop writing because thinking about food causes a psychological hunger that has nothing to do with actually needing to eat. And guess what happens if you eat when you are not really hungry? Yes, you'll get fat. That is exactly what is going to happen to me on my holiday.