St. Urho’s Day is an “Finnish” holiday made by and for Americans. Americans with a Finnish background of course. It’s a holiday so that the Finnish people feel better about not being Irish and being able to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day appropriately. That’s why its conveniently celebrated the day before St. Patrick’s day. Spiteful little Finnish people. My mother has given me pages and pages of explanations of St. Urho’s Day. Something to do with grasshoppers or crickets… I can’t really remember. Anyhow St. Urho is a hero of some sort. There are plenty of things I am missing. Something about wine and something about muttering things in Finnish all day long – I just cannot do it any justice. And for this I apologize. In any case, my mother decided we were going to celebrate it this year. My cousins and aunt (all of whom are also Finnish) are currently in attendance of this celebration along with my good friend Paulina. She was invited because she is in fact a real live Finnish person, here from Finland for the year. In any case the wonderful event of the evening has been the dinner. Mojakka ja Leipa (Some sort of stew and bread) is what we were supposed to be making. We got the meat all browned, the garlic mixed in and started cutting up all the vegetables in a very hurried manner because the recipe said it would take 2-3 hours to make (and we started making it 3 hours late.) Course in my frenzy of chopping and dicing I manage to slice open my thumb along with the potatoes. After I cleaned up and got a bandaid I read over the recipe that Paulina had been reading aloud to me the whole time. This is when we discovered that she had had skipped a portion of the recipe, the portion where the stew cooks for 1-2 hours. So we back tracked and did what we could. It got done about an hour ahead of schedule, luckily. We tried to figure out how the entire fiasco occurred. After much speculating we figured it out. My mother placed a carrot in front of Paulina thus distracting her and causing her to skip ahead to the vegetable section which came immediately after the cooking section. Moral of the story is: Finnish people are easily distracted by carrots.
In case you were curious as to how the stew turned out: My father remarked “The good thing about it is if you drop your bowl nothing falls out.” Yes, it was quite the mush. Fate brought this wonderful Finnish mush to us and now we are all eternally grateful. St. Urho was really looking out for us today.
