How to Have a Great Finland Christmas Dinner

Whether you're visiting Finland for the holidays, or you are entertaining Finnish guests, or going to celebrate with Finnish family, you might want to entertain or bring a nice Finnish recipe. If you're from the US and have no idea where to start, here are some great recipes that will help you impress either the host or your guests?

Some interesting facts about Christmas in Finland might also be helpful to know are a particular tradition of placing nuts and seeds in a garden for the birds to eat. It is a necessity to take care of birds before sitting down for a Christmas dinner. The birds must eat first. The Christmas tree is actually set up on Christmas Eve, and foods such as fruit and candies are used as decorations. Another ritual is that after traditional Christmas happenings, families will often visit a famous steam bath and followed by everyone dressing in clean clothes to prepare for a wonderful Christmas dinner. Gifts are handed out before dinner, there are no stockings and Santa comes to visit all in person to give out gifts.

Carrot Gratin Recipe: This is a great carrot dish (as we'd say in the US). Here's a new and interesting way of making the carrots at your Christmas dinner look a little tastier.

This recipe can take up to 2 hours and take up to an hour for preparation, so make sure you leave enough time for the Christmas dinner festivities. However, preparing this meal a couple of days ahead of time is actually ok, because it gets better with every time you re-heat the dish.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and gather:

3 bags of small already peeled carrots (to make it easier)

1 ½ cups of water

1 cup of rice

¾ cup of milk

¾ cup of cream

3 eggs

1 tbsp of sugar

Half a stick of butter

2 tsp of salt

1 cup of breadcrumbs

Step one - Boil the water and milk and then add the rice. Boil until rice mixture is thick and soft.

Step 2 - Grate the carrots into fine pieces, and add the carrots to the cream, melted butter and eggs.

Step 3 - pour the entire mixture into a banking dish and cover with the breadcrumbs and some drips of butter (if desired), and then cook for 60-90 minutes or until browned.

Rice Pudding -

This recipe only takes a half an hour to make, so it's real quick an easy and will definitely impress.

You only need:

1 ½ cups of rice

6 cups of milk

2 cups of water

Half a cup of sugar

Cinnamon and salt to taste

Step 1: Combine the milk and water in a saucepan and boil. Once the mixture is boiling, add the rice and then let everything simmer on a low heat until it's completely cooked.

Step 2: Add salt as needed

Step 3: Add cinnamon and sugar

Finnish Liver Pate - A very popular Finnish dish.

This is more of a complicated recipe, it can take more than 2 hours to make.

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

You'll need:

1 lb of ground liver

1 ½ cup of cream

2 onions,

1 cup of breadcrumbs

1 tsp of ground up ginger

2 eggs

¼ cup of olive oil

Step 1: spread the olive oil into a glass pan

Step 2: mix the cream and breadcrumbs and wait until the breadcrumbs are completely saturated in the cream.

Step 3: Caramelize the onions in butter and set them aside.

Step 4: Once everything is cooled, mix it together with the ground liver and add the eggs.

Step 5: After the mixture is smooth, pour into the banking dish and cover. You'll then want to put that baking dish into a larger one that has some water in it, and place both in the oven and bake for 2 hours.

Step 6: Allow cooling before serving this great pate.

Step 7: Serve with crackers as an appetizer.