Between Rie and Mocchi, it is almost as if there was a cooking competition. Not that they competed, but both are excellent cooks, with slightly different methods maybe but same spirit of using fresh / natural products.
Rie was astonishing in how she always seem to be improvising on last minute and at same time precooking and saving for later use…
Mocchi seems to prefer following recepies, but was also able to improvise.
But even though we never saw them planning together, they both got busy in the kitchen and produced marvellous meals for both the guests and all of us ( we were 8 non-guests ).
But this was not a vegetarian guest house… even though we hardly saw any of Ōto throughout the day (he never joined us for meals), he was providing all the fish!
Most often he went skin diving and fished with harpoon, but also sometimes with rods from the boat… either way he was selecting special spots for the fishing, some 20’ by boat from the guesthouse.
Patrick joined him one day during the skin diving ( just watching and carrying some of the catch) => no photos of that! And also joined him once for rod fishing…. ( with the boat ride and staying on the boat for hours, this was not really for Hélène…)
we were then fishing at depths of 80m, takes time and work to wind all that line in – the fish are then immediately dead due to pressure variation, I suppose…
Only time we really saw Ōto was when he was preparing those fish, as he was the sashimi master!
All this combined, made top meals for both guests and us…
Those moments in the forest and meals…How do you manage to ever return to office life in Finland?