Happy
Midsummer's Day everyone!
Midsummer
Day must be one of my favorite holidays. Not only because it’s the longest and
lightest day of the year, but every holiday gives you a permission to eat and
drink well!
My
mom gathered together the most beautiful bouquet and brought it home. The smell
of the fresh flowers were intoxicating!
The
cats were also interested in about the bouquet... Way too interested! Haha.
Later
we put on the grill and barbecued our own delicacies – only vegan delicacies for me,
of course.
The
dinner was very filling and good. And what can I say? I love food and I love to
barbecue!
The
Midsummer Day’s morning was beautiful and misty! Almost like a painting... On
Midsummer Day I give myself some more leash and let myself to stay up later
than usual. There’s nothing better than a night full of light when sun never
sets and you can get to see the rise of the new day.
We
had made the summer’s first sangria in the fridge to cool down and to absorb
all the flavors from all of the fresh fruits well ahead of time! To me, sangria
is a sign of summer!
Because
it was a holiday and stores were closed and there was nowhere to go, we slept
late – our cats are fascinating creatures for many reasons; one of them is that
they tend to sleep when we do. They don’t fill almost any part of the cats’
manual for they are unique. And besides, tiredness doesn’t look at a place or
time...
The Midsummer’s Eve and Day couldn’t gone any better! Only the weather could
have been sunnier, but to be honest, even the rainy, cloudy days didn’t bother
that much in the end. There’s still time for the sun to come out!
Happy
May Day everyone!
Like
last year, we decided to avoid the crowd of the May Day market at downtown and
stayed at home more than willingly.
I
have always loved to eat and my love towards making food burst out in a bright
flame since I quit eating meat. I love that every kind of festivities are great
opportunities to use the whole day making food and gives me a chance to try new
recipes!
I always
try to hold on the traditional aspect about what I will make and eat, which
means that I won’t eat something completely different than what is usually related
to each festivity, but instead I try to create something new around the traditional
foods.
Although
making most of the foods from scratch, using a lot of time to do so, we still
had time to make vegan doughnuts which we rolled in sugar.
I have been eating the whole day, but isn’t that what these days are for? I
hope you had a great and plentiful May Day in every way!
p.s. The quality of the photos are not like they used to be because my camera
decided to break up its co-operation with me after all these years. I should’ve
seen this coming...
I don’t know why, but Easter is one of the ”holidays” I wait the most! I
guess all the good childhood memories about egg hunting and eating candy until I
felt sick, comes into my head.
We planted some grass for our cats way before Easter – Tiny couldn’t
care less but Lara was crazy about it, even before it started to grow... Oh,
the joy when she finally got to it! This is just one way of showing how diverse
and different cats can be!
Like during all holidays and days alike, I like to bake and make food.
I baked vegan peach-quark buns – something I’ve had in mind for a long
time, but I had never baked before. And they turned out perfect! I couldn’t
have been happier!
For dinner I made my traditional Easter seitan roast with spicy
oven-roasted vegetables. The picture isn’t the best, but at least there’s a
picture...
I hope you have had a great Easter and you’ve eaten yourselves as full as I
have, ha!
This weekend has been extremely good. And overall, I have been having
more great days lately!
On Saturday we went eating out. I ordered root vegetables grilled on
charcoal and grilled fresh pineapple in curry sauce, roasted coconut, mango
salsa and coconut rice. All vegan and way too good!
There was really something eating under numerous crystal chandeliers –
very exquisite.
Sunday on the other hand, went just at home and not leaving anywhere. Those
kind of days are also needed to balance out the week when you go somewhere
every day.
So it was nice just to chill out with a glass of white wine...
I hope you had a great weekend too!
The Oscars came on a live broadcast last night – I had waited for it so,
so much! It has become a tradition-kind-of-thing already, to watch the Oscars
every year.
The Oscars always come from TV in the middle of the night because it’s
live but there’s a thing to watch it in that hour. You can always watch the
subtitled version on the next day, but it’s not the same thing... You
concentrate way too much to the subtitles and half of the show itself goes by –
since there were none, I could concentrate to the show as fully as possible.
And the subtitled version is also about 45 minutes shorter for the Finnish
middle-speeches during the American commercial breaks (which they don’t show in
here) are cut away and to me they are a big part of the whole show!
The Red Carpet part, which comes before the actual Oscars went by a little, but
not too much. When the Oscars started we popped a sparkling wine and laid back
to enjoy it. The Oscars sure are one of the greatest ways to spend a whole
night!
I had baked vegan almond brownies earlier on the evening and ate them
while watching the Oscars. It had been on my mind for so long to try to bake vegan
brownies and for my surprise they came out from the oven perfectly! It obvious
which side is mine, ha.
After the Oscars ended, it felt it had gone by too fast, even though it had lasted
for hours. I was so excited that it was impossible for me to go to bed right
after it, so I stood up a little longer but then went to bed...
I’m already waiting for next year’s Oscars!
I have never known that Shrovetide is called Shrovetide. I mean, I have
always known it is called “Laskiainen” in Finnish but I have never really
thought about its name in English... Oh well.
On this year Shrovetide came just after Valentine’s Day and traditionally it’s
preceding Easter... I started to look up when this holiday actually was and
found out that the special days of Shrovetide were on Sunday and today, on Tuesday.
I personally don’t mind this because every holiday gives me another good reason
to eat more, since every café and store is filled with these Shrovetide buns,
which are just like regular buns, yes, but they are filled with whipped cream
and jam or almond paste.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how many food additives these ready-made buns
actually had and I was shocked to
notice that one of them had 18 food additives – there was something in
everything (in the bun, in the jam, in the cream)! I wasn’t going to buy them
in the first place because I knew they contained eggs and milk as well as some food additives, but eighteen is way, way, way too much for anyone!
So I baked vegan buns at home and ate them with vegan whipped cream and
raspberry jam. Yum!
I didn’t have any coarse sugar or decorating sugar so the bun might just
look like a bread roll filled with jam and whipped cream. Ha! But they were
actually really, really good. And I have been eating them for three days now...
But I don’t mind indulging myself on holidays.
And oh! On Sunday there were the most glorious sunset I’ve seen in this
spring so far. The days have become sooo much brighter and been very beautiful
overall so I hope (and believe) that there would be more pretty sunsets (and sunrises) to come...
Valentine’s Day always makes me think about the friends I have and how
fortunate I am to have people in my life.
Sometimes, there’s nothing better than to spend a whole day at home, making
food, eating and drinking well...
My mom had bought a box of fresh strawberries a day before Valentine’s
Day and their scent was intoxicating – I haven’t eaten fresh strawberries since last
summer!
After eating half a box of strawberries, where else to put the rest of
them than to a pink sparkling wine?
I have proven to myself that homemade food can be as good as anything
you would get from a restaurant! And as a vegan you can’t really find a variety
of foods you can eat from restaurants so it can get a bit boring in the end.
So, instead of going eating out, I made pita breads from scratch which I
stuffed with everything vegan; vegetables, seitan kebab (also made from
scratch), vegan crème fraiche and spicy tomato sauce – it couldn’t really get
any yummier than that...
Have a good Valentine’s Day!
