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Just a quick post to say that I proposed to Alex today and that he said YES! We were in Bath, England in a lovely park outside the Royal Crescent and I decided to pop the question. Afterwards we had some lovely vegan food in a pub nearby and bought some kitchen gadgets. A lovely day!
We’re off to England in an hour. It’s vegan paradise compared to Sweden and I’m going to eat lots and lots of fresh lovely food. Alex’s mum has a lovely garden and we’ll be getting most of our food straight from there.
We’ll be visiting some markets, going to lots of car boot sales, looking at second hand shops and I’ll also be working on my accent. I want to move to south west England in a couple of years and it’s vital to be able to talk to the locals! Hopefully when we come back on the 20th I will have picked up a little bit of the accent.
This is what I looked like last year before we went. I was really excited and nervous then, this time I’m more nervous about our cats and less nervous about meeting Alex’s mum. See you all later!
Some great things going on here lately:
The freezer block is in the freezer, my ice cream mixture is in the fridge and when I come home from work tonight I’m making choclate orange ice cream. Wooo! (using the Vegetarian Times recipe and subbing orange extract for the vanilla)
What are your favourite recipes for ice cream? I know there are plenty of them around! And does anyone have a good recipe for lemon icecream/sorbet/sherbet? I am craving lemon like crazy.
A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise is going to be my favourite blog from now on. I’ve read it before but without an ice cream maker it’s seemed a bit pointless for me.
A little while ago now Alex and I started ordering an organic box of vegetables every week. This week we got some amazing things.
My breakfasts have been really great lately.
I’ve said it before, we try our best to plan out what we eat in the week. It means we spend less money on food, we eat better and on days where I’m short on time (like if i’m going to the gym, or have to run errands after work) we can plan on having easy to cook meals that still taste good. I also get an organic box of vegetables most Thursday, so I always keep that in mind.
This is how I plan out food:
If there’s any left over vegetables that I need to use up I remember those when planning. We try to not throw away any food, but sometimes something gets left in the back of the fridge until it’s waaaay past its expiry date. We try to combat this the best we can. I’ll also take note of what we have in the pantry; do we have quinoa, rice, noodles, pasta, canned beans, seitan..?
If there are any recipes from food blogs I want to try out I try to remember which ones. I get out my favourite cookbooks, or the ones I haven’t used in a while. I check the starred items in my Google Reader. If there are recipes there that mean that I don’t have to buy a tonne of ingredients, they go on a preliminary list in my head.
If there are, gooo me! I don’t want to buy a bunch of celery and end up using only one stalk. What a waste of money that’d be.
What do I want, when do I want it, will the lettuce still look good on wednesday? Did Alex mention anything he really wanted (meaning; do I have to make wingz this week?)
What days am I working? Shall we make cooked breakfast on any of the days? When am I going to go to the gym? Are we doing anything special this week? I sit down, write down the days and what we’re doing on them and then start planning out what meal goes where. I also write down anything special that might affect our week plan and if there’s anything else I’ll be making that I have to buy ingredients for.
After all of that I write down what ingredients we need to buy, think out what we need for breakfasts and lunches and compile it all into a neatly sorted list. Vegetables in one section, fruit in another, soy milk and yoghurt in one.. and so on. We usually go to the same store so the list tends to be written in what order we go through the store (frozen items last).
Here’s this weeks list!
All of this list organising is pretty funny considering I’m not a very organised person usually. Woah!
Recently we started ordering an organic box of vegetables that we pick up every week. It’s full of delicious things and the best part about it is that it forces us to be a bit creative with food. We can still plan out our weekly food plan, their website lists what you’ll receive, so it’s awesome in every way. However, this week has been a rather lazy week (food wise atleast, we cleaned out our closet and sorted a bunch of things recently - not so lazy!) and we’ve not been planning. We’ve still eaten, and a few days ago we had a lovely stir-fried cabbage dish. The cabbage was one of the vegetables in our box and not being the biggest cabbage fan I didn’t quite know what to do with it. Enter stir fry! We’ve run out of brown rice so we served it over white jasmine rice, but brown rice has a nice nutty flavour that would have been delicious with this.
Stir-fried sesame and ginger cabbage: Serves 4
Prepare the vegetables. Chop onion finely, mince the garlic and the ginger (or grate it on a microplane grater). Shred the cabbage finely, don’t worry if it looks like a lot of cabbage, once it starts cooking it shrinks a lot. Slice the carrots finely.
Add both oils to a big wok or a large pot. Sauté the onion for about 3 minutes over medium heat, until it starts to soften. Add the garlic and the ginger and raise the temperature to medium-high. Stir fry for another minute. Add the chilli flakes. Add the cabbage together with the carrots. Stir fry for about 5 minutes. Add soy sauce and water so the cabbage doesn’t get dry, cover with a lid and let the cabbage cook for about 5 minutes until it is tender. Add black pepper to taste.
Sprinkle sesame seeds over the top and serve immediately over rice or noodles together with some sweet chilli sauce.
(I wanted a bit of a protein punch so I also stirfried some tofu in sesame oil, added garlic, ginger and some soy sauce, a tiny bit of liquid smoke and at the end, some sesame seeds. I put the tofu on top of the whole thing, and enjoyed!)
Today’s our anniversary! Alex and I have been together for 2 years today (and it’s been two amazing years!). We’re celebrating by seeing Mamma Mia at the cinema and by eating some nice thai food.
Here’s a picture of me, my fab flab and my chubby man on Midsummers Eve.
I <3 you Alex!
We’re planning out weekly food menus again and it’s working wonderfully. We eat better, spend less money and I’m less cranky when it’s already decided what we’re eating.
I’ve had a week and a half of holiday and we’ve been going here and there in Skåne, taking walks and enjoying ourselves. I’ve spent an unholy amount of time in the kitchen making up new recipes and cooking up a storm. It’s been a blast but it’s also been insane in this heat.
Yesterday I cooked up some mapo tofu using a recipe from Vegetarian Times. I was reading through the recipe when I realised it told me to use 12 oz of soy crumbles. I converted it to metirc and thought ‘holy shmoly that can feed and entire nation of hungry people’. Only, it said soy crumbles, not TVP and I don’t have the former.
So, here’s the recipe with my alterations, using TVP instead of packaged soy crumbles. It was soo delicious. This is one of my new absolute favourite dishes! (ps. aren’t my Swedish glasses awesome, they have dala horses on them!)
Mapo Tofu:
Serves 4
Put TVP mince in a bowl and reconstitute it using hot vegetable stock. Add the soysauce and stir. While the TVP is swelling prepare the other ingredients. Chop green onions and garlic finely. Drain the tofu and cut it into 1 cm/½ inch cubes. In a large skillet on medium heat, heat canola oil and add garlic and 3 tbsp green onions. Saute for about 2 minutes. Drain the TVP mince of any excess liquid and add it to the pan. Add black bean sauce, sugar and the 150 ml (2/3 cup) water. Bring the mixture to a simmer and then add the tofu cubes. Simmer the tofu for about three minutes, until heated through. Whisk together the cornstarch with 2 tbsp water and add the cornstarch slurry to the pan. Cook for about a minute, until the sauce thickens a bit. Take off the heat and add the chili oil, stir through. Serve with rice and garnish with green onions. A little bit of chinese soy sauce is good with it.
When I was at Vegomässan in December I had these little paper slips with my blog address and e-mail on them that people could take. A great idea I thought. Well, I had an even better one today. As a foodie and someone who blogs about/obsesses/drools over/thinks of/dreams of/plans/eats food I thought I’d be nice to have my contact details on something a little more foodie related than just a plain piece of paper. Enter sugar/salt/pepper packets. They’re easy to sew together in an hour and makes interesting business cards.
Simply make a design (my sugar packet is 9 x 3 cm or 3.5 x 1.5 inch) and make sure to have enough space to sew on. Print it out and put on top of another paper. Sew it up using a sewing machine, but leave one side open for filling with sugar. Fill with sugar and sew up the last side. Keep the stitches tight. Trim the sides with scissors, but don’t cut too close to the stitching. And voila!
I put one teaspoon of sugar in the big packet and in the small packets are about 1/8 teaspoon of salt/pepper. The small packets with images on them have salt/pepper in.
They say no news is good news and while it’s not always true that getting news is BAD per se, it seems like thats how it works for me. Things have been emotionally difficult for me lately. I’ve already told you about my mums arms and neck and the hernia that’s causing it. Well, it turns out life thought it hadn’t taken a big enough dump on my mum just yet and so we’ve recently found out she has a serious heart condition. Go life!
I’ve cried a lot, and to be honest.. I’ve been thinking about what would happen if she died. Not a nice thought considering she’s only 43. Damn life.
It’s been hot here lately. The grass has turned yellow and brown and many plants have flowered and died, much faster than usually is the case. I’ve been very reluctant to make any kind of food where you have to heat things so we’ve mostly lived on boring sandwiches and pasta. Nothing exctiting at all.
I was tagged by Sarah @ vegtoveg so it seems this post will be all about me and not about the food I eat.
Here are the rules :
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names, linking to them.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs
1. I am a huge collector. I collect: journals, paper, old videogames, cups, glasses, plates, tea towels, bed linen, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, hair pins, shoes, bags, books, piggy banks, erotic novels from the 60s and 70s, old comics and stickers. Just the other day I went through my jewelry and sorted things out, there’s about 150 pairs or earrings there!
2. My absolute favourite things to do in my free time are going to flea markets, auctions, car boot sales, garage sales and markets. I find so many awesome things there. My obsession with this is what keeps our tiny flat so cluttered and kitschy.
3. I am fat and that’s ok. It bugs me so much to hear vegans talk about fat people like they don’t exist within the vegan community. I know I’m not the only fat one! Not all of us fatties follow the standard american diet, I don’t for one, I’m not even american and not all of us are unhealthy lazy slobs. I’m active, happy and healthy and that’s not going to change and neither is my fat status. I’m fat, proud and happy, how about that?
4. When I get tired at night you’d think I can’t speak.. at all. The confusion of speaking English and Swedish all day (when I’m with mum and Alex together I keep swapping) breaks out in all it’s glory at night and I say things that no normal person can understand. Alex laughs and laughs. Sometimes I just resort to grunting.
5. I love colourful make up but I rarely have the opportunity to wear it. I usually don’t wear makeup to work and I won’t put any on when I come home, but when I get the chance I break out the blue and the fuschia, gold, purple and orange. I think I look quite good in it actually, it’s all about confidence (I have plenty!) but it helps if your own colours are good with strong, bold make up.
I don’t think anyone hasn’t been tagged already, so I’m not going to tag anyone. But if you haven’t already posted this on your blog… DOOOOOO IT and let me know!
What a day it’s been. I was sick yesterday and couldn’t go to work and today was so so. Alex spent all morning today updating and redoing my blog from scratch. Pretty much everything looks the same, but the code has been changed quite a bit (it should load faster now) and we’ve done some small tweaks. If anything isn’t working like it should please let me know so we can fix it. It should look OK in IE now too, which is great.
Other things going on.. well, we had this wonderful spelt salad today with a fruity and tangy mango vinaigrette. That was nice. It was also not too hard on my stomach which is still quite upset from yesterdays sickness. And most of all, this was delicous and addictive. I could see myself eating this all summer. Making fruit vinaigrettes is such a fantastic thing to do.. another favourite of mine is a raspberry vinaigrette, or one with strawberries, lime and basil. Yum.
The spelt salad itself was simple and made with easy to find, delicous ingredients. The mix was great, creamy avocado, crunchy pumpkin seeds, nutty and chewy spelt which made for an interesting eating experience. If you don’t have white balsamico the normal kind works just as well, it just has a different colour.
Spelt salad: Serves 2-3
Cook spelt berries according to instructions (mine takes 1 part spelt, 2 parts water and a little salt and needs to simmer for 20-25 mins). Drain and let the spelt cool. Meanwhile, cut the red onion into thin half moons and mix in a small bowl with the balsamico, oil and sugar and let marinade while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. This makes the onion more mellow and much tastier. Thinly slice your carrot into half moons. Dice the avocado and finely chop the sundried tomatoes. Tear the spinach into smaller pieces. Mix all the vegetables together in a big bowl and add the spelt. Mix in the chopped parsley and lastly put the pumkin seeds on top. Serve with nice bread and the mango vinaigrette.
Mango vinaigrette: Serves 2-3
In a small mixer or blender, mix the mango, balsamico and oilve oil until it’s smooth. Add in the chili flakes and season to taste with salt and black pepper. Enjoy!
