But what do vegans eat tho

Probably all vegans get asked that question every once in a while...or a bit too often.

So if you are a meat eater and you get asked "what do you eat" what would you answer? You eat lasagna, pizza, risotto, fish & chips, soup etc? Well this might be a shocker, but guess what, vegans also eat all that. 

I decided to take a picture of everything I eat in a week! I actually went a little over one week, but who cares. I didn't take picture of all the boring snacks tho, but some of it I did capture to get you an idea. 

We are foodies sometimes and love to experiment and make new dishes. We were like this before we were vegans and still are and it has not become any harder to make cool food. Actually now that we realize that there is a lot more interesting stuff in the plant world, I think I have started to love cooking even more than before.

Actually this week was sort of junk food filled...... Like usually we make ordinary everyday foods, but I guess I decided to capture our most unhealthy week. Who am I kidding we are probably always unhealthy hahaha. 

Staato! 

Toast with ajvar (bell pepper spread, random pick from the store), rucola and cucumber from our own balcony with some chia seeds on top i think. There are actually tons of lovely spreads that you can put on bread!! My latest love is artichoke spread which i havent taken picture of since its pretty boring looking. I also love olive tapenade omg.

Bolognese sauce with soy flakes and noodles + some nutritional yeast on top to give some cheesy nutty flavor. Holy shit this is super tasty!

Soy sausage hot dogs which we ate outside next to a pond aww. Personally soy sausage is not my favorite. Of all the vegan sausages I have tried, only the quorn sausage is good! 

We have these people in Finland we call sipsikaljavegaanit - chips beer vegans. Which is pretty self explanatory right? Vegans who love unhealthy processed shit! Well aint that me. There is dairy free quark available even in DK, so I can make dip for my chips yasssss!

We love fruits! Especially I have been a fan of different melons all summer. I even planted some of their seeds and now Im growing honey melons in the balcony from seed.

Bf made a lot of home made pizza dough. Pizza is life. He also made home made tomato sauce for it. And garlic thing to spread on top (its in the jar in the pic) If i remember correctly, this pizza has mushrooms, pickled artichokes, olives, red onion, capers and these vegan "grilled pieces" from the store, that actually taste like these meat sticks we have in Finland. Like literally they taste like meat. I dunno how some replacements are made so real tasting, sometimes scares me. 

They used to sell dairy free cheese blocks here in DK, that we just grated to put on pizza. Tasted perfect! But then we didn't find it anywhere anymore. We literally went to all the stores looking for it, but I guess they stopped selling it or something. So I had to improvize and made a cheese replacement using nutritional yeast. It was pretty ok! I really miss Finland's grocery stores. You don't have any vegan problems in there ever, since everything is available everywhere.

One of the common everyday foods in Finland is called "pata" I dunno what it could be in english. Pot food? Stew? PAELLA? But its basically just a rice dish. My mum also used to just call it risotto. Which it obviously is not. So I call it "finnish risotto" to my bf hehe. This particular one here is hawaiian pata (because it has pineapple). Usually pata foods have minced meat in them, so I just replaced that with minced soy. Which is just soy flakes, the same that was in the bolognese. 

Nothing interesting in this one, but the tea cup and the tray accidentally matched in colors so I wanted to take a pic. It's MARIMEKKO!

When I was in Finland this summer, I bought a lot of food stuff from the Japanese store in there, and here is one of those things! It's yakisoba with mushrooms and some nori on top! The brand was called Ichiban Sapporo something, because my bro had earlier mentioned that this tastes super authentic. And it sure does taste like street food in Japan!

We always want to have a nice breakfast in the weekends, so we got some morning buns from the bakery. Actually a very danish thing to get rund stykker i think. You want to know the toppings? Well we found this non dairy cream cheese that was pretty good. Peanut butter & jelly is always good too. Ah, I didn't take pictures from todays breakfast, where we had vegan ham and cheese slices too.

This was gonna be an honest post so I will definitely post this failure picture too! The sauce in the picture is gyoza sauce from the Japanese store, so I wanted to make vegan gyoza (Japanese dumplings). I bought wrappings from the asian store in our town, but it only had chinese ones so these were wrong kinds for gyoza and they got pretty messed up as you can see. They tasted very nice though! 

I also found my favorite authentic thai noodles from the local asian store!! Like the kinds that only have thai writing on them. Well we got the extremely thai level spicy ones hahaha. Love it! Added some mushroom and rucola.

I tried to make the traditional Finnish mushroom salad spread. It turned out pretty nice, but not as good as it should be, cause you can't get these special kind of salty forest mushrooms here in DK.

Home made french fries! And vegan schnitzel with caper berries and lemon on top. This schnitzel is from Lidl and to me it's surprisingly tasty. There's tons of fake meat foods like that in Lidl and we have tried them all. Especially the nuggets taste like the real deal and it is so weird. I always have to check the package if they actually lied and put some chicken in it.

Had to do something with the left over dumpling wrappers and cabbage so I made spring rolls and wow those were the best damn spring rolls ever. If you like spring rolls then you should try making them yourself wtf that is some good stuff. All kinda veggies with noodles inside and sweet chili sauce for dipping.

Even we can order take out. We ordered some Indian take out! This was vegetarian qorma, with delish cashew sauce and veggies. The fried dough thing on the side is pakora, which was also pretty nice! Oh, you can see Finnish long drink at the back. Actually it's from Germany. So weird that you can get Finnish lonkero in there, but why not in DK?!

We noticed that the salad growing in our balcony had to be used, cause there is a lot of it. So what is the best salad? Taco salad of course! I used to make taco salad a lot back in the day, but it's main idea is the meat soo we had to make a little bit different kind this time. Actually my bf made this and he made the salsa from scratch too, which was so tasty. The meat was replaced with marinated tofu. This whole dish was completely different than the old taco salad, but it was really tasty! 

So that was it for the pictures. Maybe now you understand that being a vegan is not hard at all. The food is actually a lot better and we never feel bloated and tired after meals anymore. 

Bye! 

I sort of hate to travel maybe

Pictures in this post are from Mallorca where we just went last month.

My family took me all over the Europe when I was a kid and we did one long distance trip to the US too and I loved every moment. When I was a teenager we started to go to beach vacations only with my mum, which was also lovely, we would just lay in the beach all day. I especially love Thailand. When I started to have jobs and my own money, I started to travel with my friends and sometimes even alone in: USA, Japan, all over Europe. I would sleep at hostels and meet new cool friends who would go out to party with us. I can not lie that is the coolest thing from my youth! I have tried hitchhiking and couchsurfing too which were awesome experiences.

Then I got a boyfriend, so naturally I started to travel with him. But we are older now so we only sleep at hotels and don't meet anyone new while travelling. So basically you would think that having your own room and privacy would make travelling a lot nicer! Yes, it is a lot more comfy, but the experience it self is boring, especially now that I do not want to lay in the sun all day and make my skin old af in exchange for 2 weeks tan. So basically beach vacations are pointless now, yes I love to swim in warm water, but that's it.

City vacations are even worse. Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk! Look at a landmark for 2 minutes, take a picture of it, which you already knew how it looks like. Tourists everywhere. What else can we do? Oh, shopping? But I hate spending money and I don't need new stuff. I buy new stuff only when my old stuff is broken. Restaurants are nice, but pricey.

Conclusion: if you wanna have fun when you travel, go to hostels and socialize. The cheaper you travel the more fun you will have! Party with new people. Go hike in the countryside and rural areas to avoid all the typical tourist spots and see different kind of nature. But sometimes this is easier said than done! The most fun I had was when I went alone and was forced to socialize.

But the worst part is the actual travelling and planning it. I don't live near any airport so I have to plan everything very precisely and check that every transport vehicle matches each other and is also affordable. Waiting for the train or bus which takes you to the airport. Then going to the airport and dragging your big bag around. And so on, you know how it works. It's of course easier if you live in the same city as the airport. And if your destination is also in the same city as it's airport.

I am an expat, so I need to go to my homecountry a few times a year. I used to be super excited everytime I'm going there, because hey it's my homecountry! And everyone speaks my language, the amazing nature, all my friends and family are there and I love the crazy wide selection of grocery store products. But I am going there next week and I am not excited at all. It's such a hassle to get there and am I gonna enjoy my stay to the fullest to go through all that trouble? Recent visits haven't been so fulfilling to be honest. I have also noticed that most of my friends have moved on with their lives and don't care if they don't see me during my visits. But thats a whole other issue I could write a whole post about.

Here is my whole trip plan:
Take a bus from home to the train station. Take 2 different trains towards Copenhagen, then change to a bus until I'm finally at CPH airport. It takes 3.5 hours because they have some road work during the summer. But hey tickets cost only 99kr. I am extremely nervous that one of those trains is late, because danish trains are VERY often late. That means I can miss my flight. Well then there's the 1,5h flight to Helsinki. One way ticket cost only 25eur! I was very lucky with the prices, but you have to understand that I have been searching for those tickets for many weeks until I found cheap ones. When I'm in Helsinki in the evening my friend will pick me up. I sleep at her place and spend the next day with her. The day after that I take a 5h bus ride to east Finland with onnibus, which cost only 6eur. Yes another extremely cheap ticket, because I happened to buy it when they had some discount thing going on. I spend a week in Joensuu with my parents and possibly my bro. I love the nature in there so much, this is what I'm looking forward to the most, I just hope there's nice weather. Then I take a bus back to Helsinki (6e) and sleep at my friend's place again. The next day is Weekend Festival yaas! We were there last year too and it was the best day of the year. The day after that I have a flight back to Denmark and the same shit with trains and buses (same prices too).

Why can't anyone invent a teleport?!?!?
Bye.

Danish nature

Gonna post a huge set of pictures, since we had a small vacay and it was super nice summer weather and we also happened to have a car during this time. Good karma! 

Castle in our town. 

We have sooo many swans in our town and they keep making babies every year. Apparently they all don't fly away from parents' place. That's why I'm not so impressed if someone sees swans anymore.

We have had amazing hotel breakfast every morning during this vacay. Probably not so healthy. 

But it's been so warm and summery, we deserve some pampering. We even hit 25 C.

One of the best days was when there was may market and international market at the same time in our town in amazing weather!

It's a me.

The following pictures are from the deer forest in Vejle.

I just LOVE forests for some reason, so I took a ton of pictures. 

I lived next to a forest for 23 years, so maybe that's why I suddenly love them so much.

Check out the sea at the back, wow.

Yeah, there was actually lots of deers in that forest, but they were shy (obviously).

We ended up at a beach in some small never-heard town. 

Every beach we passed by, was packed!

This is from another deer park, this time in Middelfart. We went there by accident.

Very stockphotoey.

Oh shit, we found such amazing place from a forest in the deer park.

I think people like to do biking in crazy places like this.

Wow, look at that clear water and then a fucking kayak came in the middle! Perfection!

So beautiful. I love when I accidentally find natural places like that.

This didn't even look like Denmark!

 That was a huge flower tree, with a huge bee hive. Just imagine the constant ZZZZZZZZ sound.

This is the view from our lovely balcony.

And this is from our kitchen window. Love dat light up water tower.

You buy too much cheap clothes!

In recent years I have reduced my clothe shopping a lot, since originally I wanted to save money and I felt that I already own every piece of clothing I need for any occasion, so why would I have to keep piling the clothes?

I actually started to become super concious about the stuff I own and consume when I moved in to my first apartment in a different country. All my stuff and clothes were in a different country, so there was very limited stuff I could bring from my previous home, since I had to bring it through airplane and several trains. When I thought I was gonna move away from my new country again, I packed my bags and had to donate a lot of my stuff away that I had dragged all the way from my home country (I had brought more stuff everytime I visited my home country during my study years) a lot of stuff got thrown to the trash too, since no one wanted my ugly clothes and I had no space in my bags anymore. After this I have really admired simple life and I totally HATE clutter. It's really not the fact that "oh no, I had to throw away my stuff :(" that stuff was shit anyway! Why not just have the essentials all the time? Nowadays I always have only one bottle of shampoo, cream etc and use it all up before buying new. I used to have several bottles open at the same time and I bet I'm not the only female doing that. Now in our household only my boyfriend does that and I hate it haha sorry. Anyway that was the story of how I became to hate clutter and consumerism in general.

I wanted to talk about how everyone in the fancy countries buy too much cheap useless clothes!

So I watched this documentary called "The True Cost" which is telling the story behind all of our everyday clothes that you and me use and buy. Especially the cheap shit we buy from stores like H&M, Primark, Zara etc you know the ordinary mainstream stores. I thought everyone should know how exactly they are made! I know most of people know the horror stories of sweatshops in Bangladesh and China where the workers get paid 2 dollars a day and work crazy overtimes all the time, but there's actually a lot more horrific stuff behind it.

The most horrific thing to me was the cotton fields part, so I'll just try to write what it is in short and simple, since most people don't have time or interest to actually watch a long documentary about this.

Your clothes are made of cotton. Majority of the world's cotton fields are genetically modified (GMO) cotton fields, only a small percentage is organic cotton and that kind of clothes are super rare and expensive. There is a big seed company that patented the GMO cotton seed, so all of the cotton farmers have to always buy cotton seeds from that big company which has added 1400% more price to it. This brings the cotton farmers in to debt. This results in vast cotton farmer suicides! It's like, everyday a couple of cotton farmers kill themselves. Check the documentary for accurate numbers, I can't remember off the bat.

The villages around the cotton fields are affected too. Even though the seeds are GMO they need to be sprayed with tons of chemicals in order for the cotton to grow all year round and not only seasonally + grow faster and other mutant stuff. All of the villages around the fields have very high number of retarded children, mental illnesses, cancers, tumors etc all kinds of bad stuff, probably from all that chemical. The farmers themselves always die early from a disease like that.

And of course the terrible sweatshops, but that is a bit more common subject so I'll just leave it at that. There was actually just recently an incident in Bangladesh, where a garment factory was in a very bad condition. There was visible cracks everywhere in the building and the workers notified the factory owner, but he didn't give a shit. Then the building collapsed killing 1000 slave workers. :(

How can you as a consumer help? I don't know, these people have work thanks to this, but it's like slavery in my opinion. Those countries are poor as hell and you are lucky to have a job. I don't know if enough people in the consuming world can become aware and stop buying these cheap clothes, enough to make the big heads of the companies to take action, right now they only see dollar signs in their eyes. Did you know that every sixth person in the world works in some part of the clothing industry?

Here's me, consuming. Okay bye!

At the movie theater

This is a negative complaining post about going to the movie theaters =) 

I have always loved to go see movies as probably everyone does. Recently I haven't gone too often, since I have become super stingy about using money. I'd say we go to the movies 2 times a year with the bf. I wanted to go see Jungle Book, since I love Disney stuff. So we decided now is the time, since we had free time and had a mini date lol we rarely do those.

Now, usually when we go see "kids" movies there's always english and danish version available, we choose the english one obviously and all the kids go to the danish one. Well they don't show the danish one here for some reason at all, but I didn't think much of it - until we entered the theater. So many kids, but I was like okay I'm not judging this shit, it's cool. 

Then the movie started. 2 kids with their mommy in front of us keep talking in normal voice. They ask their mom stuff and mom just answers the kids. I was waiting for her to tell them to keep quiet, but nooo. The kids commented stupid shit like "Oh look there's monkeys. The monkeys are attacking. Wow look at that." etc. 

There was this individual behind us who also kept talking and occasionally yelling stuff. Those occasions would have been perfect for the parents to say "sshh" but no, they just chatted away with the kid. He was sitting behind my bf and apparently he was kicking his seat the whole time, lovely. One time the kid farted out loud. At the end of the movie he had fallen asleep and his dad had to carry him out. 

My question is: why do you bring your kids to see an english speaking movie when your kids clearly are too young to understand english or read the subtitles? It's probably because the parents wanted to see the movie themselves lol. And I kind of understand the kids perspective, I might also talk if I didn't understand what was going on, but still had to sit through it for 2 hours. But I'm blaming the parents for not schooling their fucking kids how to behave in a movie theater. In finnish we call this "free parenting" and it has a bad reputation. 

My problem is: I don't feel happy paying 100 kr for this kind of shit. As I said I'm very money concious and wow what a downer when my movie experience got so much disturbance. Probably will not be going to the movies in a loong time, since I can just wait a while and see movies at home for cheaper. But it's sad cause most of the time I go to the movies it's awesome. For example Interstellar was amazing to see in a big screen and also We Are Your Friends because all the music was blasting loud! 

I can tell other shitty stories from my previous movie theater visits! Well just the ones I remember now off the bat. One time I was at the movies with my mum and I could smell this weird odour throughout the whole movie. It was a weird version of poop smell, which I didn't enjoy at all. When we left the theater my nurse mum informed me that that smell came from the guy next to us and from his too full poop bag (I'm sorry I don't remember the real medical term right now). 

Then there was this time when a fat guy sat next to me who brought super smelly coffee with him, and he sipped it for 2 hours and breathed very loudly. 

Yeah, most of these things are just small inconveniences which these people can't even help it. And I should know that there can be weird stuff happening when dealing with strangers in a movie theater. I don't know what I'm even trying to chase here. Shouganai! Can't be helped! It's just facts of modern day human life, I guess. 

Okay bye.