fabulous finland

We have had such a lovely time in Finland. The entire two weeks were spent enjoying the best food, drink, scenery, company & conversation. We camped. We rode bikes in the archipelago between Finland and Sweden. When my leg began to hurt, we were rescued by a wonderful couple who are destined to become longtime friends. They hosted us, fed us, and helped us rent a 1600cc motorbike. We skinny dipped in pristine lakes amongst wild moose and deer. We drank apple cider and ate delicious dark rye bread, Karelian pies with egg butter, baby carrots in cream thickened with spelt and tempered with a pinch of brown sugar, new potatoes drenched in butter with dill, sea salt and black pepper, blueberry rhubarb pie, squeaky cheese with cloudberry jam, and fresh salads with grilled haloumi cheese and dried berries. We had fresh chanterelles from the forests of nearby Estonia. Our fingers are stained red from strawberries both wild and cultivated. We enjoyed countless fresh peas, popping them straight from the pods into our mouths, while sitting on the edge of the Baltic sea, or in a green park in Helsinki, or in a lake, on an island. We had coffee and cardamom rolls while waiting out a thunderstorm in the town of Navu. We devoured top notch Thai food on a tiny island, after a blissful private sauna that included lots of scrubbing and cans of cider that stayed surprisingly cold in the 90°C air, at a place called Bjorkslund's Batslip. We went to a 15 year old girl's communion party, where we were invited to the neighbor's wine cellar to drink a delicious bottle of Spanish Albarino wine. We had a picnic on the fortress island of Suomenlina, watching cruise ships navigate treacherous & narrow straights.

Hostess Hanna

And we window shopped... because Finland is not only one of the prettiest places I have ever been, but also one of the most expensive. If not for the open hearted generosity of the people we met and are visiting, we'd be deep, deep into the black. But do not despair, budget travelers! If you are willing to camp, picnic, and get off the beaten path, you too can have a blissful, vegetarian and affordable adventure in this often overlooked wonderland. And if you open yourself up to the people you meet, you'll find some of the warmest, friendliest people ever. 

209€=too much!

My shortlist of tips for the shoestring veggie-voyager coming to Finland: bring a tent, sleeping gear, leatherman, swimsuit, sunblock, wind breaker, and mosquito repellant. If you plan to visit saunas, bring body products like scrubbers, moisturizers (oils) and exfoliants to enhance your experience. Be willing to eat rye, dairy and eggs, as there is butter, cheese, rye or eggs in most of the vegetarian options. If you are vegan, get ready for lots of fresh, raw veggies and fruits. Many people we met were either vegetarian or pescatarian, and most people are very concerned with the origins of their food and with the current Monsanto/GMO crisis. Restaurants are very expensive; you'll spend 15-20 euros easily per person. Apple cider is more common than beer. Luomo means organic. Pretty much every one speaks English, so you'll have no trouble communicating if you don't speak Finnish. In the summer there are tiny wild strawberries that taste like candy growing in the countryside. I could go on and on... But that should cover the basics.

When I get back home, and have a real keyboard (using slide mode on a tablet here...) I'll start posting some recipes. But if you want a taste of a Finland summer, here's a suggested menu for you!

Boil a couple of pounds of baby potatoes in some water with a few generous pinches of sea salt. Drain. Serve while still hot, with fresh butter, dill, black pepper and sea salt. Allow your guests to dress their own! If you can get some fresh chanterelle mushrooms, simply saute them in butter with a pinch of salt. Serve this with fresh peas still in the pod, hot toasted rye bread, more butter, and bottles of cold hard apple cider. Enjoy a big salad with tender new lettuce and a squeeze of lemon juice. Dessert could be a bowl of ripe strawberries, fresh whipped cream, and some good dark chocolate. Simple, easy, elegant and YUM!

Until next time, hugs to you all.

Love, K

papad with spinach paneer spread

 

 Hi there! It's been quite a while. My blog presence has shifted to the art world. I am still eating, cooking and traveling and have even felt a twinge of guilt from time to time for neglecting the veggie voyager. Can't promise to post all the time....but I'll try to be better.

In case you're wondering what I've been up to, please take a minute to check out the amazing project I am up to my ears in here in Mumbai, India.

Me (in the middle) with friends and colleagues in Mumbai.

Papad is an Indian snack food that is available all over the place. If you have an Indian market near you, I suggest you go pick up a packet. My friends here tell me that, like ramen in the US, papad is the food that gets college students through those tough nights of studying and drinking. It is not the kind of food that most people here even bother to make from scratch, although I have heard tell that it is sometimes done. But most people just buy papad the way we buy tortillas.

And tortilla like it is. It is a crunchy, flat disc on which one can put any number of toppings, or just eat plain. I have been experimenting with all kinds of different toppings here in my 21st floor apartment. My favorite to date would have to be a spread of yogurt, paneer (Indian cheese, not unlike fresh farmers cheese), garlic and spinach. Kind of a fusion invention, I hope it will appeal to Indian friends as well as everyone else in the world who loves a good quick snack. Consider it fusion food.

papad three ways: grilled paneer & tomatoes, olive oil & tomatoes, spinach paneer spread & tomatoes.

Topped with fresh tomatoes, this can't be beat...

Spinach Paneer Spread

6 cloves garlic
little bit of oil
1 bunch spinach
1 lb paneer (or farmer's cheese)
1/2 cup plain dahi (yogurt)
1 green chili
salt and fresh pepper to taste

Chop the spinach and garlic finely. Sauté the garlic in oil until fragrant and add the spinach to wilt for a minute or so. Put the rest of the ingredients into a food processor or blender and pulse until creamy and spreadable. 

Heat the papad on a dry skillet until it bubbles and becomes crispy. Remove from heat, spread with the spinach paneer spread, top with sliced tomatoes and sprinkle with salt and fresh pepper. Enjoy!

e & drink in san diego

 
This is a shoutout to the new eatery inside the 99 ranch complex on Clairemont Mesa in San Diego. While not a veg restaurant, they do a super yummy veggie mini hotpot, complete with a litany of sauces and pickled bits to dip in and enjoy with the rice and bubbling veggies. Not being an unfermented soy eater, I had to pick out the tofu and soy skin, but I'll just be sure to order it without next time. Two of us ate for about $12.

The owner is an afficionado of teas as well, and with our meal we received a delicious glass of sweet iced green Alishan tea of the highest quality. She said to try the red tea from Taiwan the next time I come. I think I will!

This place has been here for about 2 weeks...so go and support them if you're in the area! Then, do what we do and duck into 99 ranch for fresh coconuts, seaweed, funky mushrooms and other Asian delights. There's also a Chinese "pharmacy" in the complex with a doctor on site to help you with your Eastern medicinal needs.

E & DRINK
7330 Clairemont Mesa Blvd
San Diego, CA 92111

D-K-Che' in Imperial Beach

You know how sometimes you find yourself in a neighborhood that doesn't have a lot of veggie options, so you start thinking, "how bad is a little lard in my beans, really?", or, "just one donut isn't going to kill me..."?

Well, Imperial Beach in south San Diego can be that place. So I'd like to shout out to the ladies that run the new smoothie, torta and juice joint just up the road from Home Depot on Palm Avenue. Clean, friendly, fresh and a nice option for a refreshing pick-me-up.

We had the green juice, with fresh pineapple, celery, parsley, grapefruit, nopales, spinach and orange juices all in one glass. We also enjoyed tostilocos minus the cueritos (pork skin). This snack is a hodge podge of jicama, pepino, chaka chaka (?), cacahuate (peanuts), tajin (one of my mom's favorites), lemon, chile, and chamoy. It was cruncy, salty, tangy and spicy. There were salty round corn chips tucked throughout the mix as well.

Here is the pertinent info, so that next time you find yourself in IB, you know where to duck in to!

D-K-Che'

1555 Palm Avenue, San Diego, CA 92154
(619) 651 - 8595
8 am to 10 pm

Located at the corner of 16th and Palm Avenue, just west of the I-5 freeway.

Vegan Pesto with Pepitas

 I have to say, San Diego is full of hidden gems. It's good to be home for a while.
 
This past weekend, as Ryan was finishing out the 10 day master cleanse, my mom and I found ourselves poking around in the corridors of a restaurant supply store, shopping for rice noodles and fresh coconut at 99 Ranch, the biggest pan-Asian supermarket in San Diego, and eating fluffy uttapam and paper-thin dosa in Little India. While there, we tucked into Bombay Bazaar for some Indian staples, and finished up the day with a stop at a place called "The Fruit Stand". It was a fun day, completely centered around the subject of food. So much for me doing a "cleanse" at this juncture...

The restaurant supply store was fun. There are two on the same block. One is always closed on weekends, but F.S.E., Inc. is open on Saturdays. Most of their products really are for industrial kitchens, but they do carry some fun stuff, including cheap fiestaware and other fun dishes. You'll probably see pictures of some of them with food in them on this blog, at some point. This is one of those hidden gem-poke around and maybe you'll strike gold types of places.

me mum with our loot

If you live in or are visiting San Diego, I highly recommend a visit to the Indian shopping center known as Little India, on Black Mountain Road just off Miramar Road. In Little India, you will find several Indian eateries, a yoga/meditation center, a Hindu temple, a large grocery store, a bank, a travel agent, and a fantastic clothing store/herbal beauty salon that will thread your eyebrows for $9. (I can fully recommend the services.)

While there, we ate lunch at Cafe Madras, an unpretentious eatery that has a South Indian menu of dosa, idli, and uttapams, which are a thick dosa-like pancake that has pieces of cilantro, tomato and onions studded throughout. And just like a restaurant of its ilk in India, each table had stainless steel cups and pitchers of water already set. It was tasty and the dosas were proper. I have had better sambar, but considering that two months ago I didn't even know what sambar was, I'll cut them some slack. For those of you who don't know, sambar is a ubiquitous lentil soup that is always served with dosa, idli, utthapam, and wada, alongside coconut chutney. Usually sambar is highly spiced and very flavorful. There was also an all you can eat buffet that included an endless stream of waiters bringing more dosas and idli as long as the person was eating. Next time! I had the vegetable utthapam and my mom had a masala dosa. I love this simple, classic, traditionally gluten free food. In fact, I think that dosa is one of the greatest things on earth. It is a food with immense potential.

After lunch, eyebrows, and a general stocking up of Indian groceries, we headed over to The Fruit Stand. This is a really cute place that sells mostly local and organic (and pesticide free) produce at very good prices. It is just south of the Costco on Morena. We bought fresh organic basil, and at $1 per bunch, how can I not make pesto? 

This recipe is an old standard of mine. I first learned to make pesto similar to this when I was a teenager working in a café downtown San Diego. We used walnuts instead of expensive pine nuts, and we used parmesan cheese. These days, I replace the parmesan with nutritional yeast, and use whatever nuts I want. I am particularly fond of pepitas, or pumpkin seeds. If you have a food processor, then this recipe is super quick and easy. Simply pinch the leaves off the basil stems, toss everything in the FP, and blend away. You want a textured pureé, not a smooth pureé. This is why the FP is better to use than a blender. I have read that proper, true pesto is best made with a mortar and pestle, but I would be surprised if very many of you were going to that route. This pesto is excellent with on a bagel or toast with fresh tomato slices. It is also great as a pasta sauce or on a pizza. I like to have it on hand all summer for all my pesto needs. Whenever I can get my hands on fresh basil, you know I've got pesto in the fridge.

  

Basil Pesto With Pepitas
(makes about 1 cup)

• 4 cups loosely packed basil leaves (no stems)
• 1/2 cup pepitas or pumpkin seeds (walnuts or pine nuts will work as well)
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• 3 cloves garlic
• salt & freshly ground pepper to taste
  

Whirl in a food processor until it reaches your desired texture. If it seems too dry, slowly drizzle in more olive oil. If it seems too oily, toss in another handful of nuts (or more basil). Adjust for salt and pepper.

You could also add olives for a tapenade-pesto blend, or sun-dried tomatoes for another flavor alltogether. Sometimes I make it spicy...

Camel Safari Masala

We recently finished a three day, two nights “camel safari” out of the desert city of Bikaner, in Rajasthan, India. Our party consisted of myself, Ryan, two camel men (Sankar and Aridam), and two camels (Kwalu and Moni). There was one camel for pulling a cart of supplies, one camel for riding. Our playground was a big, huge sahelian landscape, sometimes wilderness, sometimes pastureland and sometimes village, for us to slowly traverse. 

The hours spent riding the camel (or the cart), cooking, eating, and sleeping were lovely. Getting to see wildlife in the wild, and not in a reserve or a zoo, was truly special. We saw countless antelope as well as the occasional wild fox, jack rabbit, and even some elusive blue bulls, which are the largest antelopes in Asia. Unintimidated by our camels or the men driving them, these animals barely blinked an eye at our presence and it was humbling to be amongst them. I loved every minute of our morning and afternoon rides. 

I learned after our safari that our guides were Bishnoi, a people of the Rajasthani desert that have been living in harmony with the environment and animal world for hundreds of years. Bishnoi means 29, which is the number of tenets that this casteless society lives by. Some tenets guide them in how to live in accordance with the environment, others to their relationship with God, others on how to take care of health and body. The Bishnoi have an ingrained love of wildlife, allowing animals of the desert to live and graze on their lands, with no fear of being killed or eaten. (Whenever an animal was spotted, one of the men would point and exclaim “Bulee bull! Photo!”, “Camel baby! Two!”, “Bird! Bird!”, “Antelope! Yin!”, or “Big lizard! Down!”) 

Other than milk, all their food is vegan. Eggs and meat may not even touch the dishes in which they cook and eat. There is no smoking, and no alcohol is consumed by these people. (They weren’t adverse to a little chewing tobacco, though, I noticed)

The food was delicious. (Camping food always is, isn’t it?) We had essentially the same dish for lunch and dinner each day, with variations on which vegetables were used and the addition of rice in the evenings. The camel men both acted as drivers, guides and cooks for us. With almost no English and questionable Hindi, our communication was limited to a vocabulary of about 20 words, a bunch of pointing and pantomiming and lots of smiles and thumbs ups. If something really needed to be communicated, we would call Vinod, the man who set up our safari back in Bikaner and he would help us translate. But that only happened once…the rest of the time we did just fine.

If you can imagine an experience that is both incredibly interesting and boring at the same time, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what this jaunt into the desert was like. Maybe our attention spans are too inundated by a fast paced media, we are too used to our devices and unable to just sit, but the four to five hour siestas (from 10:30-3ish), where we sat out the hot sun under a tree might have been better spent if one of us had remembered to bring a book, or a deck of cards, or something. If you are the kind of person who can sit still for four hours and meditate quietly, or sleep in blazing hot weather, then you’ll absolutely love the quiet respite that this experience offers. Otherwise, take heed and bring your own entertainment for those siestas.

In the event that you decide to book a camel safari out of Bikaner or Jaiselmere one day, I have compiled a list of things that would be helpful to bring along when you go…some of these things we wished we had, and others we were glad we did.

• Pair of wool or cotton tube socks. Why? Wet the sock and put your water bottle inside. Keep the sock wet and you’ll have cool drinking water instead of water fit for a Jacuzzi. This is a trick I learned from my good friend Linda in Ghana.
• Playing cards or other non-electronic entertainment
• A good book
• Your own sheet and small pillow
• Head lamp
• A harmonica or other small musical instrument if you play
• Booze
• A cushy bike chamois (camel riding is hard on the tush region)
• If you want something other than white bread and sugar spread for breakfast, consider bringing your own supplies. No eggs or meat though! You will offend the camel men.
• Wide brimmed hat
• Bug repellant
• Sunscreen

water bottle inna wet sock

Our meals consisted of fresh chopped onions and vegetables cooked in a sauce of chili powder, turmeric, coriander seeds and salt. Spicy, simple, and tasty. The chapatti we ate on safari was delicious and definitely gluten-full. I look forward to creating a GF chapatti when I get home.

I wonder if the fact that Aridam cooked our chapatti right on pieces of gathered cow dung is what made it taste so good…

Here is the recipe for our “Camel Safari Masala”, a simple and tasty dish that can be thrown together in no time and that is perfect for a camping trip, wherever you are in the world. Serve with rice or freshly made chapatti.

Camel Safari Masala

• 1 TBS chili powder
• 1 TBS coriander seeds
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp salt
• 2-3 onions, chopped
• (I’m going to add garlic to the recipe) 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2-3 tomatoes, chopped
• 4-5 cups chopped vegetables (cauliflower, potatoes, zucchini, cabbage, or any combination or just one kind)
• Oil for cooking
• Water

Combine the spices and add a small amount of water to make a paste. Heat the oil and add the onions. When translucent, add the spice mix and the vegetables. Cover with enough water to help cook and to create a sauce. Cook until the vegetables are soft to your liking. Remove from heat and prepare your rice or chapatti.

Chapatti

• 3-4 cups of whole wheat flour
• Enough water to mix it into a kneadable dough

Add water slowly to the flour and mix with your hands until the dough is elastic and smooth (about 5 minutes). Pinch off pieces about the size of a ping pong ball and roll them in your hands until they are smooth balls. Flatten each ball with your hands and then finish shaping by rolling the ball out until it is thin, like a tortilla. Cook dry on a cast iron skillet until bubbles form and it begins to brown. Finish the cooking of the chapattis directly over the flame to brown and crisp further.

making chapatti

  Or, serve the masala with rice. Perfect for camping!

Here is the website of the man who booked our camel safari. He was helpful and reasonable and we recommend.
http://www.vinodesertsafari.com/