Foodwise

This Weekend Cooking post is a hotchpot of food-related topics that have been left stewing the past weeks. I’m focussing on bentos and swaps.

Bentos

Bento making has gotten a bit neglected lately; the following, hastily filled boxes are the only lunches I have to share.

Buckwheat Pancake Bento #205

Rabbit food:

• buckwheat pancakes from Vega Dutchie (which I found too gritty, even more when eaten cold like this)
• cranberries
• Lithuanian dried plum “cake”
• treacle for pancakes in the small container
• cucumber
• corncob
• carrot-cabbage salad with walnuts

MiL Bento #206

The brown rice with ratatouille in the round blue thermos is a leftover from dinner at my mother-in-law’s the night before. The small lock & lock box contains red cabbage coleslaw with apple, raisins and an orange dressing. Two sandwiches in the butterfly bag and clementines for dessert.

Swap-botting

I’ve recently discovered swap-bot. What I don’t like about that other random mail-exchange ‘program’ Postcrossing is that I often put a lot of thought in what I write on a card, but get the shortest messages in return. Also, although I receive awesome postcards every once in a while, many people send free ad cards or touristy multi-views, both of which don’t interest me. On Swap-bot on the other hand there’s themes you can choose — and people that really like to write! A trip down memory lane as I was a fervent penpal when I was young. So thanks to Uniflame for reacquainting me with S-B! :)

Now what does this have to do with food? I hear you think. Well, the first two swaps I joined are food ’n drink-centered.

Tea For You And Tea For Me, What’s Your Resolution?

For the easy Tea For You And Tea For Me, What’s Your Resolution? trade we had to send three bags of tea to our partner plus a note revealing our resolutions for 2013. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but I have things that I’d like to achieve this year concerning my health. So I shared those.

Now the assignment may originally have been quick and easy, it wasn’t as simple as it seemed… My partner Barsook likes green teas — how was I supposed to choose only three??? So I sent her a whole bunch. :)

Myself, I was pampered with five teas in a lovely decorated envelope: pure rooibos red tea, earthy vanilla scented rooibos, Tulsi sweet rose, apricot vanilla crème and jasmine green. But I won’t tell what JessicaLynn1978’s resolution is!

Lovely Vegan Dinner Recipe Swap

Recipe cards seem to be common in the States, but not here in Holland. I very much like the concept though! So I joined the Lovely Vegan Dinner Recipe Swap in which I had to share a virtual meal via recipes for a starter, main course and dessert. All animal-free. Luckily it was okay to make your own recipe cards as long as they had the standard format of approximately A5. So these are the ones I made for lob.

The recipes that travelled on these are:

• simple leek soup
• Ecofabulous red cabbage with tofu & ontbijtkoek (a kind of gingerbread cake which I included)
• chocolate syrup

Now I got the most AWESOME package from long-time veggie Seaglass! She put a lot of effort in making my parcel extra special — she’s the sweetest!

There’s recipes for:

• vegan ‘blue cheese’ dressing
• potato, sorrel & watercress soup
• quinoa salad with tofu
• tofu with snow peas and lemon lime vinaigrette
• spicy polenta with chili paste
• Lisa’s vegan zucchini carrot muffins
• chocolate upside down pudding cake

I have no idea where to start! :D I guess it won’t be the soup though since I have to find out first where to get sorrel (zuring). Any ideas, Dutchies? Should I just go and pick some in the fields? I’m a little afraid of catching tetanus from dog or fox pee… :\

Seaglass also included some empty recipe cards for me to use and a load mouthwatering vegan candy bars — those are hard to get over here! And a packet of California powdered chili for me to compare to its Dutch counterpart: American recipes containing chili somehow always get too hot; even though I can usually handle heat.

I LOVE the paper Lisa (Seaglass) wrote her letter on: it has a heron! So cute!

That’s it for me now. Do you have some foodie news to share for Weekend Cooking?

Vita Bento #203

On Thursday I enjoyed an office lunch with several of the Lithuanian goodies I got from my November Foodie Penpal Vita.

The box up front contains both the kūčiukai and cookie rings (yay, cookies to add carbs to my bento ;) a freeze dried strawberry and candied radishes.

The middle ‘meat & veg’ tier holds some onion-leek-garlic-pepper (yellow & green) stir-fry, slices of Healthy Planet “chicken” fillet, a fresh radish, mini Brussels’ sprouts and a skewer of sliced raja potato and gherkin, all on a bed of corn salad. I also brought a small container of tomato ketchup for the faux meat but forgot to include it in the picture.

Dessert comes last of course: apple & clementine.

I didn’t mean to cross the bento-200 line so silently… Alas, I lacked the time to post numbers 200-202 but plan to make up for that later this month!

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Join us with a food related post in Beth Fish’s Weekend Cooking!

November Foodie Penpal Reveal Day!

YESH! It’s Foodie Penpal Reveal Day!

It was my first time participating but I’m SO happy that I overcame my hesitation and joined. Vita spoiled me with a big box of vegan goodies from Lithuania. Thank you so much!!!

She enclosed a lovely card in fall colours (and glitter — I love sparkly stuff!), explaining the contents of the parcel and her choices. So nice! And handy, since I can’t read Lithuanian labels. :) Are you curious??? Here’s what I got!

Up front is my biggest treasure: Vita’s home-made almond butter with a Dutch label. Vita studied my language for a shortwhile in the past! Wow. I haven’t tried the spread yet because I want to cherish it a little while longer and I didn’t want to open everything at once. I expect it will be awesome on some hot toast… So I’ve taken the necessary steps to finally get a new toaster – ours has been broken for two years! I can’t wait till the morning when I’ll be slathering this fluid gold on my first toast for ages. Mmmmm.

Speaking of gold, you should taste some of the pine bud syrup from the bottle at the back! OMG it’s delicious! I crowned it as my new favourite sweetener, leaving agave syrup far behind. I guess I’ll be booking shopping trips to Lithuania soon! ;)

But for now Vita appropriately sent me Lithuanian Vitamins, to get through winter. These freeze-dried strawberries melt in your mouth and have the full taste of fresh ones, though a bit more sour than I expected. Lovely! Perfect for breakfast, bento, or on the road. I bet Mr Gnoe is going to appreciate these a lot, but I haven’t let him taste any yet. I secretly enjoyed them on my own first. :)

I also got two kinds of cookies, the sweet-ish taste of which slightly reminds me of the Liga bars from my childhood. My mother never bought those, but I got them at a friends house. ;) The poppy seed balls are called kūčiukai, Lithuanian traditional pastries for Christmas Eve. You’re supposed to eat them with poppy seed milk, but as I had no idea what that is and the recipe is pretty time-consuming, I just had them with roasted cauliflower soup. A good combination! Though probably sacrilege. ;) The cookie rings in the green bag are organic wheat “Javine crisps”; Javinés traškučiai.

Now whát are those bright green and pink chips in a bag almost at the back??? Candied radishes! Sounds scary, I know, but they’re quite good. I cannot explain what they taste like, more than “candied radishes”, which doesn’t do them justice. ;)

Last but not least there’s Vita’s favourite nutty buckwheat pasta left to try, and a slice of plum cheese. I’m particularly curious about the latter, which I’ll be having at tea-time or dessert. Maybe after a dinner of buckwheat macaroni with a creamy mushroom sauce and almond topping. :) That brings us to a full circle!

I thoroughly enjoyed this first Foodie Penpal exchange. I hope Vita did too, as well as Sara, the recipient of my parcel in London. She’ll be writing a guest post on Graasland! But for now, please check out some other Foodie Penpal revelations from the link-up.

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Join us with a food related post in Beth Fish’s Weekend Cooking!