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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?
Received
In June and July I received Postcrossing postcards from Germany, Russia, Amsterdam & Almere (Netherlands), Japan, Finland and… Poland — a first! Here’s a photo collage of the cards arriving in my mailbox.
I also received an unofficial postcard from Argentina as swap for the Miffy card (see below) I had sent to valeval on request. It’s really colourful!
There’s a whole set of received postcards on Flickr!
Sent
These are the Postcrossing postcards I have sent in June and July. As usual I tried to fulfill the addressee’s specific wishes as much as possible!
There’s a whole set of postcards I’ve sent on Flickr!
Are you a Postcrosser too?
Today I received this lovely Postcrossing postcard from Germany: a Lily of the Valley (called lelietje-van-dalen in Dutch, and Maiglöckchen in German). Amazone, it’s sender, took great care in finding a card that suits my interests and wrote a little on the back about our similar interests. I love it when people are so kind to a (relative) stranger!
I started Postcrossing in October 2008. I stopped for a while because I received so many (view)cards with only best wishes. What I like about postcrossing is hearing from fellow earthlings around the world, so I prefer it when they actually write to me ;) And sometimes I even think I like sending cards better than receiving them… Until I get a card like today — that makes my day!
It’s been raining continuously but it’s still spring; exactly the atmosphere these lovely dewy flowers communicate to me :)
Now I’m off to draw some new addresses from the tombola. I have this huge pile of unwritten postcards sitting in my drawer and I am not allowed to buy anything new until it has decreased notably — so let’s send them off!
A dream come true: my second Postcrossing postcard came from Japan! I didn’t even know I could receive another one until some more of the cards I’ve sent are registered. I sent a ‘thank you’ to Japan in return. And it’s going well because I have also received a Florida Sunset from the US. All my cards can be found on a special Flickr page for Gnoe’s Postcrossing!
Today I received my first postcard! Some kind of reward for finishing my grant request (in time ;) or consolation for some bad news I got (no, that had nothing to do with my job, LOL).
Anyway, I was very glad to find it in my mailbox! Now I have to wait until the cards I sent have been registered… Postcrossing is an exercise in patience!
I heard about Postcrossing on the Dutch Bookcrossing forum a long time ago, but hadn’t taken much notice. Then she told me about it last weekend when we had our final Twin Peaks marathon… Very enthusiastically! And from today I am officially a Postcrossing member :) This week I will send a postcard to another postcrosser in Finland. She likes to receive cards of buildings :) Well, I like historic stuff, so hopefully this a good one to send.
The building on the card still exists. It used to be a department store called Winkel van Sinkel and now it’s a grand café and night club under the same name. Each September it also houses the yearly Dutch Film Festival. Wikipedia will show you how the building with its caryatids looks today.
The picture on the postcard is from 1890 by a unknown photographer. It is viewed from our public library. I will try to make a picture from exactly the same spot, because I am really charmed by the idea of rephotography as is done by Mark Klett and people from the Tyrrell Today Flickr pool that make new pictures that look like the images from the Tyrrell Collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. See this great post and you’ll probably be as amazed as I am :) (Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum digital media and museums blog gave an inspiring talk on the Museum Congres in Groningen as well!) And all this is getting crazier by the minute: did you know there even is a Twin Peaks rephotography project? :)
Graasland 