Give Me Bananas

I know, this title sounds so incredibly epic but I’m still in shock. In a good way.

It takes some time to wrap my head around it all but I just wanted to let you know about what happened.

Today I handed in my notice.

I will continue to work in the office until 31 December but I handed in my letter of resignation early because my boss will leave her position in September and I didn’t feel like dropping the bomb on her successor on his first day of word.

My hands are shaking a bit and I can’t form any proper sentences. Can someone slap me please?

So I’ll keep this short so I can go and dance/scream/laugh/cry/whateverthehellkarinfeelslike.

I’ll tell you all about my secret now.

On 4 January I will fly to San Jose, Costa Rica and travel around in the country, as well as in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador for two FRIGGIN! months.

After that I’ll stay two weeks in Switzerland.

And then I’ll move to London where I will go and study for the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English exam for three months. Then I’ll hopefully find a job.

AND ALL THIS SETTLES BEFORE MY HOLIDAY IN THE STATES!

Well I knew that I “had” to hand in my resignation before I leave but it feels so.. real now! I don’t mind change but it’s still making me nervous.

Am I really leaving my great governmental job and grab all my savings and explore the world?

This must be someone else’s life, not mine.

I need to breathe.

I’m so sorry for my rant but I guess you understand how wonderfully overwhelming everything feels like right now.

I’ll chime in tomorrow when I’m hopefully more like myself again. In the mean time, go and make my apricot jam.

Love and peace and thank you for joining me on this journey.

Yeah I ain’t kiddin. –>Do you believe my fake southern accent? I’m obsessed with saying "shiiiiaaat" the True Blood way right now.

But seriously now: I am not kidding!

What I hate most about jams are the ingredients. Sure, there’s a huge amount of fruit in there which is, however, closely followed by tons of sugar and sometimes some other weird little ingredients.

But then again I didn’t find any semi-healthy recipes! (I’m still no fan of cooking with tons of sugar) Long story short: I simply made my own jam.

Give Me Bananas Apricot Jam!

Ingredients (for 2 medium-sized jars):
- (approximately) 600g of fresh apricots
- 150g agave

Directions:
Remove the pits and chop up the apricots.

Combine them with the agave in a medium pot.

Let the mixture cook on a low heat (just hot enough so it bubbles a bit) for 30-60 minutes, depending on how “chunky” you want the jam to be.

That’s all! You can go and dance a bit in between. Or maybe do some studying, if you must.

I still have a shitboatload of apricots left so I will definitely make a second batch before I’ll leave.

Go and make this jam RIGHT NOW! You won’t regret it, I promise.

It also freezes well in case you won’t be able to gobble up that much jam by yourself.

Happy cooking!

For some weird reason I still remember the first time I made quinoa. I saw a recipe that sounded amazing and had my parents and sis over for dinner so I whipped up a quinoa salad (with spinach, mozzarella and pine nuts). Thinking about it makes me drool. I have make that dish again soon.

Ever since I’ve been in love with keen-wah.

My boyfriend is not a huge fan because he kind of overdosed on it when he was a kid (healthy mum! me likes!) but I wasn’t really familiar with it so I started to cook it extremely often. I don’t seem to get sick of it!

Yesterday night I prepared some quinoa for today’s and tomorrow’s breakfasts. I cooked some (pre-cooked) black quinoa with rice milk, dates, banana slices, almond slivers and a bit of cinnamon and got this really nice porridge.

It might look a bit ugly but it sure as hell is a keeper.

Other great quinoa eats:

• Quinoa pasta
• Quinoa salad
• Quinoa with basil and pine nuts
• Quinoa porridge (That post is actually titled with “I Love Quinoa (And My Sister Too)” – guess I really like quinoa, hehe)
• Leftover quinoa in a wrap
• Quinoa pesto mix (oh my what an old post!)

There are lots of other quinoa ideas but I could go on and on forever and you’d still be reading the next week .

Q: What’s your favourite quinoa-based meal? I can’t decide. I really love the sweet porridge version but I also love it in salads, etc.. It’s so versatile!

Oh! Hello!

That title isn’t really true, I took the pictures while walking back home . I actually spent 2 hours of the afternoon at the Marzili and now I have tanning lines! Ha! I actually don’t really like sunbathing (as I feel rather uncomfortable in my bikini in public..) but my paleness is utterly shocking.

Thank you so much for your comments – I feel much better now. I felt nauseous during yesterday’s Switzerland-Honduras match but a good night’s sleep felt like magic.

And now I’ll head to my parent’s home on my mountain bike!

Well.. ok, it’s rather a machine than a mountain bike but I love this baby!

We will have a nice barbeque at my parent’s.. it’s the first “real” one this summer. I can’t believe that it’s already end of June… We used to bbq all the time when we were kids. Back then it felt like summer was endless.

I hope you’re having a sunny and wonderful Saturday as well!

Q: Are there any special childhood memories that you cherish? I’m really grateful that my childhood was so full of love and happiness. And I especially cherish the memories of us having tea on Sunday’s at my grandma’s.. and said bbq parties. They were fantastic.

All day long I’ve been lying around, watching Season 7 of “24”, downloading podcasts, reading running magazines and listening to the Eclipse soundtrack (check out “Ours” by The Bravery! That song is kind of silly but so danceable and fun!).

Being ill has its good sides.

What sucks though is that I’m not even 100% ill! Just incredibly blah-ish but luckily not like I’m going to die. You know what I mean? It’s ok if you don’t

Moving on…

Thanks for the votes! It seems like we have a winner!
Here are the results:

Alplermagronen = 3 votes

Nusstorte = 4 votes

Graubünden Barley Soup = 2 votes

The nut cake it is then!

However, I will make the other two dishes in the following weeks as well. I really want to try making them.

Speaking of trying something new…

I needed a stabilizing and good lunch today and only had three things on my mind:
Red lentils
Brown rice
White coconut milk

I know that it looks awful but I took approximately 10389498 pictures and none of them turned out well. Too bad because this meal was truly amazing.

Coco Nutty Lentil Rice!

Serves one hungry trooper

Ingredients:

• 1/4 c red lentils
• 1/4 c brown rice
• 1/4 c coconut milk
• 1 c water
• 1 chopped tomato
• 1 tiny zucchini, sliced
• 1 small chopped carrot
• salt and pepper
• coconut oil

Directions:

Cook the lentils and rice with water for 20 minutes. Add salt and pepper, tomato and carrot and continue cooking for 10 minutes.
Add the coconut milk to the party and let it simmer until it’s not soup-like anymore and the rice is done.

While it’s cooking, sauté the zucchini with a little bit of coconut oil until it gets soft and a bit brown.

Pour the “stew” into a bowl and top it with the zucchini. Add preferred toppings (I added hummus and shelled hemp seeds).

Enjoy!

I’ll continue watching 24 now. Go Jack, go!

Have a good Wednesday!
Switzerland won the match against Spain and there’s a crazy noise outside! I get that people are happy (and let’s be honest here – no one thought that they would win) but damn it.. after a few hours it gets annoying! Am I becoming a grandma? Could be possible.

Q: Do you watch the World Cup?

I couldn’t publish this post yesterday for some reason… Let’s hope it works now.

There are few grains that I’ve ever cooked with. One of them is MILLET! I’ve had that lone package of millet for ages and finally gave it a try yesterday.

I had millet before but I’ve never cooked it myself which is also the reason why it took me 298583 years (and a few months) to try it.

I present you the Not So Average Millet and Chickpeas Dish!

Serves 4

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dry millet
• 4 cups water
• salt
• approximately 2 cups cooked chickpeas
• 1 onion (halved and sliced)
• 2 carrots (sliced)
• olive oil
• ground cumin
• 1/4 c raisins

Directions:

Cook millet according to the package (mine said to cook it with water and a pinch of salt for 13-15 minutes). In the mean time sauté the onion slices in a bit of olive oil. Halfway through cooking the millet, add the carrots and cumin. Once the millet is done add the chickpeas, onion slices and raisins.

It couldn’t be more simple!

Sorry, this pic is pretty ugly but I was HANGRY and needed my food fast! I’m sure you guys understand . On the side I also had a tofu kebab which went well with the millet dish.

Mmm I LOVED it! I had leftovers for lunch today and my co-worker said that it smelled so good. Mmm yes it was. Thankyouverymuch.

My day was pretty non-eventful. I was busy at work since we have a big event tomorrow night (which I am not looking forward to. I like my job but working til 9pm is not my idea of a “fun night out”).

Tonight’s pilates class was ok. We have a fairly new trainer and she keeps things very basic so it’s been boring me a lot. Actually.. Few people know that I once started to train to become a pilates teacher! I gave up after the second course because I’ve been too busy and couldn’t deal with everything at the same time.

Ha. That was some sort of random fact about myself.

Tell me one random fact about you!

I LOVE finding out random facts about other people . In fact (no pun intended) I always remember the weirdest facts about people – mainly celebrities. Yes, that’s what you need to know in life.

Darn. Is it 10:32pm already? I actually wanted to go to bed early so I could leave for the gym am 5:30am (crazy? Yes indeed, I don’t deny it). We’ll see how that goes.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to blog again because of tomorrow’s big event (and me getting home really late) and my trip to LONDON this weekend! I worked my butt off in March and can use my overtime for a few more days off so we’ll fly to London on Thursday night. I CAN’T WAIT! I will blog over there though (as often as possible) because the boyfriend is taking his laptop with him. Hooray!

But for now.. GOODNITE!

ps: the legs workout that I mentioned in my last post is a killer and I did it again today. My butt is in pain!! (Ok, I’m pretty sure you all wanted to know that.. –>insert heavy sarcasm)

ok I’ll go now.

See ya.

Sweet dreams.

Hasta luego.

Oh KARIN! Shut up already will ya???

..ok…

There are 3 main ingredients that you need for a good and simple veggie lasagne:

1. Tons and tons of veggies (duh)
2. Béchamel sauce
3. pasta

First you cook a huge load of mixed veggies (I used 1 yellow & 1 red bell pepper, 3 carrots, a few leaves of savoy cabbage, 1 zucchini and 1 aubergine) with one can of crushed tomatoes. Let it simmer for a few minutes and turn down the heat.

Next up is the béchamel sauce. To make that sauce you need 3 ingredients:

1. Butter
2. Flour
3. Milk

First melt 30g of butter on low heat then mix in 2 tbsp of flour. Let it brown a bit but watch it carefully! Afterwards stir in 4dl of milk and continue stirring (very important!) for about ten minutes. Season with salt and nutmeg and you’ve got your perfect béchamel sauce.

Now comes the fun part. LAYERING!

Béchamel sauce, pasta (uncooked!), veggies, béchamel sauce, pasta, veggies… until nothing’s left.

There you’ve got your perfect lasagne!

Now just top it with a bit of cheese (opt.) and you’re good to go (well after baking it for 30 minutes of course. You wouldn’t want to eat “crispy” pasta, would you?)

Ok, Italians would probably shoot me for butchering up that lasagne but it’s still an unbeatable recipe if you want a quick and good treat.

My boyfriend and I actually cooked veggie lasagne on our first date and it’ll always be dear to me.

Random meal of the day:

That, my friends, are defrosted zucchini patties from 9829847 years ago, topped with rice mung beans and savoy cabbage.

Oh and there was an egg or two too..

Ok, I’ll have to go and continue praying. My leg has been hurting like hell for the past few days which is making me slightly nervous since the race is in.. oh.. 2 days. Huh.
Or in other words: I’M FREAKING OUT!!

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

It’ll be fine. And if not..
well we still have two days.

Q: Have you ever had an injury? I haven’t! 23 years without one broken bone or any other kind of injury. I just hope that this trend continues *knock on wood*.

Hello!

Remember me?

Brown hair, witty, amazing taste in music?? haha!

I am currently living life (!!) aka going to amazing yoga classes, celebrating a friend’s birthday and eating fantastic risotto.

It’s currently 11:51pm and I’m so freaking grateful that it’s finally the weekend.

Tomorrow I’ll tune in and let you know how our 11 miles run went. I will make sure to whip up some Thrive goodies as well – I can’t wait to make energy drinks and recovery shakes!!!

But now I have to go to bed.

Sweet dreams!

I feel kind of drained. (Almost) literally.

Sadly not because of Eric Northman

source

I went and donated blood for the third time yesterday. Donating blood is very important to me even though I’m not a huge fan of that red liquid. Or needles.

So why do I donate blood?
First of all I think that it’s an amazing and easy way to help people. Blood is always needed and you never know who you’re going to save with a donation. It might sound overly dramatic but blood can’t be “created” and with every donation you’re helping a person.

One of the most important reasons why I decided to donate blood is my blood type. I’m a AB+ which is not a very common blood type. Only 5.06% of all people have AB+ so I felt like it was my duty to donate blood. However, all blood types are needed and every donation is important.

source

It took me some time to make an appointment for my first donation though. I’ve got to admit that I was a chicken. Let’s face it: The thought of draining me wasn’t that appealing. However, what’s a split second of “pain” compared to a lost life due to lack of blood? Again, I don’t want to sound like a drama queen but someone could die if there’s not enough blood.

I really want to persuade everyone (who can) to donate blood. It’s a simple and easy thing to do and doesn’t hurt at all. The thought of helping someone only through my blood makes me really happy.

But let’s quickly get rid of a myth: Vegetarians can donate blood! (Surprise surprise)
When I went there for the first time one woman honestly told me (in a “I don’t believe it!!!”-voice) that some girls don’t eat red (shocker!!). I then told her that I was a veggie and she shut up. Hmmm.

However, anaemia (or anemia) is not uncommon so I can see why she mentioned the red meat. My haemoglobin (or hemoglobin) is ok though (it’s never been a problem before) and I’m not even taking iron supplements. As long as you take care of your diet (and the iron intake of course), you’ll be fine.

Tips for blood donors:

• Do some research. Check if you are allowed to donate blood.
• HYDRATE! It seriously makes all the difference in the world. The blood flows faster and you’re not feeling weird afterwards
• Eat. I think I don’t have to tell you how important food is
• Go with a friend/partner/family member when you’re a first timer. I went on my own but being with familiar people probably makes things less scary (if you are scared that is).
• Don’t be nervous. They’re all nice people

Want to know more about donating blood in your country? Here are some helpful links:

Switzerland
Germany
England and North Wales
USA
Australia
Canada

(Missing your country? Let me know )

Q: Have you ever donated blood?

If not: Why? don’t want to sound accusing here.. no worries .

If yes: What was your experience like?

Friends,

I forgot my camera at my parent’s place and I’ve used my sister’s all day long and now I can’t find the cord, argh.

Anyway, I will catch up with you guys and tell you all about the two lessons I learned yesterday tomorrow. For now I will take the missing camera and cord as a sign and lie down and hope that my weird nausea will go away soon. Don’t worry, I’m fine. Please apologize the lacking decent posts yesterday and today – sometimes life just gets in the way.

xk