I have good news! After my recent healthy food inspiration, I've finally activated my food blog. I love eating, and I want to remember all of my fantastic recipies, but this Raindeer Pants blog is not the right place for them.
This is where I collect my recipies, so that I won't lose them. It's not intended to be a serious food blog for those who are serious about cooking. I keep it mostly for myself. But because I apparently eat weird things, some people might find it interesting too.
So if you want to see kitchen disasters and some pretty strange ingredient mixing, Raindeer Fodder might provide you with some pathetic entertainment. And it might be a useful resource if you're a young person who only just recently left their nest and mummy doesn't cook for you any more. It will help you to get some variety in your diet when you get bored of pot noodles or frozen pizza!
It's sunny outside! Unfortunately it doesn't mean that it's warm. Today it's been only 3 degrees and I had to wear my winter coat again.
But this spring I will try and start eating healthier food. More fruit and vegetables and less frozen pizza. Healthier food gives you more energy, right?
Maybe it's all the sunniness that's made me want to eat healthier. I've been living on hamburgers, cheesy pasta and frozen pizzas for way too long.
But I just went to a supermarket and bought loads of fruit and vegetables.
Vegetables!
I've been dreaming of healthier food. But over the past couple of weeks I just haven't had the energy or the time to try out new recipies. But now I finally have lots of healthy things I could eat! Laura is slightly suspicious whether I'm actually going to eat everything I bought. Now I have to prove her suspicions wrong.
I also read a very inspiring blog post in Peaches Blog(in Finnish) recently! The author, Vilma, is a vegetarian and has written a few posts about her diet. Recently she did a post about a smoothie she had for dinner/snack. It includes coconut milk, almond milk, fresh pineapple, kiwi fruit, nuts, maca and spirulina.
It sounded awesome. And I wanted to try and make it too. Maybe the best thing about it was that instead of publishing a proper recipe Vilma just briefly explained what she did.
And I bought a blender last month. Because it sounded like a fabulous thing. But then I realised that I don't know what to do with it. So this smoothie is going to be the first thing I'll actually attempt to make with it!
If you know any other fantastic vegetable or fruit based meals, let me know – I need inspiration!
Some people think that students are just lazy nocturnal creatures who don't need to do much apart from lying around all the time. Especially arts students who rarely have classes to go to. Because I have years of experience of what student life actually is like, I decided to write this blog post to show some of the challenges I've had to face during this past week. It's shocking how hard life can sometimes be for students. And because some of you are students and already understand what your life is like I have an added bonus at the end of this post where I will provide you with fun decoration tips that will make your flat look more student-like.
This week
There are a few essential things in life. The most important one is food. Students love food - especially free food. There's this wonderful pub called Korova in town. Before, I've only ever ended up there when I've been fairly drunk - occasionally too drunk for them to let me in. But last Wednesday we had a little flat outing and went there when they were serving free food. It obviously was mostly just a trick to get students in so that they would buy drinks. This assumption was confirmed when we walked to the bar to ask about the food and the rude lady behind the bar told us that "it's not free", and that we "have to buy drinks first". Well, we did that, and got a plate full of pub food. Not bad for less than £2.
You can't get free food everyday though, and sometimes you have to cook. Cooking is not easy though.
Kata experienced a pea attack.
Frozen peas especially are not easy to deal with. Sometimes they jump on you when you open the freezer. And then there's peas all over the floor - and that's a safety hazard.
Peas where they should be.
If you survive to cooking procedure, you get to eat homecooked food which unsurprisingly tastes a lot better than free pub food. But student life challenges don't end there. Sometimes after a meal you want something sweet. But student fridges are funny places.
Hygiene+ has kidnapped my Swiss chocolate!
My chocolate has frozen to the back wall of my fridge. Is it trying to ensure that I really want to eat the chocolate? Anyhow, it's very inconvenient.
The next thing is not really an inconvenience but it's a thing that students don't tend to do.
Ironing.
Poor Pikachu.
I had to iron this week. Turned out that the Pikachu costume I ordered online was vacuum packaged and if I had worn it without ironing I would have looked like a very wrinkled Pikachu.
I don't write this blog as often as I would like and all of my blog posts have become ramblings about how I would like to live a happier life and how people should care about each other and do more things they would like to do. And guess what I am going to write today! Yes, exactly the same stuff, because I still think it's important. And this is my blog and you are voluntarily reading it.
My last post was about how I would like this year to be happy because last year was absolute rubbish. And that is more easily said than done. But there are a couple of things I am trying to do to reach this goal.
1) Work out what gets me down.
Of course depression is more complicated than this, but depressed people are allowed to enjoy life too. And most of us are unfortunate enough to know a lot of idiots. Which is why we should look for people whose company we actually enjoy and whom we love and spend as much time with them as possible to balance out those rubbish times with the scumbags whose company we cannot avoid.
2) Eat good things.
I've discovered avocados. They are my new favourite thing. I am getting a vegetable bag through my university's Environment and Ethics committee. This means that every week I give them £6 and they give me edible things that I have never seen before. Here, for instance, is a fennel. I had never even heard of them, and suddenly I had one.
I might post a cooking related blog post as some point. I know all of you are anxious to try out my awesome recipes!
I also think you should be allowed to eat things you enjoy, and not only try and eat ridiculous healthy stuff that you have never even heard of before. So if you want that blueberry muffin, you go and eat the blueberry muffin. As long as you did not skip lunch.
I also believe in supplements, but instead of going with the multivitamin, I have filled a cupboard with loads of different things. Now I can choose what I feel like taking each day. Today I took C vitamin, D vitamin, iron and tyrosine.
3) Don't become a sofa potato.
I love my sofa. And it is freezing cold outside. It is either snowing or raining some icy stuff out there. But I am forcing myself to go out and do things and to gain life experiences. Last week I went bowling and tried out dodgems. Bowling involved throwing heavy balls on a long and slidy piece of floor and trying not to throw myself with it. A bonus was if the ball hit the cones that you are meant to knock over. Dodgems are little electric cars that did not feel much like cars, and crazy university students would drive around them really fast and bump into each other. They were probably meant for kids but it was surprisingly fun!
This week I have eaten pancakes, laughed, forced myself to go to pub for a drink with strangers and got on stage to pretend that I haven't forgotten what acting is. Today I am going swimming and dancing. I should probably leave now.
Basically, I still think that a world is a wonderful place but that sometimes the happiness is just very well hidden. I will keep looking for it. Let me know if you have seen it recently.
Let me tell you a story. Yesterday, my very foolish flatmate asked if I could cook for us. I didn't have time to go to a supermarket to buy any food so I told her that I could do it if she would be happy to eat whatever I had in the cupboard.
The truth is that I can't really cook. I'm very happy to feed myself though and I'll just cook things that I would like to eat. Lately I've been eating a lot of pasta with cheese in green curry sauce. According to some people it's weird.
Pasta with cheese in green curry sauce.
When I got home I looked into the cupboard to see what I had. There was cheesy pasta, crushed tomatoes, canned meatballs, red pesto, chow mein stir fry sauce, jelly, a pot noodle, red kidney beans, black eyed beans and chick peas. I had no idea what to do with all the beans and peas, but I figured that my foolish flatmate could eat them.
I ended up cooking some mince from the freezer. I learned that you should really defrost it properly before trying to fry it. But in the end it was all okay and I added some crushed tomatoes and black eyed beans with it. I learned that although it's apparently easy to cook things that come in cans, it's really not easy to open the cans. And then I just stirred half a jar of pesto in with the mince and the beans and let it boil a bit. And voilà it was ready to be served with the rice that was ready before I had even started the cooking because it was very difficult to fry the mince that very closely resembled an ice cube.
My flatmate did eat the food. But she said that she would have normally used pesto with pasta and chicken. I thought it went perfectly with mince and rice.
Do you think we're just too used to associating certain foods and tastes together? To give an another example, I used to cook fish fingers with pasta on Tuesdays. This mainly happened because the person who I was feeding them didn't want me to boil rice, that I would normally eat them with, because she didn't trust my rice boiling skills. She protested eating fish fingers with pasta for a while too, because according to her they should always be eaten with chips. In my opinion eating fatty fish fingers with fatty chips would have been too much. But in the end she got used to eating them with pasta.
So my point is, why do people do this? Why do we like ready meals so much? Where do these set structures of what is meant to go together come from?
Another example involving fish fingers is the first episode of the 5th series of the new Doctor Who serials where the eleventh Doctor Who is hungry after his regeneration and asks 7-year-old Amy Pond to cook him various different things. In the end he asked if he could have some fish fingers with custard.
The Doctor happily eating fish fingers with custard.
Amy Pond found this very strange. And the viewers were meant to find it strange too. But why? Why are we so used to eating what we think is right to eat? There are people who go on holidays to foreign countries and take food from home with them just because you can't buy it in their destination. Why are we so afraid of trying new things? In some cultures insects are the greatest delicacy. I'm not telling you to eat insects, although they are full of protein and potentially quite good for you. In our culture they are not something that we would think to eat. But they do sell a lot of things in supermarkets that we are allowed to mix and match if we're brave enough.
Oh, and yes, I do find Doctor Who as a very educative program. Here's the bit with the fish fingers and custard!
Now I'm off to possibly play some golf. Have a tasty evening!
