Oh boy, how the time is flying :D I was supposed to publish this text already more than a week ago.. But anyway, let's talk about food! Mmmmm.. Yummy!
One of the first things i was thinking of when i realized i'd be on the road for a good while was FOOD! Of course ;) Food is important for me! I love eating! It's a real SUBJECT for me! And so is tea also. My special super tea made of special super herbs :D
Ok, one of the first thoughts was i must have an electric kettle with me for making tea. And some basic tea herbs like green tea, chaga mushroom (in Finnish pakurikääpä), reishi, milk thistle seed (i just love the qualitys of this miraculous liver healer herb), goji berries (which after all just didn't have the place in my luggage anymore when i left.. too bad..), vanilla (which actually.. well.. just vanished somewhere in all the hassle and at least it did not end up into my luggage?), garden angelica (väinönputki) and the rest i'd get when i had arrived. The rest includes at least some ginger root, cinnamon and chili. And let's say, anything nice i'd find! The first findings were, yes, ginger root, chili and some black pepper. Then i got lost into a local 'supermarket' which was mainly selling highly produced industrial western 'foods'. But also they had some teas, herbs and spices which was a pleasant surprise :) I took a packet of black tea with cinnamon, made a note they are also selling nettle(!!!), picked up a random packet of something which turned out to be a spice blend called coffee masala :D Oh, so lovely! Whaaaat? But you don't even drink coffee..?? Who cares about the coffee if there's this kind of masala! (For those not familiar with the term masala, it means a blend of powdered spices.) It's ingredients are green cardamon, nutmeg, star anis, dry ginger, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, mace, white pepper, black cardamon. So what else would i need to spice up my tea life? Well, thats a pretty good start at least :))) Then sure there's gotta be honey and lemon. They dont have here at all the big yellow lemons that we are used to in Finland, but they have those nice super tiny Asian limes. I like those. Yet there's 'a bit' more work to be done with those to get any amount of the precious juice out of them.. In Finland i often used to use two big lemons a day, here six tiny limes gives maybe the amount of juice of half a lemon. But the sabjiwala (an Indian name for vegetable seller) -lady who sells the limes on the nearby corner already seems to think im a real lime freak buying that six pieces a day from her ;)
So what happened to the crazy nice super smoothies..? My loved super smoothies, i really do miss you.. There wasn't a place for even a stick mixer in my back pack after packing everyhting i thought would be necessary, like water filtering system, some aromatherapy oils, sesam oil, neti pot, hula hoops, pois, some performance outfits, laptop, this and that, etc etc.. So it was a bit sad bye bye for the smoothie scene, at least for a while. But yesterday morning i enjoyd something slightly alike anyway. I had some cocoa nibs, camucamu powder, some mixture of many superfood powders like carob, cocoa, lucuma, baobab, black currant, tocotrienolis, soylecithin and so on. So i poured some of the super herbal tea into a bowl and let it cool down, then stucked some amount of all the above mentioned ingredients into the bowl, added some lime, stevia, honey, little salt, dry ginger powder, olive oil (which i found from that same western spirited supermarket.. thank god! At least some kind of decent fat to eat! On the local stores its available mainly highly raffinated very poor quality oils, i havent even found butter yet. Let alone thoughts of pure virgin coconut and hemp oil, raw non pastourized butter etc..) coffee masala, chia seeds and a good bunch of blessings. Then let it soak for some hours and cut two tiny bananas and half apple into the mixture. Mmhhhhmm.. It was quite nice! Far from the smoothie but it worked.
Im used to eat really a lot of fat. A LOT!! Olive oil, hemp oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, butter, occacional raw goat milk yoghurt, occasional goat/sheep feta cheese, some raw almonds and nuts like macadamia and brazil nuts, cocoa beans and cocoa mass (mmm, not even to mention my chocolate freaky seasons :D ).. oh boy, oooh, awwwh! People tend to think things like indian curries and chinese foods are oily.. But i've really been feeling like starved of fats, im almost on a non fat diet! Nooooo! But today i got a revnge of the non fat diet :)) I made a salad. Yep. Maybe u already knew that my salad might have some amounts of fats hidden into it! Yes it certainly does! (It really was, once again, quite far from the idea of low calorie-non fat-diet food.) And some spices too! My body really needs plenty of fire to function, i just won't do without chili, black pepper, too much salt and a good amount of sour things in my diet.. And specially now here, because the climate is crazy cold (+2 to +16.. ok thats not SO cold to be OUTSIDE temperature..) and extremely humid. And since this is Nepal, and im on a low budget at the moment what it comes to the basic living costs, it means it is at least as cold and humid inside the place im staying. Sometimes it's colder inside than outside. So just imagine +2 inside your room and all the textiles damp.. Hmm..And mainly just ice cold water from the tap (except the occasional treat of hand warm water in the rare times of electricity). Some people maybe might be ok with it. But i have serious difficulties in adapting to any kind of coldness no matter what it is. I dont even consume any ice cream, believe it or not :) ok, sometimes i do eat ice cream.. But that's not even every year! It's just tooooo cold for me to tolerate! No, i also dont drink cold water. Never!! I want my water hot or at least body temperatue. Or as tea ;) And I like the water drinking culture here. When the climate is cold, people are served hot water to drink for example in restaurants.
So my secret garden salad was composed with love and the magic in the air.. I took my dining bowl. Poured into the bottom a fair a mount of olive oil. No we are not talking about a teaspoon or two. It was really almost a desiliter :D Then i started with the powdered spices: a teaspoon of blackpepper, maybe two tea spoons local chili powder (really, these chilies dont have the same kick at all that im used to! I mean the ones i always bought from Helsinki's Hakaniemi area, from the Asian stores), continued with other spices and things: grey Celtic sea salt half tea spoon, then half of a big garlic, two red onions, almost a table spoon of aswagandha, some nutritional yeast, hint of camu camu powder, some tocotrienolis. After that followd quite an exception according to my normal salad system: i added some fruits there too! Handful of grapes, half of an apple (which was the other half of the breakfast's non-smoothie's overleft). The veggies: one crunchy carrot, one cucumber. Then the real thing of the day: yak cheese, a local delicacy. I try to be nice and tell you the piece was some 200grams. The packet didn't have the weight of it mentioned.. But when i think of the sizes of the cheese packets in Finland.. Yeah. Theres no way it was only 200g. It was a lot more. And, hahaa ;) im sure it had way more than 20% fat in it. Yes! Fat!! Oh soooo nice :D So everything got sliced into tiny pieces and mixed with oils and spices and everything and it was so good. Nice. Lovely. Great. Excellent. Gourmet <3 and possibly around 1500kcal fat ;) After eating it all I felt so good, Im still feeling so good!
I think I just have to order some nice fats from the iherb really soon.. At least coconut oil.. And hemp oil could be an option too :) At least it would work for a while, since the temperatures will be fridge cold for some weeks more still, so the storing of it wont be such a big deal (no, the fridge is not available) :) Let's see. Or maybe instead of lovely hemp, i will go for cocoa butter, try to find some local (even if its the industrial pastorized, killed, radiated and homogenized one) butter, and if I really will go wild, I'd also try to get one tiny stick mixer for myself in a way or another.. Smoooooothie... I am missing you my dear.. ;)
