18th day without meat | Mushroom lasagna

Dear cupcakes,
Today is my 18th day as a (temporary) vegetarian.
Not that I'm counting...
I just wanted to start off with a straight fact.

During this short amount of time I already learned a flippin' lot!

Happy international women day

Something you should see :
{and it isn't KONY 2012}

Sasha grey for equal pay day

Stressing out | a non-recipe: chocolate flake cookies

Stuff I do when I'm stressing out:

# tell everybody how stressed out I am.

How to be an awesome hostess | no big deal chocolate chip cookies

I absolutely love it when people drop by at my place for A Cup of Joe and a chat. 
As I live close by the city center and my love for a good cup of coffee is common knowledge among friends and family this luckily happens quite often.
When there is a coffee-related surprise visit there are some basics that need to be covered;

No big deal chocolate chip cookies

24 before turning 24 | semplice insalata di pasta italiana

Today is my fifth day as a temporary vegetarian {for more info click here or here}and I already ate some incredibly good stuff. Stuffed red onion, mushroom lasagna, pasta italiana, ... I'll try my best to put the adapted recipes on here asap.

vegetarian antipasto salad as a lunch on the train.

I could have called this salad: simple vegetarian antipastopasta salad. But seriously; why should you call it like that if you could easily use translate.google.com to spice this shit up?


Now on a completely different note! As I told you before I wrote a letter to myself to read one year from now, when I'll be turning 24. Old and shit. Life moves fast. One day you're crawling around with a diaper and the next second you're living alone doing grown-up stuff. Together with that letter I made a list with 24 things to do before I turn 24.

23 random joyful facts | Birthday

23 joyful facts on the first day of my life as a 23-year old

1. Yesterday I had the most amazing birthday ever.

2. The day {and night} was filled with love, laughter, pie and booze.

3. Right now, my kitchen table is filled with pie leftovers, empty botles of wine and roses.

4. Today, I wrote a letter to myself to read a year from now. I'll try to post it tomorrow on here. No promises.

5. I baked two pies yesterday. A chocolate-meringue pie and my no-fail apple pie. {recipes coming soon}

6. The chocolate meringue pie failed hard.

7. My dear friends baked some delicious goods themselves. There was a chocolate mousse pie, a frangipane-pearcake and home made cookies in different varieties. I felt very blessed.

8. My friends made me a crown. They've put a lot of work into it. I wore it ALL NIGHT. I was very proud to have such amazing friends.

9. Today we ate leftover birthdaycake as breakfast. It's my favorite! 

10. I loved to win every discussion with the argument: 'but it's my birthday, so I'm right...'

11. My little sister laughs at my poor English grammar. She's right. That sucks.

12. She became a fan anyway. Deep down (really deep though) she's a sweetheart.

13. My friends are AWESOME at picking out things I like.

14. I got 2 cookbooks: Vegalicious and a DonnaHaybook.

15. I got 4 beautiful, big, colorful, eclectic plates. I couldn't have chosen them better myselve.{pictures; soon} Mr boyfriend gave me a big white tappasplate. It's so simple and lovely. He's the best.

16. On her way to the party one of my friends dropped her present; so one superduperprettypink bowl was broken before it even got here. She felt terrible. Lucky enough the smaller one survived. It's so completely my style and I'm absolutely in love with it.

17. One of my best friends stayed over to sleep. I love it when she sleeps over; it always feels like a slumberparty that way. We giggle and eat pie in bed and talk shit about everything. We find ourselves incredibly funny. 

18. That's cause we are. Duh.

19. The 22d year of my life was a magical one. I don't like to talk all butterfly and rainbow with unicorn shizzle, but if I had to describe my past year it would be exactly like that.

20. Life right now is going bonkers; so I'm pretty sure next year has the power to beat the previous one in terms of awesomeness. 

21. Twenty three sounds really adult-ish. 

22. I didn't do shit today; except lying in bed and writing that letter {see 4.}

23. It was the best day after my birthday ever!

Picture taken in Budapest by my dear and extremely talented friend Alex.

My last days with meat | Parsnip and apple soup with bacon

So, this is it. My final days of eating meat before the Days without meat-challenge (DWM) starts. From the 22nd of fFbruary on I won't eat meat, nor fish, for 46 days. At least; that's the challenge.

For more information click here for a previous post or here for the {dutch} website with all the information and stuff...

So right now, I'm saying goodbye to bacon; goodbye lovely chicken; goodbye delicious salmon and goodbye steak sandwiches. I'm cleaning out my fridge while saluting all of these loved ones who didn't make it to the end.

But hey, let's take a look at the brighter side; Hello falafel! Good evening vegieburger! Welcome home marinated tofu! Nice to meat you, chickpea's!

For the ones that will ask thé question: No, I don't really talk to food! Ok, .. just sometimes maybe... Once in a while... quite often, actually. So what?

While cleaning out the fridge I found these little pieces of bacon. They fit in just perfect with this parsnip velouté.