Monthly Archives: May 2015

Travel

Oslo

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Easter weekend in Oslo was marvellous. While it rained in Switzerland (ha ha!) we enjoyed deep blue skies and bright sun. I couldn’t get enough of the weather, even if it was a little chilly still. It wasn’t worse than the cold temps back home!

I bleached my hair again right before we left so that I was nordic blonde. Maybe it was the shock of seeing sun again, but I was crazy about taking selfies that weekend.

Yeah, soak up that sun. Mmm.

I also tried to take lots of selfies of me and Kay, because otherwise I would almost never have any pictures of the two of us. He’s so cute too!

We visited the Nobel Museum, the Fram museum, Kon-Tiki Museum, Holmenkollen Ski Museum, National Museum of Art, the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and the Munch Museum.

The Nobel Museum had some very cool interactive design engaging museum-goers. I was really impressed how well it was done.

The Fram museum really tired me out. It was dark and not set up very well and to be honest, I am just not as interested in viking ships as Kay is. He really wanted to go to the Viking Ship Museum as well, but by the time we finished the Kon-Tiki museum, it was too late!

It was a funny shaped museum to match the ships. I was happy to get moving outside. I was starting to fall asleep on my feet!

Since all the museums were closing, we decided to head to the opera house to check it out.

We watched the sun setting until we got hungry and then headed back to the hotel for dinner.

I really liked our Scandic hotel. It was innovative and cool with lots of handy touches. The only negative was that it was a bit cold the first day, so I ran the space heater they provided… but then it was sooo stuffy hot the last night, we could barely sleep and opening a window was not possible.

Aside from that, it was conveniently located at the train station and it had great Norwegian breakfasts!

View below from the top of the Holmenkollen ski jump.

Sooo happy about the sun and good weather! 😀

After the ski jump, museums started closing so we headed down to the brand new renovated harbour.It was beautiful! All the buildings are gorgeous and we imagined ourselves living there some day.

Love is in the air!More new buildings in the “thieves island”.

The main train station with our hotel to the left.

The last night had a wonderful sunset and then on Easter morning when we flew away, it was starting to cover up a bit. We were happy to leave for Munich then.

We had our early morning ride to the airport and then we were off!

Oslo is a beautiful, clean city with easy transportation, lots of museums, wonderful gluten free food options and more. We really enjoyed this weekend trip!

Food

Winter/Spring GF Eats

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We’ve had a fairly cold start to the year with spring taking awhile to get started. Although we enjoyed a little warm weather in the past couple weeks, it went back to the single Cº digits, or around the 40s in Fahrenheit. Boo.

To keep warm, we’ve been eating lots of delicious gluten-free food! Here is a little highlights tour of some of our meals.

I’m slowly trying out GF oatmeal in my diet after over a year quitting oats completely while I flushed gluten out of my system. I need to double check if I have symptoms when I eat it. I did not feel feverish after though and that seems to be a common symptom on gluten for me.

Above was a delicious dinner from cooksmarts with garlic and rosemary cauliflower mash, spicy chard salad and roasted chicken thighs.

I do a lot of fish dinners during the week now because it’s so easy to throw them in the oven with some roasting veggies. Here we had avocado with balsamic cream on the side.

Kay made an Indian Cooksmarts recipe but mixed up “Kümmel” with “Kreuzkümmel” in German and accidentally used caraway (Kümmel) instead of cilantro. It tasted special… not bad, but a little strange. I’m not a big caraway fan. I should probably just chuck it all!

It made good leftovers though!

This Pineapple and Cashew Curried Fried Rice below sadly made me feel awful afterward. It has eggs in it and since this meal, I’ve pretty much been avoiding eggs. It makes me sad, but they are giving me horrible stomach pain.

Easy stir fry beef always goes down well in this house.

And again, filling out the week with an easy herb butter fish tossed in the oven with some veggies. Yum!

I was proud of this one below because I whipped up a random stir fry using random stuff in the fridge, including the sauce, which I normally use a recipe for. It was so tasty!

A friend posted a recipe to a tahini bowl that sounded really tasty, so I made that one day and Kay grilled up some steaks we got on special after Easter. We ate a lot of steak that week and both of us were happy.

Kay also started cooking for me a bit more lately, so he made this lovely garlic quinoa dish that another friend posted. I pinned it ages ago! It was also wonderful. As usual, Kay did the best job plating it. He makes all his recipes look so divine on the plate! 🙂

Right now I am branching back into dishes with lactose to see how I adjust, but we are staying away from eggs and gluten obviously. Sometimes I still get very frustrated how hard it seems to substitute things or know what to cook instead, but we still enjoy a lot of yummy food. I’m just pretty darn compulsive about our meal prepping and cooking. 😉

What’re you cooking lately?

Travel

Weekend Trips Continued

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Like I mentioned in March, we had several short trips planned this year, which is only growing as the year progresses. I am on fire with the cheap airfare.

Athens:

(Picture via Flickr Creative Commons)

This year Swiss labor day falls on a Friday, so I really wanted to take a long weekend somewhere. For a long time, I only found flights for 400CHF or more, but finally a few weeks before the weekend, I caught tickets to Athens for a good price. I’m really looking forward to visiting Greece for the first time this weekend! Kay has already been before, it’s where he met my design friend who introduced us, but I’m looking forward to a relaxed weekend exploring this old city!

Helsinki:

(Picture via Flickr Creative Commons)

The same day I found tickets to Athens, I found tickets for another long weekend in May to Helsinki. We always get Pentecost Monday off, so we’ll head north that weekend for another long trip. We’ve already been to Sweden, Norway and Denmark, so this rounds out our Scandinavian countries.

Now we’ll just need to visit Iceland and see the northern lights somewhere at some point.

Luxembourg:

(Picture via Flickr Creative Commons)

Keeping an eye out for weekend trips for our birthday weekends, I decided to go ahead and book tickets to Luxembourg for my birthday weekend. We don’t have any public holidays then, but the flights are early and Luxembourg is small enough that I think we will see enough.

I’m not sure why, but I was always sort of interested to visit Luxembourg because it’s one of those really small European countries nearby. Usually the tickets flying there are 450-500, but I actually found them for around 200, so I figured it was worth going.

Porto:

 

(Picture via Flickr Creative Commons)

Porto is another city that Kay has had on his list for ages for whatever reason, but the tickets are usually always almost 500CHF. I’ve been checking since January and finally found a weekend this year where the tickets are 250 and we are both here, so off we go!

Our calendar is starting to fill up and I’ve realised that we haven’t even booked any “real” holidays yet. I need to make sure we have enough money for that too with all this weekend traveling! We are also starting to be pros at weekend travel and have really streamlined our packing.

Now, off to Athens today!