A thousand thanks!

....to all my friends and colleagues from work for sharing Friday night together with me! You made me happy ♥!

Mixed feelings!

...since we are celebrating my farewell from Sweden tonight! Let's hope the day has no ending :=)!

The menu for tonight!

Starters & Main Course
Hummus with pickled vegetables and bread                              
Vegetarian Canneloni with spinachsalad                                    
Köffte (eastern lambbeef) with Tabboulet and baba ghanoush   
The chef's soup (days soup/vegetarian) with bread and aioli        
Moules Mariniere                                                                     
Reindeer Stew with mashed potatoes and blueberries                 

Tapas:
Saltbaked Potatoes with aioli                                                
BBQ-baked lamb with vitaminbomb                                       
Pickled Mushrooms                                                              
Vanilla Salomon on spinashsalad and orangesalt                       
Smoky beansalsa with crostini                                                
Meetballs in roasted tomatoesauce    

....and lots of alcohol!      
Much love!                                

Time flies!

This morning I have put up some advertisement for my furniture. That's crazy! I am feeling like I am only running through my life! Let's have a break :)...when?!

 

Perfectly wonderful!

...........was my last weekend since I have had
my friends here!

We have started every day with a huge breakfast!

To get some rest from our extensive Christmas shopping-tour we enjoyed different cakes in cozy cafe-bars!

A wonderful dinner at a nice restaurant in Stockholm with original chinese food made all of us really full and happy!

Delightful Winter in Uppsala!

During the Winter time whole Uppsala is illuminated by all kinds of different light-installations. Here are my favorite places.

Carrot Cake & self-made Müsli!

....for my beloved friends from Germany that will visit me over the weekend! I hope they will like it as much as I do!

For the carrot cake you will need!
2 eggs,
4 carrots,
2dl sugar,
1/2tbsp Vanilla extract,
1tbsp baking powder,
1tbsp baking soda,
2tbsp ground cinamon,
2dl flour
1dl peanut oil or olive-oil as an alternative.
In addition I have added , a cup of chopped almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and 8 sliced dates.

Start with pre-heating the oven to 175°C. Grate the carrots. Mix vanilla extract, baking soda, ground cinnamon, baking powder and flour. In another container mix eggs and sugar. When the mixture becomes white, add the peanut-oil. Then mix all. When the pastry becomes fairly thick incorporate the carrots. Grease the cake pan. Bake about 35 min. Wait some time before adding the icing sugar on top. For the icing sugar you will need: 200g of Philadelphia, 30 g melted butter, 1dl icing sugar and a table-spoon of lemon juice. Mix all and add to your chilled cake! Finish off with adding some chopped walnuts on top.  Leave the cake in the fridge for a while to cool it down.

Self-made Müsli!

To make your own Müsli is quiet easy and brings you a lot of happiness every morning. You can add any item you want and as much as you want. Here I have used: almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame & coconut fibres, amaranth, dried red & green grapes and oat flakes. All the components I have roasted in a frying pan except the dried grapes and amaranth. Much love!

How to stuff 3 years of life into 7 boxes?

That was my last Sunday-afternoon challenge! At the beginning it seemed almost undoable especially if you are a girl like me that likes to buy clothes, magazines & books and is collecting almost every little beautiful thing! At the end I had to get separated from a lot of things to be successful.
All my 7 boxes together with my bike and my beloved lamps were loaded into that truck that was driving back to Germany today :=(.

The second Advent!

Today I have managed to put up my 'Christmas Star'. It's an original 'Herrenhut-Star" from a company in East-Germany that are producing that kind of stars for more than 160 years. The light makes a really cozy & warm atmosphere...I just love it!

For the 2. Advent-dinner tonight I have made some modified 'swedish meatballs'. The classical ones called 'Koettbullar' contain grated onions and are served with lingonberries jam, smashed potatoes and a thick brown gravy. I have added a lot more: chopped olives, paprika, garlic, capers and amaranth. The meatballs were served together with spaghetti and vegetables. Therefore let's just call them...'Nadja's Italian Koetbullars'!

Have a good week...much love!

Puppy-dog sox!

It's time to do some Christmas shopping. Here comes the first inspiration: a pair of sox.

.... Happy Sunday :)! 

Everything matters. But not as much as you think.

That's what my Mom told me this morning when I was calling her because I didn't get the fellowship that I have applied for! At the moment I am still a bit too sad to really feel it!

Thanks Mom!

The 1st Advent!

..... swedish pepparkakor, handmade choclates, and some swedish glögg! Every year they are selling a special edition: this year it's a white one with Saffran...mmmhh quite exquisite! This was just the warming-up since tonight I am invited to join a 'Första advent fika' at a friends place from work.......HURRA!

A frosty & sad morning!

This morning I have send out the invitation to my goodbye party. The 22th of December will be my last day here! After almost three years living in Sweden I can't speak swedish but I feel swedisch. I will miss it sooo much. ♥!

HURRRA. It's white everywhere! Since yesterday afternoon it doesn't stop snowing!

Jamies's 30-Minute Meals

That's the title of Jamie Olivers new book. I really like his style of  preparing food. The first recipe of that book that I have tested so far is the RED-PRAWN-CURRY. http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/seafood-recipes/thai-red-prawn-curry-jasmine-rice-cucumb
He claims that this book is a revolutionary approach to cooking good food fast....that means in 30 minutes. For me that approach failed completely. It took me 90 minutes. However the result was fantastic! Since I love to cook I don't mind to cook good food crazy slowly :=)!

How to beat your sugar addiction?

Sport, sport and sport again! No that does not work. A big sugar temptation here in Sweden are the huge candy-shelves that you have to face every single time you enter a grocery shop.You can get more than 60 different candies in every taste and shape that you can't imagine. And I can tell you most of them are heavenly delicious. So what to do. You just ignore the candy-shelf and leave without a single candy. However that does not work either. Since if your sugar craving starts it leads you directly back into the grocery shop and unfortunately they have open until midnight. Therefore I just gave up and buy me candies every time and even the procedure to choose them makes me feeling happy!

A typical swedish November morning!

Looks like that: gray and dull. There is no day-light at all and if you would not know better you could think of it's getting afternoon! However  this morning is actually really delightful since I am looking forward to the dinner tonight. My friend Shiying is preparing a three-course dinner and the main course will be a Beijing Duck with hot-sour Chinese cabbage!

Shiying, you are my little sunshine.

 

Things are not always as gray as they look like!

Life is too short for a bad meal!

Especially a Sunday! Therefore I decided to make chicken legs for Dinner! The legs were soaked in an essence of 8 different components for the whole day. After frying them on both sides they were served with green vegetables and rice!

Pandora's Box

 

It's done! I finished the preparation of my sequencing samples! Juhuu! Since July I am working on that while jumping from one problem to another one. But finally I got them ready! Now they will send out for sequencing analysis! Let's hope that the results reveal something exciting. But anyway, it has to be celebrated...:)! Where are the drinks! 

Walnut-Chocolate Cake for FIKA

Today was a happy day! Together with a piece of Walnut-Chocolate cake a lovely card was placed on my office-desk this morning. It was an invitation for FIKA from my friend Kristin. FIKA is a social institution in Sweden. It means having a coffee with one's colleagues, friends, dates or family. That kind of 'taking a break from work' is such a great swedish invention that I don't want to miss it anymore. And the Walnut-Cocolate was really delicious. But not enough with that! A really good salmon sandwich together with a asparagus-soup
made me happy for lunch!