Hi, welcome to my blog! 👋
My name is Anna. I live in Finland with my husband, two children and two dogs 🐕🐕 I’ve been blogging since 2021 – you can find my Finnish food blog at https://melkeinvegaani.com.
Since I now have readers from all over the world, I decided to create a second blog entirely for my global readers in English. This way I can make sure that the recipes don’t contain any special ingredients that can only be found in Finland.
I’m passionate about food, because I find cooking really relaxing. I’ve been cooking for over 20 years, but I’m new to the vegan diet. Because familiar flavours are important to my kids, I often make veganised versions of familiar home-cooked meals. I test different products and techniques to find the best substitutes for familiar animal products.
When I started to increase the amount of vegetables in my diet, I found that many vegan recipes tasted very foreign to those of us who were used to meat. My kids were downright resistant to any lentil and bean stew. I started to develop recipes that would appeal to all of us, regardless of our background.
Why I went vegan 🌱
I never thought I would go vegan. We used to eat meat and dairy at almost every meal, you know – just the basic everyday food for a family with kids.
However, in 2019 I became seriously ill and with that I became interested in the health benefits of vegetables. The benefits of a plant-based diet were undeniable, so I started to add plenty more vegetables, fruits and berries to my diet.
My initial intention was to change my diet to be a little more plant-based, but not to make it a special diet, not even close. It sounded really difficult and restrictive…
But my vegetarian experiment unexpectedly went a bit off the rails. We used to have one vegetarian day a week, but somewhere along the way it turned the other way around and we had just one meat day a week. Eventually, even that started to feel redundant.
Yes, I’m a turncoat! 😆
What we eat 🍴
Since I’m the main cook in our family, I kind of accidentally changed their diet as well. My husband turned vegan, too, so we now have two vegans in the family.
However, our kids follow a regular diet outside the home and we also buy dairy and some meat products for them.
I eat 99% vegan, but I still use honey sometimes. When travelling, it is sometimes so difficult to find vegan food that I may eat “regular” vegetarian food as a compromise when travelling.
Why I started this blog ✏️
The purpose of this blog is to store our new favourite recipes in one place. With my new diet, I’ve had to learn how to cook a number of completely new dishes, and in the process I’ve literally thrown many old favourite recipes in the trash.
By the way, we have a policy that each member of the family has their own cooking shifts. So I also publish recipes on this blog under the tag “kids cooking”. These are particularly easy and simple recipes, suitable for beginners.
Give feedback! 📣
Getting feedback from my readers is the best, so feel free to send me a message if you have any questions – I aim to reply to all messages and comments within a couple of days.
