Holiday photos from Finland

Here are some of my holiday photos from Finland trying to transmit the holiday atmosphere and whatever I got up to there. I hope you'll enjoy these photos. I have a few more Finland posts in store, which I will post as soon as possible.

Helsinki and Flow Festival

First of all I arrived in Helsinki with my partner, where we met a very good friend of mine and also visited a music festival called Flow. In Helsinki city we went to the Market Square as usual, as there are so many lovely looking stalls offering local produce. There's nothing better for me than fresh Finnish summer produce. I especially like fresh chanterelles, they are so very tasty. We also visited a covered food market next to the Market Square outdoor market.

Flow Festival had a whole section selling vegan street food, and I had to try several things as you can imagine, even when I wasn't that hungry anymore. Unfortunately I didn't manage to try all of them, but was very well fed for the festival day. I have another post coming, where I'll write about a couple of more dishes from there, but these kale-broadbean sticks with pea hummus were just lovely and so was a falafel platter with dips.

Helsinki is a very pretty city in the summer. If you have never been, I can only warmly recommend.

At home

After the visit to Helsinki it was time to go home to visit my family. At my mum's and granddad's places I got up to the usual summer activities of the countryside, foraging, walking in the forest and going to the sauna. These are the most relaxing things I could do on my holiday and I do feel really refreshed after this.

The forests were absolutely loaded with lingonberries, it looked so pretty. I like lingonberries, although they are very intense tasting and can be overpowering. However they are so healthy. This summer has also been very good for wild mushrooms in Finland (both edible and poisonous ones, need to be very careful when foraging) and we managed to find some chanterelles. I made a cheesy chanterelle tart, but used the mushrooms that I bought at the market in Helsinki for this.

The weather was quite rainy and so the river by my mum's house started flooding, luckily not too much. We had some nice and sunny days too and it was warm throughout.

I also did some cooking and was delighted about some new products I found. There was a really good fresh beetroot pasta and a mix to make veggie burgers from grains. It was so nice to use the seasonal berries from the garden or the forest in different dishes as a boost.