The magical activities of Zagreb in Autumn!

How is Zagreb in Autumn?

If you didn’t visit Zagreb in Autumn, then you should!  Maksimir, the city’s biggest park is magical at this time of the year. That’s why we organized again another photo tour to capture the essence of autumn in the park.

The theme was “leaves” but it seems that the magical scenes didn’t allow  the tour members  to resist capturing those beautiful mushrooms, trees and landscape .

We were joined this time by Tina from South Africa,  Izabela and Keith from UK and of course a participant from the host country Croatia “Luka”.

Here you can see all our photos from the tour and remember this is our second tour, you can get another perspective from our first tour photos.

What else?

We also had another International cooking meetup  hosted by Vestigium NGO which is concerned with organic local food and offer an alternative space that was perfect fit for our alternative meetup.

The idea is simple, each participant brings a dish that he/she masters. Presentation of each dish takes 5 – 10 minutes and this is followed by the open buffet where we try the presented dishes in warm friendly atmosphere while chatting in English.

People who are not into cooking can still join us and have lunch for a little fee.

This time we had Mario who shared with a vegan Macaroni and cheese. We also had Anamaria for the second time, and she joined with vegan sarma “Stuffed cabbage” and sacher cake. From Macedonia we had Taratur salad which was refreshing and made by Milena. From Egypt we had chickpeas sauce with Egyptian curry by Theresa and some vegan cookies. Our guests were from USA and Croatia.

It seems that most of the recipes were vegan more than being International!  But every meetup is different and that’s why it is unique.

Here we will share with you the recipes in case you didn’t get the chance to join us.

Vegan Macaroni and cheese

By Mario

Ingredients

1 medium head cauliflower

1 carrot

1 potato

1 tbsp Miso paste

½ cup cashews

4 tbsp nutritional yeast

Onion powder

Garlic powder

Mediterranean spice mix

Salt

Pepper

Preparation 

Cut vegetables very small and cover with water below the contents. Add spices and cook as long as

needed. Leave to cool. Transfer contents to a blender and blend until smooth. Cook pasta and reserve a cooking water. Whisk miso paste with a little bit of pasta water and add all together with cashews and nutritional yeast and blend some more. Drain pasta and pour the sauce over.

 

Vegan Sarma

By Anamaria

I always precook legumes and grains a bit, then soak them in soya sauce, and mix them with some vegetables fried in oil. This time I used, as usually, what I had at home, so: buckwheat, red lentils, onions, garlic, carrots, pumpkin, olive oil from island of Mljet. Think I also put some rosemary and little bit of curry in the mixture that went onto leaves of sauerkraut which then clumsily became some kind of rolls. Cooked them in the pot, in water with tomato sauce, bay-leaf and algaes (supposedly for easier digestion). Cannot really give you list of the ingredients, their amount and tell you about the time. It’s not a secret, it’s just that I cook intuitively. It doesn’t go well every time. J We missed  fresh homemade bread with this dish, but then Mario’s pasta became a part of tasty combination instead…

VEGAN SACHER CAKE

By Anamaria

I made little vegan Sacher cakes as muffins to make it easier to deal with them, especially when transporting to Vestigium. J

Made the dough of some flour (850), baking powder, cocoa powder, sugar, coconut oil and soy milk, baked it in the oven (180’C, 20-25 minutes?: I always try to keep my attention to it and check, while I work with many different ovens at my friends’ homes and, as my cooking partner Ana says, ”there is no same cake ever”, not to bother myself with the numbers), later put some apricot jam on muffins that didn’t go much up as muffins usually do (that was the idea, though, but it would be better if I cut them in half and put some jam as a layer between two biscuit parts) and pour some chocolate on them.

Next time, I will pour the apricot jam melted in water over the biscuits (before chocolate) to make them more moist and delicious, not so much ischlers alike as this time. J

In this cooking meet up, I wanted to show that there is a way of at least somewhat veganizing the popular non-vegan dishes.

 

Taratur: Macedonian starter/salad

By Milena

 Ingredients (one person):

1 big cucumber

1 small clove of garlic

1 spoon of roughly sliced walnuts

A pinch of salt

2 cups yogurt (or more, if you like)

 

Preparations

Cut the cucumber into cubes. Mix the salt with pieces of garlic and grind them together using a mortar. Stir the mix into the yoghurt. Add the cucumber and sprinkle  the walnuts. Especially good to cool down during the hot summer.

Chickpeas sauce with Egyptian curry

By Theresa

I actually didn’t know there was Egyptian curry until I came to Croatia, recently I discovered in one of the spices shops a spice under the name “Egyptian curry”, when I used it for cooking I discovered a taste that I was used to in Egypt.

Ingredients:

1/2 kg of chickpeas soaked and boiled

1 bottle of tomato sauce readymade or homemade

Half tea spoon of Egyptian curry and half tea spoon of sea salt

One diced onion

Preparations

In a pot put little oil and fry the onion add to it the tomato sauce and the chickpeas. Add a cup of water and let is cook on medium heat for about 20 minutes.

By the end add the salt and curry.

Peanut butter cookies

I have a YouTube channel for vegan recipes so you can find this here

 

Take a look and feel the atmosphere

Finally don’t forget to follow our meetups and hopefully we see you soon