Costa Rica is a small country in Central America. A 2009 study proclaimed it as both the happiest and greenest country in the world. In general it ranks pretty high in various human development indices. It is a former Spanish colony, but acquired its independence already in the 1800s. After a bloody civil war, in [...]

First I have to mention that I recently got Bryanna Clark Grogan’s World Vegan Feast. What a lovely cookbook! I’ll probably use it to make something for Vegventures. I still don’t understand why she put yeast in a “Finnish” pancake as no Finn ever does that, but I’ll forgive her. She’s a great cookbook author [...]

Hawaii is a state of the United States (since 1959), but since it’s so far from the mainland both geographically and culturally it gets its own entry. It is an archipelago of hundreds of volcanic islands, of which the eight are known as the main islands. Only about 10 % of the people are Pacific [...]

Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands located near the coast of West Africa. They were uninhabited until the Portuguese colonization in the 15th century and later served as an important hub in the slave trade because of their location. Now it houses about 500,000 people, mostly of creole origin. Cape Verde is [...]

Cook Islands is a “self-governing parliamentary democracy in free association with New Zealand”. What is more interesting than this bureaucratic monster of a word is that it has about 20,000 inhabitants, while there are nearly 60,000 people of Cook Islander descent living in New Zealand (a unique situation, perhaps?). The group of fifteen small islands [...]

Uzbekistan is a former Soviet state, now an independent Turkic state, a double-landlocked country (only surrounded by other landlocked countries) and the most populous country (over 27 million people) in Central Asia. The climate has significant temperature variation with summers being as warm as 40C (104F) and winters as cool as -23C (-9F). Numbers aside, [...]

Armenia is a small landlocked country located in the Caucasus that used to be a part of the Soviet Union. It is usually considered to be a part of Asia, but sometimes counted in Europe as well (e.g. Wikipedia lists it as a “bicontinental country” and it is also a member of the Council of [...]

Sorry again for the delay between postings. It’s been crazy in this household – we got married last week (there are photos and videos in case you’re interested and I will probably write an article about holding a vegan wedding later) and we are moving to the Netherlands in two weeks. So, not much time [...]

Lesotho is a small landlocked country which is also an enclave – meaning it is located inside the borders of another country, in this case South Africa. It is hard to find information about its cuisine, but Wikia Recipes Wiki says this: “Lesotho cuisine resulted from a blend of many cultures such as European, Asian [...]

Germany is pretty much one of my food nightmare places, sorry Germans, and it’s not just because of the meat/sausage culture. Yes, Finnish food is horrible too, but at least we have some decent foods, like bread. When I travelled in Germany a few years ago, I struggled to find anything tasty. Even things like [...]