Hobak jeon today

I made one of my favourite Korean dishes today, called hobak jeon (instead of jeon it can be jun or chun or chon, depends on the writer ;)). It's very simple to make, just zucchinis, sweet potato, flour, salt and oil. I didn't make vegan version this time, so I also added eggs.


I had both yellow and green zucchinis and they were so colourful together! First I peeled the skin (not necessary) and cut the zucchinis into slices and sweet potato into sticks. I put flour (about 3 desilitres) into one bowl and 4 slightly beaten eggs + pinch of salt into another. 2 tablespoons of oil goes to the pan and gets medium heat (although it needs a bit help from you).

Then the messy part. Cover slices and sticks with flour from both sides and then put them into egg bowl and coat them with egg. Then the slices yearn to go the warm pan and get fried :) Yellow zucchinis really looked like slices of lemon in the flour bowl!


You should fry the slices as long as they get golden brown and then turn them and fry also from the other side. I'd say about 4 minutes on each side. In the end your hobak jeon should look something like this.

The best way to eat hobak jeon is to dip slices into soy sauce. So good and so yummy!

Our whole meal consisted of hobak jeon and salad made from tomatoes, cucumber, onion and feta cheese.

I'll write about something else than food later :)

Truly green

Yay! I finally finished my green green sock (just one...) and the colour is so amazing! It took me 2 months to knit this one, it's just sad that I don't seem to have enough free time these days. I've been reading a lot and of course that time is away from something else. But during juhannus (basically this weekend) I'm going to start knitting the pair for this. Did I already say how much I love the colour? ;) It looks as green as the nature at this time of the year, just more tropical somehow...

When I woke up at 6, it was raining and less than +10 degrees. When I looked outside my window at work, it was raining. And when I decided to go to local hypermarket in the evening, it was still raining. So when I went to the shop, I looked this "cool" (that must be the reason they didn't ask for my papers in local liquor store, no-one under 18 would come to the shop looking this stupid):

It felt like an adventure to walk to the store looking like a ghost. I also kept seeing this boy with red umbrella wherever I went...Thank you Juha for not waiting for me :D




Tomorrow I'm going to cook malesian vegetable curry and bake vanilla muffins with thai basil. True Finnish juhannus food! I bought real English cider to drink with them, because Finnish ciders taste like artificial flavourings. Let's see how Cox apples have been turned into cider by Thatchers and pears by Maguires. Organic white wine is also good especially during hot summer days, so this bottle is going to stay in fridge for a long time...

Speaking of organic, I received a huge parcel from Germany today. It included my BDIH natural cosmetic stuff that I'm using on my sensitive skin. I ordered shampoos, shower gels, moisturisers, cleansers and tooth pastes and paid a lot (I got so many products I'll use these for at least one year), but the prices of these products are half as expensive in Finland. Germany is truly the paradise of all natural and organic products! The webshop I used is Beauty Center Europe, and everything worked well also this time.


The ultimate saviour of my red and flaky (rosacea) skin is this product below. Redness disappears when I use it and I don't look like I have any makeup on, because I don't like makeup stuff. LilyLolo has a stupid name, but it comes in a nice package and works, so who cares about names.

My plants are growing and I have 3 days off! Next week is going to be horrible, only 2 people working in 2 shifts...But I'm not going to think about it yet. Have a nice juhannus you all and enjoy it the way you want to!

Tired & happy

My beautiful plants! I have one big sunflower growing outside and my new plants inside are kodinonni (happiness of home in English, I don't know the real name :D) and muratti (ivy). They're both so small and beautiful! Also my seeds are becoming plants quite fast, and I thought I was late :) Growing something just gets you back to the basics.

I had 2 visitors last week, Luppa and Tuula. Luppa seems extremely bored and Tuula totally surprised. Both had also other feelings during their stay in Joensuu.



I read two excellent books last week and I want to recommend! Maarit Verronen's Normaalia elämää (normal life) is a collection of short stories (couple of pages each), which make you think about the world and how normal something really is. Maarit Verronen is one of my favourite Finnish writers, her style is minimalistic and you just feel there's something behind the words.

And Ursula...Do I have to say more! Lavinia was once again so special experience that it's hard to put into words. I've studied Latin in high school for 3 years and we talked a lot about cultural history in those classes as well. This was kind of missing part of those classes! We always talked about Greek and Roman heroes (men) and how culture was at that time(basically through the eyes of men). It's easy for me to imagine strong women living there too, but too often they're excluded from the history unless they've been intriguing mothers of imperators or just beautiful.
Anyway, this story filled that gap and I read it on one day...I sat outside in the sun, inside on the sofa, in sauna, in the toilet, in my bed and just read.

Now I have Obama's Dream's from my father waiting to be read during juhannus (midsummer festival), because I don't have any other plans. It's going to be raining and cold anyway, so what's better than staying inside in an empty city and letting your eyes move from row to row...

Sun days

Welcome the sun! For one month we'll have lots of different suns in our library. This one is extremely cute :D

Last week I had a chance to go to the mobile library for the evening route. There were quite a lot of people (even first time visitors!) waiting for us as we travelled around with the bus. Lots of sand roads, fields, old people, children and sunshine :) The only bad thing was that there isn't a toilet in the bus, so I had to wait until I got home (so many hours!) Too bad I ran out of battery, so I couldn't take more photos of sunny scenes I saw. It's amazing, how it looks just like countryside just 4 km outside of Joensuu!

I've been reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight -series and I'm sure I'm some kind of masochist. I somehow like the irritation the book evokes in me! Poorly written, full of christian values (woman should be at home and cook, get married at 18 and start to have babies after that, but OF COURSE no sex before marriage!!), empty characters (how sad is a girl, who rather dies than lives without his boyfriend and is all the time "not good enough for him"! Or a boy, who is so handsome and godlike, but "protects" (read = stalks) her girlfriend all the time), and forever continuous rain...The fact is though that these are the books teenage girls are so crazy about. Secretly I hope they're reading the book for the same masochistic reasons than I do :D

New (hopefully last!) book of the series (where baby conceiving finally happens and that means lots of bruises and wounds for the girl = that's the way sex should be?) is going to be published this October (in Finnish) and there are already 25 reservations for that book at the library. I don't know what to think, because it's GREAT that young people are reading, in fact it's AWESOME :D But I feel somehow annoyed, because there are so many better books to read, where girls can decide about their life themselves, where boys look normal and no-one is forced to get married or pregnant in the age of 18.

Yesterday a summer journalist (oh! memories!) came to the library to make a story about our summer quiz and "Sun and child"- exhibition. All places are surrounded by yellow suns made by local kindergarden children. This is already second time this year that my face is going to "beautify" the pages of local newspaper :D I'm not so happy to see my face (especially my rosacea cheeks :D) around, but I remember how hard it was to get people accept I needed to take a photo of them, so I don't want to be THE pain in the ass ;)

Ok, it seems like I didn't have anything special to write about, just something that came to my mind. What I've been doing briefly : ordering organic creams and shampoos from Germany (double as cheap as in Finland), also ordering colourful clothes from USA to celebrate the last days of custom in Joensuu, waving goodbye to Jinchul, AEROBIC <3, watching TV brainlessly, buying seeds (I know I'm too late to grow nice plants, but I'll try), reading a lot. I'm going to end my babbling in a photo of Urpo, my brother's cat.

See you!