Archives for April 2020

Monday Margaritas

April 27, 2020

It’s Monday and during lockdown it means it’s time for some Monday Margaritas. It’s also the week of first of May or Vappu as we call it in Finland so I wanted to share this recipe with you too. Vappu is not cancelled, it just can’t be celebrated as we are used to but nothing is keeping us from making some Vappu drinks at home. We have been making quite a lot these lately because they are just so good. I was pretty obsessed all spring about the perfect Margarita that I had in a restaurant in New York in January. After some research, I think I’m pretty close to that one with this recipe.

Everything starts by making your own sweet and sour mix in advance, which doesn’t take long and keeps in the fridge for days. The recipe is for a pitcher, which makes about 4-5 glasses depending on the size of your glass, but we have made this in half too for just two drinks. I also recommend using quality tequila for this, and not the kind that makes you blind as my husband would say. We have used both kinds, but it really does make a difference. This time we used Patron Silver for these, which works perfectly.

Sweet and sour mix

2 cups water
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup fresh lime juice (about 6-7 limes)
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2 lemons)

Pitcher of Margaritas

1 cup Tequila (100% agave)
1/2 cup Cointreau
1 cup sweet and sour mix
sea salt & lime for rimming the glass

Simmer 2 cups of water and 1 cup of granulated sugar until it is fully dissolved. Let it come to room temperature and pour in a jar. Add the fresh lime and lemon juices to the mixture, chill in fridge.

Place salt on a small plate, rim glasses with a lime wedge upside down and dip the rim in the salt. Set aside. Combine Tequila, Cointreau and the sweet and sour mixture in a pitcher. Add ice to your glasses, we mixed some crushed ice with regular ones to make it a bit more frozen margarita type. Pour the Margarita to your glass over ice and decorate with lime wedges, enjoy!

Our living room

April 25, 2020

I haven’t had any guests over for the longest time because of this social distancing thing so as I found this post from my drafts where I’ve had it for quite some time now, I thought to invite you for a virtual visit to our living room. How exciting that you came, welcome! I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to drink but perhaps I’ll share a recipe for some quarantinis next to make up for it. I know I said I wouldn’t do it, but I have spent the last month of this lockdown pretty much crazy cleaning and organizing everything but somehow nothing has changed. I took these pictures before our window/facade renovation project started last fall but otherwise it still looks pretty much the same, except that you can’t see outside anymore.

Our living room has sort of taken over two separate rooms at the moment, the rooms are joined in the middle but have their own doors to the entry and the other one also to the rest of the apartment. We have been planning a possible little makeover here ever since we moved in this apartment but have postponed it because of the window renovation project that has been in works for a few years now. Perhaps later this year you will see a whole different kind of living room here but for the time being we have been enjoying the extra space here and made the other room our dining room.

When we moved in this apartment about four years ago, it was luckily in a pretty good condition otherwise as it had been recently renovated but desperately needed some fresh paint. Mostly because of the Parisian pollution that makes everything quite dirty very fast but also because the walls were in a pretty bad shape as the previous tenants had TVs and shelving attached to many of the walls. I’m also a fan of light Scandinavian interiors and we didn’t quite share the same taste with the previous tenant as pretty much every wall was of different colour and there were some purple and dark brown walls as well as radiators in here which my white loving mind simply couldn’t handle. I feel like there is always so much going on in Paris so I need my home to be a calm, light, neutral environment.

When we started the painting project, I was very excited as I love renovating and we had lived almost five years in an apartment where we couldn’t do much related to that. I had an image in my head where I would head to the paint store like in Finland and carefully pick just the perfect shade of white or light grey from hundreds of options but got quite disappointed when there were just a few options available. I guess it could be that people are much more into colours than whites here, not as obsessed about different shades of white as me or perhaps I just didn’t find the perfect white paint store back then. After careful evaluation and hours spent at different hardware stores we ended up picking the very basic painters white that they often use for walls here, as most of the other ones seemed either way too dark or too warm considering the wooden flooring that we have here. But we have been quite happy with the result especially in the living room, it goes pretty well with the flooring and brought so much more light in here. We ended up painting the windows too since they were half black, half white before.

For the other parts our interiors, we have wanted to keep it quite neutral too. We live in a building that is from the early part of the 1900s, so it is a bit newer than the typical older Parisian buildings but luckily it also has some interesting details that I love from that era, a bit more modern than those in the older buildings but still quite traditional with wall/ceiling moldings, old doors, lots of mirrors and original wood flooring. To balance it out we like our furniture quite modern. Some of those like our dining chairs from Kartell we have had for a long time and I’m quite a collector for all the little things that I keep with me always but when we moved in here we had to purchase some of the larger furniture.

As we never know how long we are going to live here and had the idea of possibly changing the rooms a bit later, we wanted furniture that could be easily converted if needed. Our sofa can be changed or cut into pieces in many ways and for storage in both rooms we have the Bestå-units from Ikea which are also quite convertible. We keep quite a lot of toys in the living room among other things so these are perfect for all kinds of storage if you want to hide something but still keep it easily accessible. Our dining table and black marble coffee table are both from AM.PM, a French brand that makes quite nice contemporary things.

To make things a bit softer with our modern furniture we have added white linen curtains to the windows and a pop of colour (the neutral way) with our greenish grey carpet in the living room. This is actually pretty much our first apartment where carpets have really found their way as I find nice carpets being not only the hardest thing to find but mostly because our dog has been quite busy making sure we can’t have any carpets in the house for too long. Let’s just say that the jute carpet in the dining room is not the first one of its kind. Unfortunately that Ikea carpet is not washable but we keep getting a new one here always since we really like it and also believe it protects the other carpets from destruction.

I also always try to keep some fresh flowers on the dining table in addition to all kinds of books, candles and other things on the other counters. We have also added some marble shelfs to the radiators to get that space used too as there is never too much space to display those scented candles. The kid has been quite a climber from the start and very interested in all of the things that could be there on display, so only recently we have started putting things like candles and flowers back on the tables. The items we keep on the lower counters are still things you can move quite fast, accidents still happen and the coffee table still works mostly as a dancefloor or dinosaur display during the days but my candles and flowers have been a lot safer now. But yes, that’s about it for our living room. There’s also the balcony which I already showed here if you want to see more of it. It is now out of use because of the renovation but hopefully it will look like that again in the summer. I hope you enjoyed the visit!

Coffee table: AM.PM

Sofa: Ikea Söderhamn

Cushions: Ralph Lauren

Bookshelf & mirror: Ikea (old)

Tv stand and cupboards: Ikea Bestå

Magazine holder: Showroom Finland Mixrack

Living room carpet: Carpet Vista

Dining room carpet: Ikea

Table: AM.PM

Chairs: Kartell Ghost

Lamp: Maisons du monde & Laura Ashley

Banana bread

April 5, 2020

Looks like the official food of quarantine is banana bread, seems that everybody is making it and so are we. It’s been a bit hard to find flour, eggs and sugar these days in our neighbourhood since I guess everyone is baking right now. If you live in a similar neighborhood where these things are rare, you’re in no luck cause this one requires all of those. But in case you are still missing a recipe for banana bread I thought I would share mine, I’ve been using this one for at least over 10 years now, nothing very special but it’s a very easy one and works every time.

It’s from the age before Pinterest and I have no idea where I have found it from but I did write it on a piece of paper in my secret recipe book that I will leave to my children so you could call it my secret family recipe now. It’s not a healthy version, we are already juicing pretty much daily so we like our baking during this confinement with carbs. You can however replace the flour with coconut flour or similar, the butter with coconut oil and put less sugar in if you like, have done that too and it works just as good.

4 bananas + 1 for decorating
1/3 cup melted butter
3/4 – 1cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour
Salty butter or butter with sea salt crystals for pan

Preheat the oven to 175c. Mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg and vanilla. Sprinkle in the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered bread pan and decorate with a banana sliced in half if you wish. My trick is to butter the pan with salted butter so that it becomes crunchy and salty on the outside, if you have butter with sea salt crystals that works best, I use regular butter for the dough. Bake for 1 hour, cool on a rack. Enjoy!

What we have been up to

April 4, 2020

As I mentioned in the previous post, we are now living our third week of confinement here in Paris, day 19 of lockdown to be exact. We are not supposed to leave our house unless we really need to, the only things still allowed to be open are grocery stores and pharmacies, and if you go outside you need to fill a form every time. If you don’t have it and get stopped by the police or army, you will very likely get fined, after 4 tickets you might end up in prison. We are still allowed to go grocery shopping or get some air but have to stay within 1km of where we live and stay only for one hour. If you can’t telework, you can still go to your workplace but need a separate form for that too from your employer saying that it is absolutely necessary. The rules are quite strict and never have I wished as much to live somewhere with a garden but I do believe that these restrictions are here for a good reason and that it is really best to just stick to staying at home.

I know this same thing is the new normal in most parts of the world right now and most families have been living this same situation for weeks now. It’s just day 19 of the actual lockdown here, but we too have been doing this for much longer. Haven’t been to a playground since the epidemic started in Italy, started social distancing a few weeks before the lockdown only going to the most important things we had to do. B still went to daycare a few times a week until it got closed three weeks ago, we took him there a bit less than normally and only because his daycare is very small, they play outside most of the time and they quarantined the ones who had traveled. Thought it was better than going to the public playgrounds where anyone could go.

I’m not going to lie, it has been quite hard. Especially the first week of lockdown which went by so slowly, my husband started working from home and our son kept asking over and over to go outside. This third week has been much easier, we start getting used to it and have found some new routines. We have mostly stayed just inside, all the parks within that 1km range from our house are now closed so we don’t see much point going out with a three year old just to walk on a sidewalk on the dirty streets of Paris.

But what have we been doing then? Not getting to play outside does bring a little twist to this all and I must say it’s been quite difficult finding ways to get the energy out of an active three year old by just staying inside. For that we have built all kinds of bouncy castles on our furniture, our dining room table is basically the centre of a running course now and pretty much we have been just trying to make sure major hurricanes don’t happen, it’s been wild but also fun. Sometimes I wish I knew how to glue him to the sofa to watch TV for a few hours a day but that really doesn’t seem to work at our house. Don’t get me wrong, Peppa Pig, Morphle and Fireman Sam are coming out of my ears already, we do not have a thing called “screen time” anymore but somehow our kid isn’t interested in just sitting and watching tv for very long. He also doesn’t nap at all anymore, so we have to find activities for him for pretty much 12 hours a day, of course he does play by himself too but one does get bored after building legos day after day.

I find this situation being very difficult for young children, they do not understand it but might still remember it later on. It is stressful but I want to try and make it also fun for him so that he would remember it as a time we spent together at home. Everyone is different and I know it’s a major challenge for everyone with work, homeschooling and kids at home right now, but I thought I would list some of the things we have been doing to avoid getting bored. And by bored I mean stuffing the toilet with toilet paper rolls and flushing it, which also happened at our house by the way. Strong recommendation to keeping all kinds of unclogging devices on hand during this time, I have heard this is a thing happening right now with kids trowing all kinds of things from soap bars to toys down there. I laughed when I first heard that happening to someone, but wasn’t laughing when we were in the same situation without any Mr Muscle hidden in the cupboards 5 minutes before the grocery store was closing. Luckily we survived that challenge too without having to find a plumber at 8pm during lockdown, it was a close call though. But, here are a few of my tricks we have been using lately to make this time a bit more special.

The quarantine calendar

I might end up regretting this once the lockdown ends or if it continues longer than my stashed gifts, but I call it now the quarantine calendar and it follows one of the most important parenting methods known during lockdown, bribery. This started innocently one evening when my kid really wasn’t into eating his porridge before bed. He loves dinosaurs at the moment so I told him there was a very nice dinosaur hanging outside our window who likes to listen what we are doing, he is a bit like Santa’s elves and if you’re nice he might bring you something tomorrow. It worked like a charm and he finished his porridge faster than ever.

Basically this works just the same way as an advent calendar, because let’s face it we are waiting for this to be over way more than we have ever waited for Christmas to arrive. No dates needed though, as nobody wants to get reminded each morning how long we have been in this situation. The Dino leaves little surprises during the nights and also monitors naughty/nice levels, I really like this part especially as I don’t always want to be the authority stuck in the same house with an angry toddler who is not getting their way. Also he seems much more eager to please the Dino than me.

The gifts our friendly dinosaur brings are nothing fancy, usually just new supplies for crafts or similar activities like drawing paper, new pens, a new pot of play-doh etc, sometimes some treats like a smoothie or on really special occasions bath bombs or hatching dinosaur eggs. We were going to get new supplies anyway for this lockdown, so this way he is not getting everything at once and the excitement for new things lasts a little bit longer. I tried to get things that are educational in some way and for us especially the things for crafts have been very nice in the mornings, he is excited about them and let’s us catch a cup of coffee. We bought most of the surprises from Smallable, amazon and just the grocery store before the lockdown, amazon still delivers but unfortunately the French postal service doesn’t seem to work anymore so if you order anything online it’s best to use a courier service.

This quarantine calendar will be staying with us until the lockdown ends, it’s too late to stop it anymore. He has been really looking forward every morning going to see what the Dino has brought, reminding him about the listening dinosaur helps during the worst meltdowns but oh the sadness on the days I have forgotten to put out anything for him to find. Not sure yet how I’m going to “deconfine” myself out of this one or what I’m going to do once we run out of the maxi pack of play-doh pots. But for the time being I have been just planning to add some collaboration with the Easter bunny now that the holidays are approaching. Hopefully the kid will understand once the dinosaur goes back to dinoland when this is all over.

Facetime playdates

Now that we can’t see anyone anymore or play with other kids, keeping in touch virtually has become so important. Since we live in different countries than our families and B’s grandparents, he is already quite used to keeping in touch with them by phone, but he misses seeing other people so much. During this time we have been face timing a lot with them and his little cousin who is also staying at home without siblings to play with. He enjoys reading his dinosaur encyclopedia to them, draw or mold play-doh together and he loves storytime with his grandmother when she is reading stories to him. Let’s call someone has been my magic sentence to getting away from tricky situations during this time.

Cute printables

I’m not a very crafty person, but we have been doing a lot of crafts during this time. And with crafts I do like to jump over where the fence is the slowest. A perfect way for that is to explore all the wonderful printables internet is full of. My favourite ones so far have been the ones our favourite kids store, Tartine et Chocolat has been providing during the lockdown. We have built a village for our dinosaurs, colored all kinds of things and made animal masks for instance. You can find them on their website and they keep adding more all the time so I suggest following them on Instagram if you like that kind of stuff. Other wonderful French kids brands like Jacadi and Bonpoint also have all kinds of activities for kids on their sites during this time.

Organizing

It’s no news that I really like organizing, and I really really like the kind of organizing where your house looks for a few days like a hurricane hit it twice and then after a while, it’s perfect. As much as I really really feel like doing it right now that we spend all this time at home and I’m really bothered by the mess we currently have here, I’m not going to do that. For the sake of my husband because I’m such a good wife and I don’t want him divorcing me after this lockdown. So what I have been doing is that I’ve kept my organizing to one closet/drawer/shelf per day. Sometimes I feel like doing more, sometimes less, sometimes nada. This might still evolve to the hurricane stage but as long as we are not sure how long this lockdown is going to last, I figured at this pace I will have some drawers left to organize until about mid-December.

Kids can also take part to this activity by helping, taking things to the trash one by one for example (counts as exercise too and best if the things really belong to trash) or by doing a mess to the drawers before you get to clean them, your choice. Also I’ve found that adding any kind of machines to this task will make it even more interesting to a three year old boy, so bring in the Kärcher window cleaners and vacuums if you want to make your house shine once the lockdown is over.

The quarantine kitchen

This one is pretty obvious and I know, everybody does that already. Our kitchen has been quite busy too during this time as we have been baking and cooking a lot. I love baking with my kid and he really loves it too, he is also really really into all our kitchen appliances like the blender or mixer, so what we have been doing in the kitchen, is using them. Luckily we bought last year a slow juicer that I had been drooling over for years (we have one from Hurom), which has now become our best friend during this confinement period. We started a mother & son smoothie/ juice bar and have been doing either juices or smoothies almost every day. My son is a very picky eater so I find it easier sneaking some vitamins into his system by making him drink them. This has also been a great opportunity to support our favorite little fruit shop that is still open.

But you really don’t need a juicer for this and could do this your own way with pretty much anything in the kitchen, baking cookies, peeling fruit, making sandwiches, waffles, pizza, smoothies, yogurt bar, planting flowers if you have a garden or balcony etc. This could also be a perfect opportunity to teach your kids how to make your favorite cup of coffee if you’re an addict like me, Baby Barista training starting here next week. To keep it simple, pick an easy thing you can do often. I myself can’t cope baking cakes every day, it is super messy with a three year old so this juicing thing is perfect for us for also that reason. Baking and cooking together has been one of the fun activities we always do together, it doesn’t take very long but it’s a fun activity my kid has been really looking forward to each day.

Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020?

April 1, 2020

Hi there! Not sure if there’s anybody out there anymore since it’s been such a long time since the last time I wrote anything here. I’m starting to repeat myself but, I’m back! I started writing this post earlier this year (it was supposed to be a New Years post) but never had the chance to finish it, there was always something more important to do. But we are living strange times at the moment and just started our third week in lockdown here in Paris, so perhaps there’s more time for the blog too.

I’m going to start by deleting everything I wrote before because let’s just say, this year has not turned out the way I imagined it to be! I do not want to go back to 2019 either since last year was quite difficult for me, there were a lot of issues I was dealing with my health for pretty much the whole year so was really looking forward to getting that behind me and starting fresh this year. We are only a few months into this year, can’t lose hope for the whole year yet but pretty sure no-one will be calling 2020 their year. So in this New Years post of mine, I won’t be wishing you happy new year, will do that in 9 months time, fingers crossed I’m betting for 2021 to be the year for all of us.

As a disclaimer I want to say here that I do take this situation where we are all currently living extremely seriously. I’m scared for a lot of things, for the virus and for the economy. I feel so sad for all the people who are either touched by the virus or working against it. For all the weddings and funerals that can’t take place right now and all the mothers having to give birth alone. I fear for my own family as we are all living in different countries. If something would happen, I won’t be able to be there. I’m scared for us, if something would happen, who would take care of our little boy. And I also fear of getting sick some other way or some other accident happening now that the hospitals are crowded. I feel so bad for all the wonderful small businesses that had to close their doors and put everything on pause. I fear for what the world will be like once the lockdown will be over.

Reading news makes me so sad every day, at the same time I don’t want to read them but can’t help myself checking them all the time. I try to find positive articles to read but the news just keep getting on whole new levels of horrible daily and it just takes so long to find the positive things from under all that sadness. Lately I’ve gotten the same feeling I got last summer while waiting for my results for weeks and was not going to know what the future would be like, like not wanting to get up in the morning and feeling sick at the same time, in the evenings not being able to sleep because of what just happened. This whole situation is just something that I have no words for and I just miss papers being full of all the boring political news.

But I want to remain positive and hopeful for the future, there is always a tomorrow, there always has been and there always will be, and we will get through this. We all read these news and we are all scared about these things, making you read about my fears will not bring anything to the table here so won’t be doing that here anymore. We are safe at home here and that is the best thing we can all do in this situation, stay safe at home and protect others. Do that for yourself, the ones you love and all the medical personnel who are still out there working and not getting to be at home with their families. Support those small businesses that you love the way that you can from home, so that they will still be there once we get out.

While we are waiting for all this to be over and things getting back to normal, I want to make most of this time we spend at home. Yes it is difficult juggling things at home but as stressful as this situation is, there is still a silver lining in being stuck at home too. For me it has been getting to spend more time with my family. My husband works quite long hours normally, never teleworking, is rarely home before 8pm and travels a lot for work. He would probably disagree here since he still tries to work the same hours from home with a hyperactive toddler stealing his computer while he is stuck on a call, but having him here all the time has been quite a change from our normal and would never happen otherwise. We have been busy trying to find activities for our three year old but haven’t been drawing and playing with him this much probably ever. I also find comfort in thinking how the climate will be benefiting from this situation and hearing birds singing in central Paris.

These pictures are not from my home by the way, although I have added a new life goal for us, a pandemic mansion with a pool, gym, yoga room, garden and everything one might need with hand sanitiser and mask making facilities but for the moment we are still living in our old apartment, which unfortunately also happened to be under construction work for the windows and facade that got paused for the lockdown. But we are good here. We have been cooking a lot and eating together much more than normally but our breakfast is still quite far from being as pretty as this one we got to enjoy in my favourite Parisian hotel where we spent our anniversary last year. But will do my best to make them as pretty as these by the time the lockdown ends.

While I’m perfecting my cooking skills, let me know if there is something you would like to read from here. I want to thank you for coming back here, I know it has been a while since the last time but I’ll do my best not to make a habit out of that hah. Hopefully I’m not back here in 6 months saying the same thing. I also want to send you all so much strength right now, we will get through this! I know this time is very hard for everyone, the situation affecting some more than others, but it’s not easy for anyone. So much uncertainty and difficult situations getting life running from home. All the best and stay safe!

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