Special Summer Drink

Hi everyone!

Are you all enjoying this late summer?

I know I am! The heat has become more bearable and is, in my opinion, much nicer to spend days outside in. Gotta love August. :)

The following drink that I'd like to share the recipe of with you has been my go-to refresher this entire summer! I started drinking it as a kick-me-up sweet drink to sip from whilst studying my ass off in order to graduate... Well, I graduated! I don't want to put all of the credits into this drink but it is pretty great. ;)

Best enjoyed during sunny summer days, but I think it could be just as nice on a particularly perky Spring afternoon! It's incredibly easy to make and requires only three real ingredients, to be honest. Everything else is completely up to you and you can make it as spectacular or festive as you wish. :)

Recipe:

Required ingredients:

- Ice cubes

- Festini Strawberry (Ola) or a similar type of strawberry popsicle

- Elderflower Syrup

- Refrigerated water

- Scavenged fruit for extra taste and decoration: I.e. strawberries, blueberries, blackberries or lemon (Optional)

Instructions:

1. In a tall lemonade glass, or a mason jar if you have one, add ice cubes until it's approximately filled for 1/4 part.

2. Add the Festini popsicle (still on the stick) and let rest between the ice cubes.

3. Pour the elderflower syrup onto your ice cubes. Elderflower syrup can be incredibly sweet, so pour with care and to your liking. You can always add to the mixture and stir if you end up wanting it to be more sweet.

4. Fill up the rest of your glass with previously refrigerated water. Key is that the drink is nice and cold!

5. By the time you filled up the glass with water, the popsicle will have started softening. Use a fork to 'shave' it off its stick and mix with the cold lemonade.

6. For serving, and taste, I like to add leftover fruit that I find in my fridge. I've learned that fresh strawberries, blueberries and blackberries match really nicely! Lemon gives it a great extra sour tone, which may be nice to take focus off the sweetness of this drink. It's also great for decoration only, I would say. :)

I created this recipe myself, if you have anything you would like to share that could make this even more refreshing then don't hesitate to let me know! Would love to see you make this too! :) Tag me in your Instagram photos, at @evazuring.

See you for my next post?

Love,

Eva

Snazzy Seafood Summer Dinner

Hello you!

Plans are to become a lot more active on my blog this year! I realise that close to all of my blogposts start like this. The thing is that I have so many passions and hobbies that I just keep to myself or don't really explore with any significant depth that I feel like I'm wasting a beautiful opportunity!

This past month I've spent away from home, living and working by the beach in the beautiful province of Zeeland! I'm sure you've snooped and seen some photos of my experience back over on my Instagram. It was a month's worth of vacation partnered with a summer job at a restaurant on the beach called Kon-Tiki! I had a job in serving which I was really nervous for but ended up enjoying a lot! It is a type of job that really isn't cut out for anyone, and whereas I did have my difficulties I do believe that it's a job cut out for me. The only downside is what little payment you end up with, but that is something I discovered a little too late into my journey... :p

I've learned so much, working at this restaurant, and it somehow sparked some sort of gastronomical interest! I hate that word by the way, 'gastronomical', it makes me think of body parts. My Pinterest and Tumblr addictions made that I started hoarding recipes during this summer, almost as if my life depended on it. I have that every so often, a passion that hits me with the power of a thousand suns and I just cannot wait to dive completely and utterly into it.

So here I am now, with bucketsful of recipes waiting to be tried out at my leisure. And of course! Waiting to be shared with you once they turn out to be absolutely, freaking amazing!

My first try-out bore wonderful fruit, hence why I'm more than excited to share with you my first foodie blogpost. :)

This past Tuesday, I surprised my Mum and her boyfriend with a lovely seafood dinner including a light cocktail to sip all the while. They were thrilled! Not only by the fact that I cooked for them, because that might as well have turned out horribly, but especially by the wonderful flavours in this meal! I highly recommend you try out this recipe. I will make sure to list where I've found it, so that all credits go to their original author.

 This Rosé Lemonade went incredibly well with this dinner dish since the sweet/sour lemony taste complemented the seafood very nicely. I could also recommend sipping this drink on a sunny afternoon before dinner with your family or friends. :)

Click here to find the original recipe!

This recipe was made for two drinks but I personally just went ahead and altered it so that I could fill up this weck bottle which I'd saved. If you've half a lemon left or so, I recommend using it to garnish the drinks! I completely forgot to do so in the rush of dinner, but I think it would look mighty cool! The yellow contrasting with the gorgeous pink drink.

It's incredibly easy to make and a delicious thirst-quencher for summer/dinner since it's not too boozy. :)

Now as for a lovely seafood dinner! 'Seafood Spaghetti Marinara'. I was incredibly eager to try out this recipe after having had 'linguine au fruits de mer' at an Italian restaurant when I was in Paris. Spaghetti with seafood is a common dish at our house, and I've always been a big fan. But the way we've always prepared it is without a tomato sauce. Having ordered 'linguine au fruits de mer' in Paris, I was expecting to be served a similar dish to the one I was used to at home. What I got, however, I have taken even more of a liking to!

It's a magical world of flavours to have the gentle, sweet taste of a simple tomato sauce mixed with the chewy, savoury seafood. Add to that some parsley and you've got a celebration on your plate right there!

This recipe I found came close enough to what I enjoyed in Paris, despite it being a spaghetti dish and not linguine of course. This is also because I altered the recipe to my convenience a little bit. In the original recipe, the seafood mixture contains fish as well as shellfish. I only used a mixture of shrimp, mussels, squid and surimi. Mmmm I love seafood. Also, you may want to change the amount of spaghetti you cook depending on your appetite. I found that the recommended amount was a bit too little, so I altered it with accordance to my family's tummies. ;)

You can find the original recipe over here!

I give it 2/5 for difficulty, because it wasn't difficult at all but it did cause me a little bit of stress at one point. That's probably just my lack of cooking experience, but I will state this for other beginners in the kitchen. :)

Taste wise, 4/5! For definite. It was a really nice meal that I will definitely be making again in the future!

Hope you all enjoyed reading this new type of post, and I hope I will be writing even more of these in the future. If you prefer me to write the recipes including my alterations in these posts, let me know!

Have a good day!

Kisses,

 Eva

'Vous pouvez-vous cogner à la vie'

In one of my favourite films of all time, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, there is a certain advice directed at Amélie that has to convince her to seize the moment and go after her love interest, Nino. Today I don't want to talk about this entire piece of advice, but rather about a specific part of it: "Vous pouvez vous cogner à la vie." In English this would translate to something close to the likings of "You can take life's knocks".

For several weeks now, this has been my personal WhatsApp status; accompanied by a cheeky bicep emoji to symbolise (my) strength. It made me feel good about myself for a pretty long while. This is because in my life, despite it only having lasted 18 years thus far, I've dealt with plenty of life's knocks and survived to tell the tale. The quote made me feel proud of myself, and much more confident about dealing with life's knocks in the future.

Now, however, I've been knocked down again, and despite the logical thought that I will continue to live and that I will be able to deal with it eventually, I just want to scream at the world to quit knocking me down.

Everyone always says that it takes these knocks to create character, that storms make trees take deeper roots; that the same storms are better at making a good sailor than a clear sea would ever be. But if these storms keep raging, keep coming back even after periods of sunshine, it will wear out the tree as much as the sailor. After too many punches, the boxer, no matter how strong, collapses.

Illustration by Cassandra: http://c-cassandra.tumblr.com/

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm tired and having more and more difficulty taking these knocks that life throws at me. Branches bend, until they break, and to a worn out tree even a tiny gust of air can feel like a hurricane. And with a worn out sail, the ship will lie still.

So now I've changed my status, and I'm not saying that I won't ever start loving that quote again, but for now I'm in a period of surrender. For now I need life to sit in time-out for a while. A white flag is waving. I'm taking some time off.

Illustration by Julianna Swaney: http://ohmycavalier.tumblr.com/

Thanks for reading!

Love,
Eva

Getting My Hands Dirty

I will give you this: I am a very impulsive person. I have explored many a hobby, music genre and craft form, all out of very impulsive interest. However, I can say with certainty that despite these new interests coming on as impulses, I never treat them as such! When I start liking something new, I'm not likely to drop it quickly after like a kid with a new toy that they were just DYING to have. Instead of getting a new interest and dropping all of the others behind me, I just add stuff to my list of interests! As of now, my new interest is gardening.

My new interest is not even as impulsive as it may seem. Though, yes, I did get triggered by a cute little pot with daisy seeds which I got from my sister for my eighteenth birthday, but that doesn't mean that my original interest in gardening wasn't already there!

Illustration by Julianna Swaney

First of all, growing up, two big influences in my life were my mother and her father. My grandfather has books' worth of knowledge inside his head about plants and nature, and I suppose a lot of this knowledge he taught to my mother. Now, I've never really received any lessons of the sort from my Mum, but growing up I would just look at her in awe at how she could name pretty much all the names of plants and herbs we passed. So that's where I think my first spark of interest derives from.

Illustration by Julianne Swaney

Secondly, I went on a holiday to Dirim Guesthouse in Yenikoy, Kusadasi (Turkey) last summer, which was a very memorable vacation culture-wise. At the guesthouse, a small house on top of a mountain, Lydia, the Dutch hostess, grew a lot of her own vegetables in her garden. She would also sometimes surprise me with herbal tea, like fresh mint which she had then just plucked somewhere on the mountain. I suppose it wasn't only the factor of eating homegrown food that made it taste so good, it was especially the factor of eating it in the right season. In the Netherlands, getting fruit and vegetables from the supermarket, we can eat almost everything throughout the entire year. Being in Turkey where eating with the seasons is still very common, was a real eye-opener for me. How logical it is, especially, that what the earth provides you during a certain season is what's best for your health and the most delicious in that time of year! While we were there, you could tell by the offers at restaurants that they truly focused on the vegetables that were available during that time of the year. I really enjoyed their dishes with eggplants in particular, and that lovely taste combined with their green peppers! A specialty during our visit in July, was juice made from mulberries that were right in their season. They would serve ice-cold beverages made from this fruit at markets and it was the perfect thirst-quencher during those hot summer days.

By Lydia Barends, hostess of Dirim Guesthouse in Turkey

The last, and rather selfish, factor that plays a part in my increasing interest for gardening, is that I've discovered how great it feels to receive the results for something you made/did/grew yourself. I'm pretty late to learning how to cook, but when I first created my own tomato/chicken/basil/tortellini soup, it just tasted like heaven on my tongue. A great deal of that 'taste' most probably derived from the fact that I had made that dinner myself! I was proud of it, I put work into it and it paid off. It's like buying something off of your first owned salary. (I'm remembering my first trip abroad with friends, to Switzerland, which we had earned all by ourselves...)

Illustration by Julianna Swaney

Now, I've only just begun with my gardening project, and only tiny bits of green are popping up here and there, but I can just imagine how GREAT it will feel once (hopefully) I will be able to harvest something I planted and took care of. Imagine then cooking with that. Imagine the INCREDIBLE taste that dinner would have. No matter whether the taste is really all that great, it will make you feel amazing. I put up a quote in my room the other day, and it says something like "To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow." (Is that Audrey Hepburn?) Being my little optimistic self, I will not let anyone rain on my parade by saying my plants will probably not grow so well or that I'll probably get bored of this new hobby really soon.

I planted my garden, because I believe in tomorrow.

See you all in my next post!

Love, Eva

Worrying | World Views

Hello everyone!

Wow, saying that my World Views would be 'coming soon' was a bit of an exaggeration. I am an incredibly busy woman this year, but despite being busy I found this to be a good time to get back into my writing flow and get this project off the ground already! I will soon be starting my final exams, so those will definitely cause a delay in my posting, but I just want to stop making excuses for starting this project that I'm still really passionate about!

The first question that I sent around the world for my wonderful friends to answer, was what they spent too much time on.

In my case, this is worrying.

I'm a worrier. I say it in this way because it makes it sound a lot like 'warrior', and that makes me feel at least a little bit better about it. Truth be told, it's horrible. For me, it's not the type of worrying that means I constantly feel like something bad is going to happen. In fact, I'm too stubborn and too much of a blind optimist for that. My problem with worrying is that I constantly worry that the steps I'm taking in my own life, are the wrong ones. I base these worries not on realistic reason, but mostly on what I see happening in the lives of those around me. Whenever my path is not like theirs, I worry that mine is wrong. Despite the fact that I do realise this happens to me, I will admit that it does not help me get rid of these irrational worries. The most horrible thing is not even the worrying itself, but the self-sabotaging that happens because of it. I keep myself from achieving a goal, because the world tells me this goal is not ideal. Or I keep myself from trying to achieve something, because I'm afraid of what will happen when I reach the other end of it. If I've learnt anything these past few weeks, it's to not be afraid to be my own, individual self, and to not punish myself if things aren't going as smoothly as my environment makes me think is 'normal'. There is no normal. There is only me, and I need to learn how to go from there. But, like this adorable illustration says, I'm still growing. And that is okay, too.

Not my illustration

My friend Gabriela from Puerto Rico could relate to my problem with worrying. "I spend too much time worrying and being scared." She told me. However, it seems to be in a different way than I experience it. "I'm too sensitive, and I never want people to feel bad or offended. This often leaves me with burdens I should just have left behind. I am too nice and people see me as someone to run over easily. It's that which has made the last couple of months incredibly hard for me."

So what did others feel like they spent too much time on?

Astrud, from the United States, told me about spending too much time organising all of her personal belongings.

My dear friend Maria from Spain says that most of her free time gets absorbed by her listening to music, or just overthinking silly stuff. (Glad to hear I'm not the only one!)

Othilie, from Norway, tells me about her surplus time spent dreaming of being a teenager in other centuries. "Basically any other time than now, haha!"

My Slovenian friend Tjaša has to admit that it's YouTube she spends too much time on, and I wholeheartedly relate.

Clarissa from America seems to be in the same boat. "I spend too much time on my computer. I tend to watch videos and movies, and I spend a lot of time on Tumblr." - Don't we all? :') - "I wish I could stop, pick up a book and read instead."


We all have things we spend too much time on, some positive, some negative. Can I just say to everyone spending too much time on something positive: Turn it into something good! For example, use that daydreaming to create something new! Write a story, paint a picture, become a poet! Use that part of you to bring something new and interesting into this world! :) And to those, like me, who tend to spend too much time on something negative: Try to learn from it and not be too hard on yourself along the way.

On that note, I will end this very first edition of World Views. See you for the next one? Its theme will be 'first experiences', and I'm excited for you to read it!

Love you lots,

Eva