When we do road-trips like this one, and the previous one in Scandinavia & Russia, and the one aross the US, we tend not to eat out much, preferring to shop where the locals shop and cook wherever we’re staying.

We’re currently staying in a holiday cottage in Särkijärven. You can see some photos of it and the holiday complex here. Quite a few of the photos on the Booking.com site were taken in ‘our’ cottage. It’s a small place, single storey, sleeps 2 people  and has everything we need in it, including a large clothes-drying cabinet and a stove with an oven. The last apartment we stayed in only had a hotplate, so now I’m having fun using the oven to roast vegetables and do some baking. Yesterday we found a packet of bake-them-yourself croissants in a can – you take the dough out of the can, unroll it,  cut into 6 triangles along the perforated lines, roll into croissants and bake for 15 minutes. We ate them with cloudberry jam and they tasted great.

We’re having a bit of a pancake ‘thing’ at the moment , because they are quick, easy, use just a few  easy-to-get ingredients (eggs, milk, plain flour), and I have never known Greg to decline a pancake, ever. I won’t turn this into a food blog, but 4 eggs, a couple of cups of plain flour and a couple of cups of milk makes a lot of pancakes, and we managed to eat them all, with banana, sugar and cloudberry jam as toppings.

If we are just using our camping stove with its gas cartridge, we’ll have something simple like canned ravioli or burritos made with a packet of vegetarian mince  (just add water, cook for 5 minutes, serve), cheese and pineapple salsa. The Swedes seem to really like Mexican food if shelf-space, range and empty shelves post-New Year are anything to go by. But in Finland, not so much. The only vaguely Mexican thing we’ve found here so far are packets of tortillas, in the snack section. Don’t know what they use them for as we didn’t find any related items like salsa, dips or taco seasoning.

The lights in the cottage window that are in a couple of the photos of the cottage in the Sarkijarven post are a  very common Scandinavian Christmas decoration. Lots of houses have some kind of light in each window, and then they also often put lights on a fir tree in the yard, or strings of fairy lights on buildings, verandahs, trees, bushes …. you get the idea. As there are so many hours of darkness here, the lights look lovely, and many place leave them on day and night. We spotted quite a few decorated Christmas trees on apartment balconies, which seems to be a good use of the space at this cold time of the year … and the apartments are probably too small to be able to comfortably fit a tree inside anyway.

I’m sure the novelty will eventually wear off, but all the houses here look to us like gingerbread houses, with their snowy white roofs and their afore-mentioned lights. On a more practical note, I wonder if the snow on the roof provides some kind of insulation.