Day 7. May 3. Rest day in Bialystok.

Bialystok

Highlights: banana bread, spices, parsnip and parsley, freegans

I woke up around 6 a.m. again and soon my host got up too. Last night l when I was already half asleep he went out for some dumpster diving and got a whole sink of nice ripe bananas which were apparently not pretty enough to sell and so were thrown away. And he said he had to leave like 80% behind.

So in the morning they had to be used and he started making banana bread which was good news for me as I wanted to learn to make some for a while now and never got to it. The recipe is pretty simple: bananas, flour (he used wheat and corn), sugar (or dates, our no sweetener at all as bananas can be enough), flax seeds, raisins and vegetable oil. Also walnuts would be a great addition but we didn't have any. It was yummy.

Ooh, he also had this great way of making your morning oatmeal (which I'm totally borrowing): soak some in a little water, add bananas blended with cold soy milk, some raisins and slightly fried sunflower seeds. Very interesting taste.

After that followed a lot of cooking talk and comparing spices, as well as trying to figure out the difference between parsnip and parsley (which apparently had a pretty thick root which I never knew about before).

Later we took a walk around the city. With population of 300 thousand, Bialystok is quite special because the inventor of Esperanto was born here. I also read a bit of city tourist guide, which mentioned a weird popular dish: potato bowel (eww!). There is a national holiday today: Constitution day, so there was a crowd in the town main square and good cops, medics, firemen and army men let people take pictures in their cars, on their motorcycles and a tank.

In the evening my awesome host cooked some Chinese noodles and I made some vegan ice-cream (frozen bananas, soy milk, cinnamon and cocoa).

 We also watched this Polish short about freegans (who were surprisingly inventive!) and looked through some pics posted in a local freegan facebook group (perfect strawberries and 210 chocolate bars are just some highlights).

Gastronomic indulgences day.

Next day: Bialystok - Ostroleka