Hi! I am Anda, a Romanian girl living in Toronto, Canada.
“La Spelonca Vegetariana” started as my creative outlet. I adore cooking and vegetarian food in general and I wanted to share my culinary adventures with my friends and maybe inspire them and get inspired to eat better and healthier. “Spelonca” means “cave” in Italian, it is a word of Latin origin (“spelunca” originally). Aside from the fact that I like the sound of it, the name symbolizes my desire to return to a simpler, healthier life style and cooking style, similar to the one adopted by our ancestors. Also, I am a Classics major (read: nerd), I study ancient philosophy and ancient languages and I try to bring this influence into my culinary creations.
I am a vegetarian for over 10 years. I never enjoyed eating meat and I made a promise as a kid that I will become vegetarian when I will be old enough to choose for myself. Therefore, at the age of 18 I started eating a vegetarian diet and experimenting with cooking vegetarian food. There are lots of reasons behind my decision to be a vegetarian but I think the most important is the ethical one. I completely agree with Leo Tolstoy who said:
“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”
Why eat dead animals when there are so many other things to eat, better tasting, more aromatic, colourful and so much more nourishing? I’ll never understand this.
Thank you for visiting my blog. If you can, leave a comment, I’d really like to know what you think.
Thank you so much for sharing these D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S recipes!!
I totally love & agree with your intro ! hahaha!
I am going to try like all of your creations, and i am so looking forward to more posts!
xoxoxoxoxo forever
Thank YOU so much for all the compliments and for being so inspiring! I also can’t wait for your much-promissed website:)
Kisses!
Anda, would you prefer to eat live animals, e.g. eating the monkey brain from an alive monkey, like some oriental cultures do?
Why dead carrots are better than dead fish or pigs? I will promote eating “dead animals” until Anda will get a restraining order against me:)
There nothing more nourishing as a fatty liver pate, you know it and your parents know it!:)
(now you will shoot a me with a bazooka)
Just one point to consider: cholesterol, vitamin A & D, vitamin B12 do not exist in plants, dead or alive!
Anda, one very important point to consider: try to recommend an accompanying wine for the dish! I am sure that more people will enjoy this beautiful blog!
Seba I don’t have that great of a knowledge of wines, otherwise I would! I can fake my way through extensive wine tours by swirling the wine in the glass pretentiously and not talking too much but I need to learn much more in order to dare write about wine on my blog. I recommend my uncle’s organic wine with any dish, though, from oatmeal to curry!
Dulse has B12! Vitamin D cannot be taken from anywhere else other than the sun anyway. The fish oil craze looks very strange to me, especially considering how polluted oceans are. Not that I would take it anyway. I need to go to sleep with a clean conscience.
We had the argument dead animals vs “dead” plants before, in the Socratic manner, building on the things we observe through our senses. And although you won’t admit it, I won that argument!
)