Holiday Travel Souvenirs.

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!