No matter how luxurious or basic, adventurous or conservative, far away or close to home, sunny and warm your holiday is, there is no place like your own place. In fact, one of the great things about traveling is going home! If you ask me my own bed, worn out mattress included, is the best. And in my case it is not only the bed that is great to return to. I am also particularly glad to return to my own kitchen, with its kitchen appliances, my enormous stock of spices, herbs and ingredients to prepare lovely plant based food with.

As you probably have understood by now, we have been in France for a couple of weeks. We started in the French Alps and travelled from there to the Provence-Côte d’Azur region. We had an absolute great time, the weather was great, the places we stayed in were superb and the scenery was stunning.

But the food…, that proved to be a bit of a problem if you follow a plant based diet that is… One of the perks of being on vacation is doing as little as possible and that means, among others, dining in restaurants. At first in the Alps it proved to be difficult to get something without meat, fish or cheese, so I stuck with the salads as much as I could and hoped it would be better in the Provence. But in the Provence too apparently no one ever heard of people who like to eat plant based food… Nowhere on any menu was there anything that came even close. We had about two vegetarian choices: vegetarian pizza or a salad with goats cheese. (I was amazed anyway about how many restaurants were “specialized” in pizza, like we were in Italy instead of France!)

Fortunately we were staying in houses with reasonably well equipped kitchens so I did prepare food myself every now and then. Of course this is somewhat limited, because you lack the choice of spices, herbs, vinegars and so on you have at home, but still you can keep it basic and simple and still get it to taste great.

One of the things I prepared was roasted sweet potato with stir fried vegetables. It took me about thirty minutes to prepare and only four different ingredients: sweet potato, green and red pointed pepper, garlic and red onion. I used sea salt, black pepper, olive oil and rash el hanout spices for seasoning.

Like I said, it was an amazing holiday. In fact we rated it as one of our favorites. But now that we are home my husband and I are somewhat relieved to be able to get back to our kind of food. Even the kids sighed with relief that they will return to vegetables instead of pizza!