Green Food Portal is a vegan blog run by Gunnar and Cathrine Birkeland, and we absolutely love cooking, spending lot of time together in the kitchen.
Cathrine
I am a married mother of three, 38 years old. All my life I have had a huge passion for cooking. I love experimenting with recipes and, well, it’s basically my number one hobby.
In December 2010, my mother became vegan overnight. “Oh no”, was my first thought. “No more dinner parties”. I was not pleased. I was even less pleased when my brother, who always loved meat and dairy, also went vegan. Overnight! What in the world happened? Well, they had both seen “The best speech you’ll ever hear” by Gary Yourofsky on youtube. And it worked. They were both pushing me to see the speech, but of course I refused. I was NEVER going vegan. Ever.
After a while I was too curious not to see it, so I did. And I, who was never ever going vegan, became vegan at that moment.
My brother, who couldn’t cook, ate only PB&J sandwiches the first months. I couldn’t watch my own brother live like that, and I would certainly not live that way myself, so I took a big dive into vegan blogs (which there weren’t many of at that time, at least not in Norway) and cookbooks, and I tried to make vegan versions out of every favorite dish I missed after becoming a vegan. I also checked out all the vegan “meats” and “cheeses” out there and after a while I almost felt like I was having a “normal” diet again. I ate almost like before, it was just all vegan!
I was gradually building a large collection of my own vegan recipes, and people started asking how I made the dishes and they wanted the recipes. I was writing them down for a while, but then it hit me; why not start my own blog and just link to the recipes when people were asking for them? And so I did, and the Norwegian vegan blog “Veganeren” was born. Now it is called Grønn Matportal.
If you love plant based food, or food at all, you’re going to love this blog. Cathrine has, for almost ten years, collected her best vegan recipes, tips and experiences from being a vegan mother, and she has eventually become a popular food blogger in Norway. There aren’t a lot of vegan family bloggers here in Norway, so if you are a vegan parent raising vegan kids, this is the go to blog.
In January 2016 I met Cathrine and I immediatly loved her passion for the vegan lifestyle and I wanted to join her on this journey.
I love running. One of my biggest passions are long distance running and it has been for years, and when I run I often listen to different podcasts about veganism, running and such.
Gunnar
When I’m not working or running, I spend all my time with my family. Me and Cathrine have 5 kids living with us, and we love being a big, happy family.
Travelling is a passion me and Cathrine share, and we love to eat our way through the countries we travel to. It’s especially exciting to travel as vegans, since the selection of vegan food often are much bigger outside Norway.
I’m looking forward to many, many travels with Cathrine so we can blog about our experience with veganism outside our country. We like to show people that it’s easy to eat plant based almost wherever you go.
