I broke vegan.

Yes. I broke vegan yesterday. Repeatedly, purposefully, and unrepentingly. A filo pastry pie with cheese sauce and scallops, milky tea, egg fried rice, and cake. Oh, so much cake.

But before you judge me, and brand me a failure, let me put forward my justification. Yesterday was my Grandma Meg's Birthday. And this has been the first time in about 4 years that I've been able to travel home to celebrate it with her. During my degree, the 20th of January would too often be the date of a mock exam, or the first lecture or tutorial of term; no chance of sneaking back to Yorkshire to down a few g&t's and play Scrabble. This year, however, with the degree safely behind me and no exams or tutes, I was able to come home be with my family. Both my brothers also made the trip. My gran was delighted when I told her I'd booked the day off work to hang out with her:
'That's great, Phil', she said. 'Have lunch at mine, I've got these lovely little cheese tart things we can have with some chips.'
And there came the dilemma. Stick to the veganism, (thus probably having to explain veganism) and make gran buy in new food after she'd already got something specially for me, or, decide that, actually, some things are more important.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that if I had had a moral conversion to veganism, and I was following the diet out of a strong conviction that eating any animal product was wrong, then my gran would have been completely understanding and made me some pasta. But I'm not. And I don't think that it's wrong. And I didn't want to put her out, and make her life awkward for something that is effectively a project to keep me busy whilst January happens.

It was the right choice. We had a great day, which was all about my gran and what she loves doing, rather than about me and what I don't eat. I'll carry on the project for the rest of the month. I've stuck to it today, and, despite a friend's suggestion that I should stop when Tom comes back, I'll take it through to the end of the month. But sometimes you have to ask yourself what is actually important. And yesterday, Vegan January just wasn't.

(Gin and Tonic, coffe cake, George Eliot and Scrabble. A birthday of Kings)

Vegan Baking: attempt #2

I'll tell you now: Vegan Baking: attempt #2 is a success story. At last! The impending visit of Mama Hibbs brought out all the strongest elements of the hostess in me, so I not only cleaned the house, changed the sheets and did the laundry, but I made a 'meal plan', and I baked a cake. And oh, what a cake. One of my worries about mum's visit was that cooking for someone else whilst being a vegan would be pretty boring for the other person. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons I chose to do this while Tom was away, was because I felt I'd be 'inflicting' veganism on the other half. But this weekend demonstrated that it really doesn't have to be like that.

So - the cake. It was an unusual texture - very dense, and maybe a bit more like a very, very set chocolate mousse, or light brownie, than traditional cake. The ingredients required are pretty basic - I mean, generally speaking, soya milk is a little unusual, but for vegans, it's fairly straightforward stuff. We ended up eating it cool as a snack, or warmed with Swedish Glace (a lovely vegan ice cream) - a bit of warmed peanut butter also made a really nice sauce.



A few notes - make sure the oven isn't too hot. Mine was, for a while, and I was very confused as to why there was a crisp cake shell full of uncooked cake batter. I was on the phone to Tom at the time who, from the other side of the atlantic, managed to save the baking. Also, the mixture is much runnier than usual cake mix. I'm not sure why this is, but my guess is that it's because regular cake mix uses butter, which doesn't liquidise until it melts in the oven, whereas the vegan cake uses soya milk, which is (obviously) already runny. (recipe from cookingforvegans.co.uk)

250g/8oz plain flour
50g/2oz cocoa
250g/8oz caster sugar
125g/4oz vegan margarine
300ml/½ pint soya milk
2 tbsp golden syrup
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda


Preheat the oven to 170°C (possibly 180°C if not using a fan oven). Line the baking tin with greaseproof paper.
Sieve the flour and cocoa into a mixing bowl, add the sugar and mix together.
In a saucepan, melt the margarine and golden syrup and add most of the milk, keeping back about 4 tablespoons' worth.
Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix the bicarbonate of soda with the remaining milk and stir into the mixture. Place in the oven and bake for 35 minutes.
Topping suggestion: chocolate icing (mix icing sugar, cocoa and a small amount of water) and vegan chocolate sprinkles (e.g. Supercook).

All quiet on the Vegan Front

After the excitement and over-planned foodshopping of the first week, this week has been distinctly lacking in any kind of enthusiasm. It's been a little bit of a fail, to be honest. Not that I've broken vegan, but many of the reasons I decided to do this in the first place have been sidelined. A lack of time (and, if I'm honest, planning) has caused me to fall back on the quick and easy evening meals and relying on pretty boring stuff to get through the week. No new recipes, really. There was some mild experimentation with....no, scratch that. I made a chilli. Like I have done most weeks for the past 7 years. Except, this time, I didn't grate any cheese on to it. The one important discovery I did make, though, was the wonder of couscous. I'm sure this is already very common knowledge, but I didn't realise how easy it was to cook! I made a whole tupperware box-ful by frying red and white onions with cumin and coriander, and then adding the couscous and vegetable stock. This then became the basis of my work lunches - a little box of couscous, topped with cold roast vegetables, hummus and olives. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but it was exciting to realise that I CAN do this packed-lunch thing, very cheaply, if I just wake up a teensy bit earlier.

This has also been the week that I've learned that the internet is definitely a limited resource when it comes to vegan cooking. This is not only because there isn't much out there, but the stuff that's worth cooking is mainly American. And I'm sorry, but the 'cup' just isn't a real measurement. As someone who's grown up on weight-based measures, the cup challenges everything I believed and thought good and right in the world. And it's also really fiddly to do accurately. So, onwards to published tomes of wonderful recipes, sporting good old grams and ounces. However, all the cookbooks I own consist of a budget student one, and the egg-obsessed Delia's How to Cook series (a fine and important culinary work. But pretty much useless to the vegan world). A workmate, Peter, was kind enough to offer me a perusal of his and his girlfriend's extensive recipe book collection. I am now equipped with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg, Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian and 'Dr' Gillian McKeith's You Are What You Eat Cookbook. I know. I know. The woman is ridiculous. But she hates dairy with a deep intensity that's highly convenient for me right now.

Mama Hibbs is visiting this weekend. I have already picked out the recipes that I'll be treating her to. Tomorrow brunch will be Hugh's bubble and squeak, dinner is a black bean chilli (the beans are soaking now), followed by a vegan chocolate cake with swedish glacé (a kind of vegan ice cream. It's impressive, really impressive). The cake is currently sitting on the side in the kitchen. Looking GORGEOUS. 'What's that', I hear you cry, 'you managed some vegan baking?'. Why yes, but more on that later.... 

In which Bex makes Red Velvet Cupackes. Which I don't eat.

I've been a slightly rubbish vegan today. Not that I've eaten anything I shouldn't have - I've simply spent a lot of the day moaning, and sighing audibly and pointedly whenever I happened to glance at something delicious and dairy based. You see, I like vegetables. I like pulses. I like fruit and I like nuts. But sometimes, just sometimes, there's an emotional need that only high-fat dairy products can satisfy. And this has been the week that my bank card decided it no longer wanted to be a bank card, and my left ear decided it no longer wanted to be an ear. So emotional need has been, shall we say, somewhat higher than usual. Even tomato soup, the vegetarian's chicken-soup-for-the-soul, I discovered today, is off limits. Which left me with the very comforting option of a hummus bagette for lunch. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but it's all just a little flat, getting a little monotonous. I long for chocolate. I long for ice cream. I long for banoffee pie. I LONG FOR CHEESE. Oh, sweet, sweet cheese.

But I stayed strong. It helps massively that I've discovered that cashews are delicious, and that grapes are nowhere as expensive as I once thought they were. Also, things picked up massively this evening when Tom's housemates invited me over for dinner and fed me a hearty winter vegetable stew, which was exactly the kind of soul food I'd been needing. Bex had also been baking. I guess this should've been incredibly frustrating, but instead I found it deeply comforting to be around the smells of baking, around someone smothering cakes in buttercream. And it also helped that Bex and I had a bottle of wine to share before Ed got home.

Tomorrow I'll try and be a more positive vegan. I have bought grapes, and apples, and a red pepper, and I've just remembered that there's a little vegan deli/café around the corner from where I work. But, just in case I have another day like today, I've made a little desktop reminder to KEEP. ON. GOING.

Katie Reeves gets involved, and Vegan Baking: attempt #1

I'll warn you now - Vegan Baking: attempt #1 is not a success story. It all starts with the desire to molly-coddle my exam/revision-riddled friend, Rhiannon, with baked goods, whilst she spends a bit of the weekend revising at my house. I've heard legends of vegan baking being, at its height....well, better than regular baking (or at least, as good). It probably is, when done right, but all I managed was the creation of an incredibly powerful, soya-based adhesive. Don't get me wrong, this is, I'm sure, a fairly susbstantial achievement in itself. But it probably would've been better if I hadn't then tried to eat the resulting cookies (and feed them to Rhiannon...)

It was a real shame, though. I got SO excited whilst shopping for the ingredients. Ok, maybe not THAT excited. I was very, very, hungry and managed to keep bumping into many-layered caramel cakes and rows of half-price galaxy bars, like awkward old friends that you haven't seen for ages and you've been trying to avoid. However, there was a joyous moment when, after 10 minutes of searching, I FINALLY found dairy free chocolate chips (apply same story to dairy free margerine).

To be fair, the cookie mix was actually quite nice (which maybe made it even worse when the baked results turned out like they did). The cookies themselves tasted like chocolate-flavoured cereal....Weetos, perhaps; you know, not actually that good, and not actually that chocolatey, but sugary enough that you continue absentmindedly and pointlessly eating them. Needless to say, I won't be giving you the recipe for them, unless anyone has a particular need for a potent vegan glue.

Luckily, the evening wasn't a complete wipe out, thanks to the intervention of Katie Reeves. A few days previously, I'd been talking to her about the whole 'Vegan January' idea, and the fact that I'd done more cooking in the last week than I probably did in the entirety of December. Katie is a good person to talk to about food - she's one of those people who likes to feed her friends well, and cares deeply about good food. One of my favourite Reevesy memories is from an Archaeology trip we went on together with our sixth form, about five years ago. The group was on a really tight budget, but this resulted in a comically irrate Reeves, standing over a pan of boiling water and Tesco's value pasta, ranting 'good pasta is important - AND THE WATER ISN'T EVEN SALTED'. So, yes she understands the importance of good food. Anyways, a few hours after talking, Katie sent me a vast array of vegan recipes over email (a couple of which featured seafood and egg, but we'll move past that). I loved the idea of cooking something that I hadn't found on the BBC website, so I decided to try her mum's curry recipe (which I'm pleased to say, featured neither egg nor seafood). This was a wonderful success - the best vegan recipe I've cooked so far. It involved transferring the curry into a casserole dish and oven baking the whole thing for about 1 1/2hrs. Oven baking a curry is something I'd never done before, but it meant that the potatoes and sweet potatoes cooked and tenderised in the curry sauce, and thus took on the curry flavour. It's also quite an ad-hoc recipe. You can use whatever veg you happen to have lying around, so it's a very good end-of-the-week, use-up-what's-left kind of dish. This was good for me, as most of my veg had frozen in our crisper drawer, so anything requiring specific ingredients would've been a bit tricky to achieve.We still have loads of the curry left, and will hopefully be devouring that later today. The recipe, as supplied by Ms Reeves, is below...

(NB I used Madras, instead of Rogan Josh paste, for a slightly spicer taste)

Caroles’ Curry with Spinach and Red Lentils
 
This is a really easy one, it only uses curry paste so requires very little effort

with a 100% success rate. I reckon these quantities would make enough for 4 easily.
 
Ingredients
 
Pataks Rogan Josh Paste
1 lge Onion, finely chopped
1 bag Baby Leaf Spinach
Handful of Red Lentils
Mushrooms (halved or thickly sliced)
Carrots, diced
Potatoes, diced
Frozen peas
Sweet potato
Cauliflour/Brocolli
Mange tout/Green beans
1 400g tin Chopped tomatoes
300 ml Water
Cashew Nuts
 
Method.
Put some oil in the dish and fry the onions until translucent. Add any vegetables 

that you fancy.
Spoon in about half the jar of Rogan Josh paste.
Add the chopped tomatoes and stir.
Add 1 tin (use the tomato can) of water.
Bring to the boil and then place in a preheated oven at 180C for 1 hour.
Add a handful of red lentils and put back in the oven until the veg and lentils 

are tender
Remove the casserole from the oven and stir in handfuls of the spinach to taste. 

(the spinach wilts to almost nothing so add plenty).
Serve with Naan bread, Onion Bhajis ad/or Samosas.
 
Any leftover curry can be safely frozen.

Spicy tomato and broccoli linguine, and one hell of a chilli.

Apparently, music is the food of love. Except that it isn't. Food is the food of love. Clearly. Think about it; there's no more intimate, nuturing way of showing someone you care deeply about them than feeding them. Especially when it's an act of selfless creation, done just to see the delight on another person's face. My parents cook elaborate and delicious meals for my brothers and me when we return home; my best friend bakes beautiful birthday cakes for those she loves; another friend has recently sent someone a mince-pie through the post (well packaged, I'm reassured), from England to China, to spread the Christmas love and show a far-off friend she is still loved (and will therefore still be fed). In my experience, I've found you can guage how much a person cares for you by how much they'd be willing to make you food. Note to all; if you're with someone who doesn't care to put together as much as sandwich for you, then get out, get out now.

Coming home to an incredible vegan chilli last night was a good demonstration of this theory. I may have recently, and willingly, become a pain in the arse to cater for, but Tom was still happy to make the effort (probably emboldened by the knowledge that, in mere hours, he would be safe in America, the land of meat and glory). I'm not going over the top when I say that it was one of the best chillis I've ever eaten. I'm not sure what was involved, but there were definitely courgettes, mushrooms, and at least two kinds of beans. Tom's housemate (who works as a headchef) declared it a triumph. As did I, but my opinion holds less professional clout. The boy is currently airbourne, but next time he's by a computer I'll badger him for the recipe. Aaah, and tomorrow, I can eat the leftovers. Chilli is, after all, one of those dishes which is always best eaten a couple of days later, reheated. (Other meals in this category include lasagne, curry and my mum's aubergine parmigiana).

I guess the whole 'food as caring' theory works on an individual level as well:
Toast and peanut butter for every meal = someone not really giving themselves much thought.
Spicy tomato and broccoli linguine = someone making a half decent attempt at treating themselves like functioning human.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/linguinewithspicytom_88952

This is my favourite recipe that I've tried so far. It was ridiculously quick to cook (only about 15 minutes, if you cook the linguine at the same time as everything else), used fairly standard ingredients, and...AND...it had wine in it too. Only a little bit, but enough to make me feel rather sophisticated. It was very light, maybe more of a summer dish than something to be eating on what may be the COLDEST night of the year (big claim. I know). I was somewhat heartened by this one. Seems like I may succeed as a functioning, self-feeding adult yet. And you know what; I ate it whilst watching TV, and drinking a G&T. It was lush, and I'm almost definitely turning into my mum...

In other news, I had my first soy latte today. Gonne be honest, it was probably also my last.

Gridled Artichoke and Red Onion Paella. But, not...

So, I've realised, reluctantly, that if I don't actually organise myself, I'm going to end up either starving this week, or eating exclusively tinned soup and toast; both outcomes would've somewhat defeated the whole point of the exercise. I'm also someone who's quite prone to get quite ill very quickly if I don't watch what I eat. So, today was recipe researching, meal planning and food-shopping. The BBC food pages were my first port of call. The BBC website seems to be my first port of call for most things; weather, news, idle evening entertainment, and now advice on veganism. My confidence was fairly well placed. There was a relatively long list of recipes (if maybe a few too many curries).

I've never written such a long shopping list in my life. I guess if I were properly organised I could've then sourced these ingredients from much better, local shops but, I'm somewhat disappointed to say that I just grabbed a rucksack and headed to tesco. Don't worry, I got my comeuppance; there were no artichokes. I did, however, feel quite smug, walking around the supermarket with a basket full of fruit, vegetables and herbs. I guess it's the same kind of smugness a New Year's Day jogger feels...how long does it last?

One of the reasons why January seems the best time to do this experiment is that Tom will be transatlantic for most of the month. It's one thing trying to negotiate this thing by myself, but inflicting veganism on an innocent boyfriend seems unfair. And difficult. Far too difficult. However, he's not in America yet, and today I had to cook for the both of us.

So lunch was a Gridled Artichoke and Red Onion Paella. Except that it wasn't, because there were no artichokes.Worrying that Tom's carnivorous side would be unsatisfied if I presented him with, what to all intents and purposes, was flavoured rice, I decided to go for some mushrooms to add something meatier to the meal. I made up a marinade of 2dsp veg oil, 1tsp chilli powder, one small squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt. Once the mushrooms were entirely coated in this (and, the rest of the paella was ready), I cooked them on a very hot gridle pan. It was pretty nice, and seemed to go down well with the reluctant vegan. I always thought paella was a really complicated dish (which it may well be when you actually have to put fish and chicken in it), but this recipe was really easy, and needed surprisingly little skill - most of it was just occasional stirring. I would say, make sure you use fresh (or frozen) peas. I tried to use tinned peas and they were unpleasant to say the least. It was fun to finally get back into cooking something again, to have kitchen worktops covered in various spices and vegetables. Most of all, though, there was a nice kind of domestic pride in being able to present my over-worked other half with something warm, edible and (according to him) actually quite tasty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/griddledartichokeand_91479

P.S. Disturbing news has come to light. Apparently Quorn is not vegan, and thus most of yesterday counts as a pretty epic fail. Still, better to learn now, I guess.