Less than 100 sleeps

I usually spend Christmas alone. It's not a big deal: I'm Pagan and my family are Christian, so I celebrate Yule on the 21st and they all squash into my grandmothers tiny bungalow (they would be my maternal grandmother, my mother, stepdad, two uncles, my two sisters and their husbands).
The bungalow is far too small and I have issues with being 31 years old and forced to sit on the floor to eat dinner. My uncle, who lives with my nan and will be the man cooking up the sparingly dished out feast will not have the time to cook me a vegan meal. So I will avoid the family festivities as I always do.
Sadly, I am also single and thus am unable to snuggle up with anybody. It's a hard life.

My landlady/housemate will be spending the day with her own family and I will most likely spend the day in my dressing gown, watching Jason Statham, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Barnes (and various other types) play bad guys with either guns or weird paintings.
My housemate doesn't like typical Christmas fayre: cream covered pudding and mince pies, strange woman that she is, but I've decided that I may spend the day alone, but I'm still going to attempt making a pudding and mince pies so I can at least get into the spirit, surrounded by those that adore me: my cats and ferrets. And I may spend the next week eating pies and pudding and feeling thouroughly sick of them, but I  don't care.

I've found a recipe for a traditional Christmas pudding, a recipe for pastry and this recipe for the mincemeat filling for my mince pies from Delia Smith. I'm planning on an attempt to veganise everything!
If I suceed, I'll make it up to my housemate by making her a Chocolate Beer cake (see, I'm nice. And I love chocolate too).

Delia calls for a hell of a lot of shredded suet, pure butter and eggs. I'm going to see what I can do with vegetable suet, soya margarine and egg replacer. I have NO idea if it's going to work but I'm going to give it a go (I searched for vegan versions but they looked so lame! The mincemeat I found had half a dozen ingredients in it so I'm not going to bother with it)

Recipe: Curry Pumpkin soup

I've downloaded dozens of apps onto my iPhone to help me to make the transition first to vegetarian and then to veganism, but after buying my [very first!] pumpkin, I was disappointed to see that very few of them had simple pumpkin recipes of things that didn't require more than a dozen ingredients. So I decided to look on an older app I'd downloaded goddess knows how long ago. Big Oven, thankfully came to my rescue!

Curry Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients

1 Kilogram Pumpkin, chopped

3 Potatoes, chopped

1 Clove Garlic

1/3 cup Red Curry Paste

400 millilitres Coconut Milk

2 cups Vegetable Stock

Yoghurt, natural

Cracked pepper, to taste

Preparation - Curry Pumpkin Soup

Cook onion and garlic in oil until soft.

Stir in curry paste and cook for 1 minute.

Add pumpkin, potatoes, coconut milk and stock.

Bring to boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

Puree in batches.

Serve with yoghurt and pepper.

(Image taken from the Big Oven site)

I admit to not being the type of person that bothers with measurements. I used a small pumkin and got maybe a quarter of what the recipe asked for. I used a handful of baby potatoes because that was all I had on hand. 1 ½ tsp of curry paste, a dash of coconut milk and maybe a mug of stock.

I didn't bother with yoghurt and I added the pepper to the soup instead of sprinkling it on top.

To go with the soup, I made flatbread with plain white flour, a little salt and water, which I didn't expect would work but did.

All in all, a very earthy and deliciously spicy soup, and I can now label pumpkin as a used ingredient.

Wishlists

I have spent my work filled evening creating a new amazon wishlist for vegan books I like the look of. I have visions of shelves filled with books that I can simply flick open and create from. I am steadfastly refusing to burst my visionary bubble by reminding myself that the only wall with enough space to take any shelves is in fact a cheap wall put in place between what was once the outside convenience and the rest of what is now the extended kitchen. If it comes to it, I may persuade my landlady to allow me to buy a small open backed bookcase to go in front of the radiator below what would have been the perfect space for the shelf. We shall see. I need enough books to require a bookcase first.

My techophobic mother is online so I may just send her the link so that she can pass the list around the family, although she's so terrible with machinery that it may work out easier to simply print off the list and hand it to her.
Among items on the list:

Books

I love this book. Straight talking, if you can get over your bodily parts being referred to as fat mouth, fat ass...etc.
Next to buy is the cookery book, even if they list loads of American brands that we Brits find hard to get our hands on.


Simon Rimmer isn't a chef. He started a vegetarian restaurant in North England armed with 2 cookery books. But his style is easygoing and simple and he's a joy to watch on Sunday morning television.

I haven't read this but I follow Alicia on twitter and facebook and I aim to buy this imminently. Her advice is amazing.










An amazing book. Confused about the best green, cruelty free products? This book will answer them all.


One of the first vegetarian books I owned, a gift from 15 years ago (before I made the mistake of returning to meat).



My housemate brought this book. Beautiful and easy food.

Greetings from the Apprentice Herbivore

I made the decision on June 22nd to go vegetarian after watching a video on PETA about the cruelty in an Ohio based kosher slaughterhouse. Like most people, I knew that inhumane slaughter occurred in all slaughterhouses, but Kosher is meant to be humane, right? 

From the PETA site: workers  were using a meat hook and a knife to rip out cows' tracheas while the animals were still conscious—after the shochetim (kosher slaughterers) had cut their throats.

Read the full article here. 

Like everybody I know, I'd turned a blind eye to the ritual slaughter in all slaughterhouses, but I was truly sickened by the video, which, let's face it, you are meant to (PETA is fond of punching you with the most horrific images they can find). As a Brit, you'd hope that UK slaughterhouses were nothing like American ones. Alas, from their McDonald and KFC fast food lifestyle, the UK has followed America like a willing puppy.

I'd eaten fish and chips on the 22nd (before watching the video on the train home from the seaside). I became a vegetarian from the 23rd (today is day 96) and have moves to becoming vegan. It helps that my housemate Helen has become intolerant to lactose, but after learning just how meat consumption is directly linked to cancer and heart disease, she has gamely joined me on the green wagon. 

We are both overweight from a sedentary lifestyle of meaty, fatty, unhealthy pizza, Chinese, Indian and other general crap. So we are both on the Cambridge Wight Plan. It's hard for her - she can't drink the conveniently premade tetra paks of milkshakes and I've swapped out my powder shakes and porridge for her (which still contain miniscule amounts of milk unfortunately), so I've not launched as immediately into a vegan lifestyle as I'd have liked, although everything that is nothing to do with the diet has been replaced. I'm using soya milk and before restarting my weight loss plan I made vegan cauliflower cheese, vegan pancakes and vegan Yorkshire puddings (sooo yummy!). We are both also currently eating Quorn, which contains free range egg. I'd like to become comfortable with using tofu - I've only used the Cauldron pre-marinated pieces so far, which tasted deliciously of sausage.

I'm hoping that by the new Year, or my birthday in late February at the latest, will be the point at when I can make the change complete.

I've decided to create this blog to chronicle recipes that I've discovered and used, or created (like my Curried pumpkin and potato soup, roasted vegetable soup, vegetable stir fry or vegetable casserole that I'll post at a later date).

It will also be a place for me to link to other blogs, complain about how hard it is to get a decent sandwich in a supermarket, and how annoying it will be to be completely unable to get a soya latte or food in a little cafe in the middle of nowhere (as we discovered when we visited Newport in the Isle of Wight, and trundled from cafe to cafe - in a town filled with cafes - looking for at least a vegetarian sandwich and found only one that offered egg mayonnaise, but no soya for our coffee or hot chocolate)

On that note, thanks for reading (or skimming) my first blog post :)