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)
good luck with your veganising!!!
ReplyDelete(and Christmas with cats and ferrets seems preferable to a lot of peoples Christmases:with argumentative families!)
Thanks :)
ReplyDeleteI did Christmas with my family a few years ago and everybody spent the entire day winding each other up - it was horrendous but I suspect that there's a secret clause in a Christmas document somewhere which states that once a year, people will get together with people they can't stand and raise their blood pressure with too much food and suppressed rage :P
It sounds like a tough challenge to veganise Christmas food - good luck!
ReplyDeleteIt is, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. I've just discovered that the jus' roll pre-made pastry in the supermarket is vegan friendly, and the vegan society webpage has some brilliant looking Christmas recipes (which means that Delia may be rendered obsolete)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vegansociety.com/lifestyle/food/recipes/christmas/