Pumpkins, shopping and working in an anti-vegan environment

It's been a few weeks since I last posted here - naughty Lexa!

I don't really have very much to say. I haven't been cooking glorious vegan foods and I haven't done anything exciting to really warrent an update, but who cares?


Here's where I show that I'm a pumpkin virgin (despite my soup a short while ago).
I brought two small pumpkins to freeze so I could use it over the winter for soups and things. I didnt read instructions and I just did what felt right. So I cut the pumpkins into small pieces and cut away the outer bit. Then googled to find out how to prepare the pumpkin to freeze it. And discover that everyone tells me to cut the pumpkin in half, deseed, rub canola oil into the flesh and then bake for 90 mins. I don't have canola oil and the outside bit is in the rubbish. My pumpkin flesh is chopped into chunks in a bowl in the fridge. My seeds are waiting for some action too. I think I might toss the flesh in normal oil and bake until it softens, then freeze it once it's cool. I'm gonna toss the seeds in a frying pan shortly.
I can only mess up, right?
Besides, what do people do when they want to carve pumkinds and use the flesh? they can't bake the whole thing, surely?

In other news, I have visited the Whole Foods Market in Kensington, which was like walking into the Harrods of vegan cuisine. Ok, they sold everything, including masses of non vegan foods, but despite this, it was vegan mecca! (The one in Camden was like a tiny corner shop compared to this one).
I had already fallen off of the Cambridge weight plan wagon at the weekend and so went a little crazy. I wanted vegan marshmallows (which, incidentally, do not melt in hot chocolate and they float in the loo if you eat too much sugar and are sick later. Oops).
Vegan turkish delight was also purchased, along with diary free chocolate, sesame sticks (I know I'm not alone in considering these the best part of a decent bombay mix) and a vegan pasty (which, I hate to say, was much nicer than the one we brought from VX. A small-ish vegan chocolate cake may also have been purchased, on the basis that for something with eight slices, it was going to cost us £7.99, or we could have brought a solitary vegan cupcake each for £2.99. I live in the world of getting more for your buck, so I persuaded Helen (and it didn't take much persuasion, let me tell you) to say yes to us buying the cake. Cue an incredibly rich mass of cakey goodness that re-inforced the fact that as a vegan, I can still have my cake and chow down with the best of them. And then suffer the mother of all headaches later. My body has adapted to a fat free/bland diet (thanks to Cambridge) incredibly quickly. I'd been hoping that I could go wild with my cooking once I start eating after Cambridge again, but I may have to do the slowly slowly introductions. Or suffer. Oh well, it's hardly the end of the world.

Buying lunch in a non vegan world isn't so easy. Camden food co, Boots et al are all incredibly unhelpful. I didn't have time to go to Tesco (thanks to work cutting our meal breaks down to half hour) so I brought a non vegan sandwich. Lesson for the future: always prepare my own lunches for work - NEVER allow myself to get caught out. If I weren't still eating quorn or using Cambridge products, I'd have walked away with just a packet of crisps or something instead of a sandwich. I still felt like the biggest hypocrite on the planet as I scuttled back to my staff room and threw my (not very nice) sandwich down my throat before my colleagues entered the room. I'm not fully vegan but I've adopted the mindset (see, HUGE hypocrite) and I don't think I could have felt any worse about doing it had I taken a bite out of some meat. I know it's only a matter of time, but I can't wait for the cambridge products and quorn to be gone.

I'm going to be restarting my diet today - I really want to be fully vegan by my birthday, which means quitting using these cambridge products within 4 months. It doesn't give me a lot of time to drop 50lbs so it's time I quit messing about and focussed.

The Vegan Pantry

There are many things that I've realised I'll require as I make the transition to vegan. An entirely new pantry is one of them. Actually, it'll just be 3 cupboards and a combo fridge freezer filled to bursting, but you get the idea.


Chez Bettay has an incredible list that they say is their ultimate vegan pantry, which looks like it's filled with more food than an extremely large family could eat in a week, let alone my housemate and me. However, one of the things I immediately noticed about the list was that a few items that are used in many of the vegan recipes I've scoured are not present.


For simple scrambled tofu 'egg' I know that while I can add loads of vegetables to the dish, the simplest thing I can do is simply add a little Kala Namak (black salt) to broken down tofu and enjoy thoroughly 'eggy' scramble.

As a meat eater, I'd add Worcester sauce to Bolognese mince and I really don't see why I shouldn't continue to do so if I am using vegan mince, except that Vegan Worcestershire Sauce is also not mentioned.

While I am content to just use Cheezley to recreate my need for cheese, not all of the recipes I've been collecting endorse such trust in deliciously recreated solid fat and instead call for nutritional yeast, which, as you've probably already guessed, is also absent.

And lastly, while they’ve added Seitan and multiple forms of tofu, they’ve forgotten to add my new acquaintances Polenta and Tempeh to the list.


It seems that every single person seems to have their own ideas of what their kitchen should consist of. I personally fantasise about seeing a brand spanking new recipe in one of the many sites I stalk, which urges me to recreate it immediately. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to go to the cupboards and pull down every single necessary item? I imagine myself recreating vegan versions of Nigella Lawson-esque food porn in my house, which I admit would be completely wasted on my cats, ferrets and housemate, but in my fantasy, my kitchen faces the main road instead of the garden, and a cute, vegan, pagan, 30-something, single, non-smoking, sober, cute guy with his own place, a well paid job and all of his own hair just happens to be walking past the open window and stops to request a taste, followed by a date. *sighs* A girl can dream, can’t she?



Anyway, am I using this post as just an excuse to write down a few of the more common vegan items that I constantly forget? Absolutely. Will it help me to remember? Absolutely not :)




EDIT: I think that rather than creating blog post after blog post with other ingredients that I remember/come across, I shall simply make a list of them in this post and link to them in Amazon (although if I could, I'd link to the UK Amazon instead! Our Amazon doesn't seem to have half of this stuff, sadly.)


Currently:

*Kala Namak

*Vegan Worcestershire Sauce

*Nutritional Yeast

*Tempeh

*Polenta

*Soy protein

*Xanthan gum