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.

Planning ahead for Christmas recipes

I've made a decision about what I will be cooking for Christmas. Actually, I've made a decision about which recipes I will be using for Christmas. I will be making finger foods for the 21st, that I am planning on taking around to my sick grandmother.

Something to make now:
Christmas pudding
Mincemeat

Leading up to Christmas week that I'll be sharing w/neighbours:
Pumpkin spiced bread
Banana bread
Pumpkin Pie
Banana-maple oatmeal Cookies

Foods I am planning for the 21st are:
Individual Vegan toads in the hole
Vegan sausage rolls
Home made hummus with cheezley bread sticks
Individual pizzas
Roasted tomato and pepper soup w/flatbreads (no links, sorry, this is my own recipe)
Stuffed peppers w/cous cous
Baked paprika sweet potato crisps

Individual apple pies
Chocolate and coconut truffles
Vegan Milanos

Christmas eve:
Christmas cake
Chocolate tiffin
Gingerbread cookies
Mince pies
Chocolate cake

Christmas Day:
Quorn family roast (which will be the only non vegan item on the menu - I'll have a whole year to convince my housemate to allow me to try cooking a nut roast)
Swede and carrots
Vegan Cauliflower cheese
meat free bacon wrapped sausages


This Christmas, dinner will be brought to the Herbivore household courtesy of the following sites:
Fat Free Vegan Kitchen
Vegan Village
Parsley Soup
My Vegan Planet
Vegan Cupcakes
Razzle Dazzle Recipes
Cook Dannemann

My neighbours are going to love me this year! I hope some of this stuff will freeze ;)

Vegan Sites

I've been trawling the net looking for vegan suitable recipes for Christmas, and stumbled upon a spakly treasure trove of recipes to suit all occasions. I'll be honest, I walked into this diet thinking that it'll be 101 ways to cook chickpeas and lentils, and to be honest, there are a thousand ways to incorporate these into the foodie lifestyle, but there's so much more! You truly believe that you'll never eat another cheese scone or tiramisu dessert again, and I'm overjoyed to be shown how wrong I am!



Some of the sites thrilling me right now:

Veggie Love Planet

The Vegan Society

Vegan Village

BBC food

Veganfamily

Vegetarian Society

Parsley Soup

Veg family

Whole Foods Market

You may have noticed that a lot of the links are to the Yule section of the recipes. Enjoy and please feel free to suggest more :)

On the books front, my housemate ordered Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, which is just brilliant! I also received my copy the The Quorn Kitchen, which would have been perfect for when I turned Veggie back in June. I can still use it though - I just need to substitute lol.

I've also ordered my copy of Alicia Silverstones The Good Diet and Skinny Bitchin', which I'm anticipating imminently :)

Everybody loves Junk Food!

There seems to be a lot of food out there that seems to have the words Anti -Vegan written along the back in teeny, tiny writing. A lot of obvious stuff, like cream cakes, and a lot of non obvious ones, like health food bars that have honey as an ingredient. 

I was pointed to a group on Facebook by a fellow vegan friend of mine, Faye,  who has provided me with a wealth of information about making the transition first to vegetarian and then to vegan. The group she advised to me to join was The Vegan Societies' official FB page, and the thing she specified was a post requesting peoples favourite vegan eats/junk food.

Now, of course, veganism and vegetarianism are hugely political. The post was a call for suitable vegan food and there's one guy telling somebody off for listing Pringles because they're made by Proctor & Gamble, while another guy sits upon his gold plated high horse and informs everybody that the best snack food available is fruit and vegetables, brought from your local farmers market that are apparently set up right next to where I live. Nice to know. I've obviously walked right past them without seeing them for all of the four years that I've lived in Cheshunt. There is a house less than five minutes walk from me that sells honey from his own hives, but I'm boycotting honey so that's a no go.

Also, there seems to be huge debate over some of the foods listed. Apparently Oreos made in the UK use milk while the American company does not. Suddenly, a lot of the people are happy and some even rush out to buy Oreos. Except that the American company uses sugar that is processed using bone char. Oops.

This is a list of the appropriate foods I've managed to glean from the post (please note that I haven’t taken the time to write everything out and have simply copied and pasted everything, omitting opinions and changing from caps):

Condiments

Salad Cream

 Bisto original instant gravy

Henderson's Relish

Vitalite margarine.

HP Sauce.

Meals

Sainsburys frozen Vegetable Fingers

Linda McCartney Sausage Rolls.
Linda McCartney deep country pies

Realeat veggie mince

Pizza Hut bases and sauces

Linda McCartney sausages.

Tesco meatfree mince

Sainsburys own tinned spaghetti Bolognese

Dried pasta

Tesco finest garlic ciabatta

Veggie samosas

Morrison's stone baked garlic pizza,

Tesco dairy/egg free pizza base mix

Asda garlic stone baked pizza!

coop and Tesco value garlic baguettes

Tesco finest garlic bread

Morrison’s own yellow garlic bread

Waitrose cheeseless pizza

Snacks

beef & tomato pot noodles

Some walkers crisps

Haldirams Indian snack range

Lidl "Crusti croc" crisps (some only)

Sweet n sour noodles

Chow mein pot noodles

Various cheap flavoured noodle packets

Peanut butter

Chili heatwave Doritos

Pink panther wafer biscuits

Tesco value and Sainsbury’s basics tortilla chips

raw almonds

Joes dried mango slices

Butterkist micro popcorn

Doritos Spicy Sweet Chilli Flavoured Tortilla Chips

Snacks: Indian shops
- uttapam mix
- pakora mix
- bhaji mix
- idli mix
- dal vada mix
- pani puri ingredients
- samosa
- onion bhaji
- some indian sweets
- lots of cheap fresh, tinned and frozen vegetables
- cheap coriander and
- lots of spices and flours
- lots of vegan snacks (inc. Haldirams)
- some frozen vegan foods

Snacks: Arabic, Iranian and Turkish shops
- tinned Baba Ghannoush
- tinned Houmous
- multiple tinned Iranian dishes
- stuffed vine leaves
- stuffed pepper
- stuffed aubergine
- especially dark and delicious small cucumbers!
- most bread in these places is vegan. especially delicious is Lebanese flat bread - a palm oil free alternative to tortilla wraps

Cakes

Lyons treacle tart

Morrisons treacle tart

Asda iced fingers

Co-Op custard doughnuts

Asda Victoria ring

Co-Op Jam Doughnuts

Sainsburys basics large apple pie.

Tescos gluten free jam tarts
Mr Kiplings jam tarts

Mr Kiplings apple and blackcurrant pies

  

Biscuits

Bourbons,

Hob-Nobs

Lemon puffs

Oreos (imports only)

Oaties biscuits

Raspberry Ruffles

Happy shopper bourbons

Ginger nuts

Marzipan ritter sports

Jammie dodgers

Plain Chocolate HobNobs.

Tesco and Asda boxes of mini gingerbread men

Asda and Tesco value range digestive biscuits.

Morrison's value fruit shortcakes

Sweets

Jelly tots

Tutti Fruities

Starbust

Fry's chocolate cream

Co-Op packet sweets- eg fruit jellies and gums

Cherry brandy chocolates

Co Op mint & orange chocolate thins

Divine Dark Chocolate

Booja Booja truffles

Morrison's plain chocolate chips

Lindt and Tesco own dark choc (85%+)

As a disclaimer, I will quickly point out that I have no idea if any of these are actually suitable for vegans (they are ALL the opinions of other people).
Also, companies change their ingredients quite frequently and usually without making a big song and dance about it (remember when Mars started using animal rennet in its chocolate and the vegetarians were up in arms to discover their formerly veggie friendly treat had been taken away from them - before a lot of them had even realised!)

In the words of Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin (Skinny Bitch): Always read the ingredients, because you never know how these companies will cut corners to save and make money!