Good Bye to MoFo but NOT to our Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain..

The Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain is STILL playing Happy Birthday nearly 60 HOURS after it was lit...but in spite of that the theme today was of course Halloween!.
Maybe because we were born in the U.S. where Halloween has always been a bigger holiday and we Trick or Treated our way through the suburbs of Washington DC in the late 60s and early 70s (we were only allowed to go to houses which were decorated and NEVER allowed to go to Miss Mackie's in case she had put razorblades in the sweets(??)..but of course we went anyway and the grapes she gave us were always fine..!) but we always really go to town at Halloween!

Banana! We don't like you!

Wigs, hats, witch and warlock costumes, toffee apples, cinder toffee, scary stories all have to be attended to...stripey tights procured (witches and wizards always wear stripey tights).
Actually stripey tights are our favourite kind anyway and Halloween is a good time to stock up for the rest of the year, especially after Halloween when everyone is selling them off because no-one wants them anymore! Except us!
So we were supposed to be visiting the children's Fairy Godmother today and we were researching Halloweeny recipes for something to make and take with us while we were all retching over our banana breakfast...we had realised we were short of time to get everything done so had decided to forego our beloved toast for breakfast (there are few things nicer in the world than toast and yeast extract for breakfast) and eat a banana each while we cooked.

Bobbing for apples 

The trouble is that none of us like bananas very much (very nice buried in a smoothie..but on their own....) and we all were choking and retching as we battled our dislike of them...those nasty stringy bits up the side..those black stick-y bits at the bottom...the past-y, pappy texture...shudder...but Cinder Toffee won't make itself! 
We galloped our way through making our Halloween essentials(!) (still have to veganise candycorn which we remember fondly from an American childhood) and then realised that because we had utterly failed to work out how to change the time on our oven clock when the clocks went back at the weekend (it has always been 10 minutes out, but is now 1 hr and 10 minutes) we were actually really early!
So we faffed about trying to decide what to wear for an hour and a half until we were late and then set off in a cloud of Lush 'Comforter' perfume (we all love it and anoint ourselves with it liberally on special occasions!) and clutching tins full of cinder toffee..

The children's Fairy Godmother has such a lovely welcoming home and one of the things that I REALLY appreciated today, being a MoFo writer on location(!) was that in order to photograph the beautiful things she'd made I DIDN'T have to spend twenty-five minutes moving clutter out of the way to try and make our kitchen look less...home-educated (an in-joke!)..
Penny had made a Halloween-themed pumpkin and butternut squash stew with roast potatoes, beanburgers and broccoli...it was absolutely amazing, and even though, predictably, Pony needed rescuing from a couple of things, plates were cleared and then dessert arrived on the table!
Apple crumble with apples from Penny's garden and soya yoghurt to eat it with...everything is always so much lovelier at Penny's house that I eat things there that I wouldn't at home - I wouldn't normally ever eat crumble with yoghurt, but it was a lovely combination....Penny once made a crumble for us with plums in and I have to say I don't really think plums ever SHOULD be cooked, but even though I have never knowingly eaten cooked plums again since then, it was lovely when Penny did that...go figure...

Good Bye

After lunch while the children were playing with Lego Penny filled us in on her latest Not-Going-Up-In-A-Hot-Air-Balloon adventure...Penny's brothers bought her a trip up in a hot air balloon as a present for a Significant Birthday and Penny has kept setting it up and it keeps being cancelled by the balloon company because of it being the wrong sort of weather...Penny has been trying to take this trip for 7 YEARS and the only time she came close to it actually happening she was in hospital with pneumonia...which the company demanded proof of so that she didn't forfeit the trip...(WHAT TRIP??!!) Penny's 85 year-old friend, we hope from a long-lived family, is also waiting for HER trip to happen...
We had a very splashy apple-bobbing session - which had prizes all round of vegan chocolate bars (we have very little family and are so lucky to have Penny in our lives) - before we went home and managed to squeeze in, very much against the clock, carving a pumpkin and reading scary stories by pumpkin-light before whizzing the children up to bed and discovering that since we had been navigating by the oven clock again we had got the children to bed and hour and ten minutes early!
So now, I am going to say Good Bye to MoFo and sit down for an hour and ten minutes with Wally Lamb (still reading about Mrs Lizzie Popper..sigh..) and a Frank's Alcoholic Root Beer -  thank you Frank, whoever you are! and thank You for reading - now go and cook something yourself!!

Well the flowers have wilted, the bunting is down, the balloons are deflated and the cake is eaten (although the Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain is still tootling away 20 HOURS after we started it...astonishing and beginning to be a tiny bit annoying..!).
 So - it is time to eat something that doesn't contain SUGAR - hooray!
I feel as though the world is my oyster ... or is that not a vegan thing to say?...is the oyster in the phrase being eaten?...or just symbolically opening up representing all available possibilities?
Anyhoo, we shouldn't get too carried away as of course the oyster never opens THAT wide around here, metaphorically speaking, as there is still Pony's miniscule 'Food That I Like' list to contend with...so today we are having an old favourite that is practically unique here at VegaNation HQ . Not only does Pony like it but everybody else does too and what with it being a bit of a chore to do since we have to make the pastry first and we always have it with green beens and roast potatoes (truly great ones do not happen in five minutes!) it doesn't come around again and again so fast that we are all sick of the sight of it!
So a leisurely day is planned, to the tinny soundtrack of Happy Birthday (thriftily, we are now hoping it will play through until late January and cover Mouse's birthday also...) with lots of reading (I'm reading 'The Hour I First Believed' by Wally Lamb) and with minimal breaks to peel and parboil potatoes etc (I have contracted out the pastry as Sarah does a very nice shortcrust with cheeze in it - why keep a dog and bark yourself?!) I'm also planning to trounce my children at Picking Up Pairs later!

Totally gratuitous pic of 18-yrs-young Smokey on the day we adopted him!

Actually to go back to my book, Wally Lamb, if you're reading this...(are you one of  my TWELVE??!)...I forgave you all the hundreds of self-indulgent pages of family history in 'I Know This Much is True' (the monkey???) but YOU'RE DOING IT AGAIN!!!
We don't need to hear about the main character's family going back to his Great Great (Great? sorry, lost count..) Grandmother, Mrs Lizzie Popper...that's what your Editor was trying to tell you!
So anyway, about the tart...it's a shortcrust..er..crust! filled with a mixture of tofu, olive oil, (fish-free obv.) worcester sauce, black pepper and cajun or creole spices if wanted, topped with halved cherry tomatoes.
We got the recipe years ago off a packet of Cauldron tofu and because we can now only get plain at the supermarket (thank you Tesco..) that's the one we use, but as the newest VegaNation cat could tell you Smokey is best!!

Vegan Friends

Gratuitous kitten pic...Glenn cuddling Nelly!

Today we had friends over for lunch to celebrate Pony's birthday...Part III!
I think all birthday boxes have been thoroughly ticked... 3 birthday cakes, sparklers, balloons, flowers, Pony's chair decorated, 3 candles in the shape of an 8 etc etc
Our lovely friends Glenn and Angie are both vegan - Glenn is a friend from our hunt sabbing days over 200 years ago...actually, that should read over 20 years...Freudian slip, must be feeling a bit tired!!!... and what is special about seeing them is our shared experiences of being vegan - the triumphs and travails of living on Planet Vegan....
We can offer coffee or tea and ask if anybody takes milk without having to explain that we only use milk from plants...we can share the Saga of the Vegan Ballet Shoes and discuss latest cookbook purchases and whether any of us have found something to make from Isa's Appetite for Reduction (Glenn and Angie have made a Biryani while we made the Ceci soup) and mourn  the disappearance of Holland and Barrett chill cabinets and so the difficulties of tracking down cheeze...etc etc
I made the Thai-Inspired Veggie and Rice Soup again that I had found on Veg Web which is the third time we have made it in just a few days - it's THAT good!
I roasted the tofu with garlic instead of frying it but then forgot about it as there was some fairly hardcore tidying up going on simultaneously and by the time I remembered it the tofu felt a bit hard but it was fine once it had been put in the soup. And the soup was a great success - Pony had her plain tofu cubes with mint sauce - although for some reason Mouse wouldn't eat any but shamelessly scrounged the tofu from everybody's soup...
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Fin, Pony and Mouse are watching a DVD of Nigel Marvin saving Mammoths from extinction (Yes, really!) while I'm writing this and are rolling about hysterically because Nigel Marvin just picked up some 'mammoth dung' and Mouse has pointed out that he still has some poo on his glove!!! The children love watching Nigel Marvin as he explains in one of the programmes that one of the dinosaurs is vegetarian, like him!
In the one that the children are watching he stays up all night keeping an injured mammoth safe from predators...our hero!
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As the finale to Pony's birthday extravaganza (3 days of feasting and celebration!) Sarah had made Birthday Cake #3, a Lemon Drizzle, which was a delicious vanilla adaptation of our best choc cake recipe (Pony doesn't like chocolate cake) and decorated with everything but the kitchen sink and then we lit our sparklers from some candles that Glenn'n'Angie had brought that all had different-coloured flames...

Glenn is a physicist and loves to contribute to the children's home ed by introducing the children to fun aspects of science...they once took us punting on the Cam and Glenn surpassed himself by doing all the punting while the rest of us lounged about quaffing mocktails and then mooring in the shade under a weeping willow and, still in the punt, with a sandwich in one hand, doing science experiments with the other!

Glenn says: Flame colours – a demonstration

This demonstration experiment can be used to show the flame colours given by alkali metal,alkaline earth metal, and other metal, salts. This is a spectacular version of the ‘flame tests’ experiment that can be used with chemists and non-chemists alike.

It can be extended as an introduction to atomic spectra for post-16 students.

HEALTH & SAFETY: Carry out the whole experiment in a well vebtilated area you have previously shown to be safe. Wear eye protection. Ensure that the spray can be safely directed away from yourself and the audience.

a Darken the room if possible.

b Light the Bunsen and adjust it to give a non-luminous, roaring flame (air hole open).

c Conduct a preliminary spray in a safe direction away from the Bunsen flame.
Adjust the nozzles of the spray bottles to give a fine mist.

d Choose one spray bottle. Spray the solution into the flame in the direction you have rehearsed. Repeat with the other bottles.

e A spectacular coloured flame or jet should be seen in each case. The colour of the flame depends on the metal in the salt used.

f As an extension, students can view the flames through hand-held spectroscopes or diffraction gratings in order to see the line spectrum of the element. (Diffraction gratings work better. A better way to produce a steady source of light is to use discharge tubes from the Physics Department – with a suitable risk assessment.)

Teaching notes

The colours that should be seen are:

sodium – yellow-orange (typical ‘street lamp’ yellow)
potassium – purple-pink, traditionally referred to as ‘lilac’ (often contaminated with small amounts of sodium)
lithium – crimson red
copper – green/blue
calcium – orange-red (probably the least spectacular)
barium – apple green
strontium – crimson

The electrons in the metal ions are excited to higher energy levels by the heat. When the electrons fall back to lower energy levels, they emit light of various specific wavelengths (the atomic emission spectrum). Certain bright lines in these spectra cause the characteristic flame colour.

The colour can be used to identify the metal or its compounds (eg sodium vapour in a street lamp). The colours of fireworks are, of course, due to the presence of particular metal salts.

Health & Safety checked, June 2007

Thank you Glenn!

So 3 cakes have been baked and eaten (well, 5 counting the disasters..) 24 candles have been blown out and 3 wishes made, and Pony is definitely 8!
 I'll end here by sharing with you with the piece de resistance, Birthday Cake #3's 'Musical Birthday Sparkling Fountain' which is still playing Happy Birthday in solitary splendour in the the kitchen, 6 HOURS later..!
Thank you for coming to Pony's party!

Be Nice to Pigeons...

...because a statue will be made of you one day...that was the fortune that Pony got in her fortune cookie tonight!! We think there are lots of other reasons to be nice to pigeons but it made us laugh..
Today was Part II of Pony's birthday festivities...when I looked at the underneath of the lemon drizzle cake that I had (so sensibly) made the day before it was needed, it turned out that it looked even more overdone underneath and just to add insult to injury I snapped it in half while I was looking at it...

So it was all to do again today before we went out and had to be fitted in around breakfast, packing up the crushed beetle sweets to return to the wholesaler and a lengthy 'phone call to L*ttlewoods Customer Services about a computer I returned to them which they were refusing to replace or refund until the returned one had done its party trick of freezing and remaining inert for hours...WHY ON EARTH WOULD I HAVE SENT IT BACK AND ASKED FOR A REPLACEMENT IF THERE WERE NOTHING WRONG WITH IT???
So anyway I knocked up a batch of cupcakes using a recipe that used to be Nigella Lawson's but was veganized by our beloved Paula and so doesn't belong to Nigella anymore!!

Violet Tomola says Please adopt black animals!

But..something went horribly wrong..I'm still not sure what as the recipe has 125 g of flour and the same of margarine and the same of sugar so it was a strange one to mess up....but when I got them out they were kind of bubbling in a weird way and eventually 'set' very hard and slightly concave!! Fin, Pony and Mouse were very supportive and also I had let Mouse have some of the overcooked Lemon Drizzle Cake for breakfast (I know, I know!) so there was no going back..but they were so embarrassingly odd that in the end instead of filling up their hollowness with icing and so disguising their shapes (as the children suggested) Sarah stepped in and made some of Isa Chandra's which saved the day! Hooray!
So anyway we had a lovely day with our friends Paula, Karl and their daughter (now known as Kitty!) during which Klever Karl held one of his Komputer Klinics and found that one of our Komputers had a Krumb under the letter D! How did THAT happen?!
And then to round off the day we had a chinese takeaway for our supper which is also in the contract as part of birthday festivities around here! The very nice man at the takeaway always seems to feel a bit sorry for me that I'm vegan(!) and always says 'It must be very hard...!' so tonight he told me they could make chow mein with rice noodles for us and he gave us a (vegan!) fortune cookie each! We are already working on Pony's fortune but worrying a bit about mine..which read, 'A young man will give you problems this week'....I'll keep you posted!

PS Violet Tomola, one of the VegaNation cats is our avatar on Twitter for the day as 27th October is Black Cat Awareness Day and Violet wants you to know that black cats, on average, spend twice as long waiting for homes in a shelter than cats of other colours. Violet spent two years waiting in a shelter and she didn't like it...PLEASE ADOPT BLACK ANIMALS!

Great-Aunt Edith's Lemon Drizzle Cake goes Vegan!

  Lemon Drizzle Cake is something we've always loved; when we were children it was our great aunt's signature cake and whenever she visited from Sussex or we visited her she'd always have made one. We never had the cake any other time so it was just a once or twice a year treat.
  Then a few years ago we were making a birthday cake for a vegan friend and she said that she'd like a lemon drizzle cake, so I looked on the internet and found various lemon drizzle cake  recipes and made a veganized version.
I can't seem to make myself be disciplined enough to read through the whole recipe before I start so I'm frequently met, halfway through the recipe, with ingredients that we don't have, and in one of these recipes, as I was making the batter, I suddenly discovered that the recipe called for Lemon Curd!
Lemon curd contains eggs (and is horrible anyway!) so of course we don't have any, but Sarah managed to concoct something in a great hurry, with lemon zest, arrowroot and water which tasted fairly similar to the lemon curd we remember from school dinners- not sure that's a recommendation, but I hadn't had lemon curd before I moved to the U.K. and had school dinners, and haven't had it since!
  So, today, in honour of Pony's birthday 'season' I have made Great-Aunt Edith's  (veganized) Lemon Drizzle Cake. I usually make it in a loaf tin as I like the cake to be slightly deeper in relation to the topping. But I made it in a cake tin this time as we are taking it over when we visit our best friends Paula, Karl and Amy tomorrow and thought it would be easier to share between 8 people if it was a bigger cake but I wish I hadn't as even though I reduced cooking time from 45 minutes to 30 I think it could have done with even less and also it's come a little flat as I cooked it in such a big tin... Anyhoo, it's done now...
Yesterday I took Pony into town with me as I had some errands to run and she needed some shoes. We normally look on ebay which can filter out urrghy shoes made of skin but sizing can get a bit random which can be problematic when you are buying online so we thought we'd have a crack at going to a Real Shop and trying them on instead...which turned into a bit of a saga..
We started in one shop where Pony immediately rejected the styles available so we went to the only other shoe shop in the small country town we live near where she immediately spotted a pair she liked which I allowed her to try on for fun but didn't buy as she is only 8 and the shoes had heels over 2" high??? They actually went down 2 sizes smaller than the ones Pony tried on!!??? Why??
 Then Pony decided she had been too quick to dismiss the shoes in the first shop and wanted to go back and try them on so back we trailed to the first shop where Pony spent ages trying on ankleboots and admiring herself in the mirror, deciding that they made her look Victorian, but then suddenly dissolving in to tears because she decided that if we bought the boots she'd miss strap shoes too much...so we gave up and went and cheered ourselves by going to the chippy and getting ourselves a large portion of chips to share..eaten with wooden chip forks...perfect!
The postscript to the shoes story was that we couldn't find any on ebay that she could accept as she decided all the strap shoes were School Shoes (she is home educated!) so I stopped in town and bought the boots this morning on my way to get the car MOT'd ( it failed, but thanks for asking!)...

Drowned, dried and crushed beetles..

Well it all started so promisingly as we had a new supplier and we found lots of lovely goodies which we hadn't stocked before, to buy for our dear little vegan shop VegaNation and we were very excited about them.
The ingredients for the sweets weren't listed in the catalogue (which we DON'T like as we are ingredients girls from way back) but everything we ordered was marked with both a V (veggie) and a VG (vegan) in the catalogue and when I placed the order I emphasised that we have a vegan shop and could they check again for me that everything we had ordered was vegan and the very nice lady said she could do that...

Cochineal beetles being crushed, after they have been drowned and dried

So the order arrived and as we were unpacking it we checked ingredients, as you do, and in two of the lines we had ordered, we spotted E120...which to the uninitiated is actually Cochineal, a food colouring (and previously a dye) made from the crushed carcases of South and Central American Beetles.... You can gussy it up all you like and call it cochineal, carmic acid, carmine or E120...it is still dead animals and clearly neither a vegetarian nor a vegan product..
I 'phoned the wholesaler we had bought them from and to her credit she was terribly apologetic and arranged collection of the offending items and refund for their purchase but it was so disappointing to see how casually this issue is treated.
She explained to me that the manufacturers who sell them the products tell them whether the item is suitable for vegetarians, vegans etc and then they, the wholesalers, (without any checking) put that information in their catalogue as a 'guide' for potential buyers..like us...
And the wholesaler (I shall protect her identity here because out of all the wholesalers who have made this or any other mistake she was pleasant and apologetic!) explained that they don't have time to check the ingredients themselves...
You would think that a manufacturer would know what they put in something (did you put drowned, dried, squashed beetles in it or not?) and could therefore be trusted to know who that product would be suitable for.
But since (like us) the wholesaler is in the business of selling them to customers,  it is unacceptable and feeble to say they don't have time to check the ingredients - how can you list something as a vegan product if you don't know what's in it? And if they didn't know what E120 is, they could have LOOKED IT UP the same as we did...
We are long term vegans ourselves, raising vegan children and we take our responsibilities to the people who buy from us seriously...we check labels so our customers don't have to.

Menu A v Menu B

Today was a bit of a Red Letter Day for me as I cooked something new and 4 out of 5 people liked it!!! You probably have to live here to understand what an emotional moment that was...
It all started out as though it was going to be quite an ordinary sort of day...scurried around tidying up a bit for Nina, the children's French teacher...although have to say we have been in a kind of Amber Alert sort of state since she turned up a week early and our sitting room was scarily shambolic and had to be tidied up in the length of time it took for Nina to get from our gate to our front door...awful...

BAD cannelloni

GOOD cannelloni

Anyway we did some french practise with the children, they had their lesson and we got started on lunch - cannelloni! I have never actually had cannelloni before but knew that I liked it...spinach, tofu, garlic, pasta...what's not to like? And also I had finally found urrg-free cannelloni (I could only find it made with uggs when I was shopping online but found it on the shelf when I went to the shop) so wanted to give it a go.
The recipe was one from Veg Web but I changed it a bit as thought it was a strange idea to puree tofu and spinach together for the filling so I just broke up the tofu with a fork and stirred through the spinach (I LOVE spinach) and garlic (doubled, natch) and yeastflakes. I couldn't put the quarter of a cup from the recipe as I'm very mean with yeastflakes in cooking because we like them so much on toast that I begrudge using them for anything else where they tend to just disappear anyway without really changing the flavour. But I used them in this case because apart from salt and pepper and garlic the tofu didn't have any seasoning.
The tomato sauce bit in the recipe was some jar of tomato casserole (?) sauce that I hadn't heard of, but I think 'store-bought' (thank you Laura Ingalls Wilder!) tomato sauce can come a bit sweet so prefer homemade. So we made an enchilada sauce and used that - we watered it down a bit to make sure there was enough as I wasn't cooking the cannelloni first.
The recipe instructed to use a ziplock bag with a hole cut in the corner but  I have NEVER got on well with any sort of piping (I always decorate my children's birthday cakes with 10ml syringes that our lovely vet Josh Lida gives us for the purpose!) so I shoved the filling in the cannelloni with my fingers and then poured the sauce over it all, covered it and baked it.

About half way through I took its lid off and sprinkled it with grated Cheezly and let it finish cooking uncovered.
We then had a bit of a family 'meeting' (meltdown) because I already knew that Pony wasn't going to eat it (although she always tries everything new, bless her) so was doing oven chips (I absolutely loathe these and feel a complete failure when I give them to my children but needs must...). But then Fin told me he was going to want chips as well as cannelloni..
What this usually means is that the Menu B option is plonked on to the plate beside Option A and some godforsaken dish like potato waffles or oven chips gets eaten first until Fin/Pony/Mouse is full and the proper meal is cold and so gets wasted...sigh
Anyway we brokered a deal in the end whereby Fin could have both but had to have the cannelloni first and fill up on (horrible) oven chips when he had given the cannelloni a fair go...in fact, to my delirious happiness he loved the cannelloni so much he had two helpings of cannelloni and was then too full to eat more than a handful of oven chips! I WON! I BEAT OVEN CHIPS! HOORAY FOR HOMECOOKING!!

PS. Mouse also ate two helpings which was unexpected and Pony didn't like it which was NOT unexpected..!