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...
                                      ***********************************
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!
                                     ************************************

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..!

Saxon Stuff

Today was supposed to be all about Saxon cooking ...mostly involving barley...
We went to a Home Ed History session a few weeks ago about the Saxons and we always set ourselves some sort of follow-up project afterwards. Such as a trip to see Roman mosaics and the Roman theatre at Verulamium (now St Albans) after a session on the Romans  and some cave painting with natural pigments from the garden after a session on prehistoric peoples.
So we researched Saxon cooking which was hard to summarise except noticing a lot of use of barley so we decided to grind some grain up into flour, using a homemade quern and make Barley Buns but in the end when doing more research online into the Saxons we took a diversion and discovered an amazing Saxon hairstyle called a Suebian Knot..as worn by Germanic warriors of the 1st century and also discovered on bodies of so-called Bog Men (naturally-preserved human bodies found in the sphagnum bogs of Northern Europe which have retained skin, internal organs and often hair).
It was allegedly used to make the wearer appear taller and more awe-inspiring on the battlefield....so we found some styling instructions(!) and without further ado we got the children all Knotted Up and photographed them for the timeline our group is putting together of all that we have covered. But then the hairstyles were making them too warlike and we had to quickly un-Knot them again....! So the Barley Buns are a project for another day since we have now done our Saxon homework!
And today we are now cooking 'Roasted Marvels' from a Jane Sen recipe book which are an old favourite...well with the grown ups anyway...the doubters are having pasta animals (with Marmite)...not many Good Mummy points for that as they had pasta yesterday except that this pasta contains OAT FIBRE!!! So we're hoping that Pony likes oat fibre! We had to hide the box of the chocolate soya milk this morning to make sure she approached it without prejudice as it was a NEW KIND..but we got away with it so we're feeling lucky!
The Roasted Marvels are a kind of filled pepper but not the stodgy kind of old that you ate through your vegetarian years and makes your heart sink into your boots just looking at them...NO these are just lightly filled (not STUFFED!) with a mixture of cherry tomatoes (from our garden as it happens although they weren't actually meant to be cherry ones??) garlic (double), onion, fresh basil, courgette, soy sauce, black pepper and a sub. for the honey in the recipe - we like to use golden syrup.
At the start of the book it says 'There are no recipes for dishes in this book that contain any animal products', but there are several recipes containing honey...JANE! BEES ARE ANIMALS!!.
Although 'More Healing Foods' is a lovely book, apart from the honey issue, I must end here with a warning as the book does contain a recipe on p153 for Date and Malt Loaf which is made with 1lb of pitted dates (arrghh) which I suppose is fair enough since it IS a date loaf but also 1 PINT of Earl Grey Tea...AVOID AVOID AVOID!

Disappointment in the Kitchen but Diamonds in the Garden

Today was linguine day...any dish with pasta of any kind is a doddle when it comes to the non-believers as they just eat it slathered all over with marge'n'Marmite...and just so that we can settle this thing once and for all...Nigella Lawson did NOT invent that, WE did...!!...in fact I have photographs of myself eating spaghett'n'Marmite as a child which should be the last we need to say on the matter!
So this dish was an unholy tangle of linguine and grated courgette and garlic and lemon which should have been tongue-tinglingly delicious but in fact was inedible as the grated courgette was so dry and bitty it was a bit like when we got quinsy last year...hurt a lot when we swallowed....
I think the courgette was a Monster one from our garden which had been allowed to grow to ridiculous dimensions hidden under the foliage so was as tough as old boots by the time it was found, but added to that I think the whole thing would have been much improved if the courgette had been cooked before being stirred through the linguine...and also even though we always double the garlic in every recipe we use, we still couldn't taste any garlic...but then one of our favourite dishes has 16 garlic cloves in it so maybe we are de-sensitised?
It was a beautiful sunny autumn day and since 3 of the VegaNation cats (we have 7) have not yet been outside in their garden it seemed like today was a good day for it:
Nelly is deaf so we adopted her because we have an enclosed garden and her brother Noah came too as we think kittens should be in pairs where possible - they are about 15 weeks (Nelly is asleep on my lap or I would get up and check!) And Smokey, who is 18, only came home with us from the shelter last Monday and has been busy exploring the house...and dozing..!
Nelly was wildly excited and even climbed trees but Noah was very very anxious and only left the security of our laps just before we came in. He is a much more laidback character than Nelly but clearly found the Great Outdoors quite overwhelming!
But Smokey was enchanted with his enormous new territory and had a thorough look around and wore his new diamante collar for the occasion! Our garden is enclosed and all our cats are microchipped so they don't usually wear collars but our friend Jan was so moved by Smokey being adopted and coming to live with us that she sent him a card saying 'You Did It!' with a £10 note enclosed! So he bought his diamond collar and if his behaviour the other night was anything to go by he'd like the remaining £3.01 spent on Salt and Vinegar crisps!

Cheese v Cheeze

Today was grocery shopping day .... I spared you all the back room deals and the begging and bartering which were the weekly ordeal of planning a week's meals..and cut straight to the shopping!
Vegans with 7 cats do find themselves in some strange places - I had to go to Pets at Home to get some raw meat for the VegaNation cats as we like to give them raw food as much as possible.
Pets at Home are a funny old mixture as they appear to be very supportive of adoption from shelters and they do nice things like donating some bags of hen food to a lovely charity called Little Hen Rescue which our family has volunteered at and letting volunteers from  Feline Care (where our beloved 18-yrs young Smokey came from!) shake a tin in their recent fundraising drive to raise £70,000 to secure their premises and future.
Also the staff there appear tremendously knowledgeable and I have overheard them explaining a variety of different animals' needs to customers in a very thorough and capable way. BUT, and this is a big BUT, they sell animals and I think this is wrong.

The panoply of cows' breastmilk cheeses on offer to veggies and omnis at an average supermarket ...

I don't know where they get their animals from but while there are so many animals languishing in shelters for want of a good home it seems irresponsible to be selling animals to people who could have been encouraged to buy their pet food from Pets at Home but adopt a pet from a shelter...It is a particular shame that they are selling reptiles in their shops as estimates based on the US pet industry (thank you Animal Aid) suggest that the majority of reptiles purchased are dead within a year of their purchase....which is totally leaving aside the  issue about selling animals as though they were things rather than beings..
So I haven't really solved that dilemma...where a vegan should buy meat???

Where did the b****y chill cabinet go?

After that I had to go to Holland and Barrett to buy Cheezley soy cheese as Tesco hadn't  had it last week and we want enchiladas again.
But unbelievably when I got there they had refitted the shop and their chill cabinet had gone."$%%££%^$"!*&%...I am so fed up.. I spoke to a member of staff about it (the lovely Elly) who explained that when re-vamping a shop H and B analyse all areas of the shop and if an area has not been generating enough profit than it has to go...which leaves vegans wanting Redwood cheeze products, Tofutti cream cheezes etc a bit stuck..OMG can't get Redwood Rashers anymore...I just think that running a shop is a balance (we run one!: VegaNation !) between making a profit (of course! we have 3 children, 7 cats and 2 mice to feed!) and providing a service. So some things in our shop are big sellers, for instance marshmallows , while some will be more occasional purchases such as a humane mousetrap but when someone needs a humane trap, they really need one and while eating lots of brilliant vegan marshies will improve most situations it won't catch your mouse...unless you use them as bait..!

The choice of cheeze available to vegans SOMEtimes at SOME supermarkets...

Holland and Barrett may not sell as many vegan cheeses as it sells packets of walnuts, for instance, but to the people who go there to buy vegan cheeses it makes an enormous difference to suddenly have that opportunity withdrawn. H and B used to have a freezer too and I used to take my children there and be able to buy them a vegan ice creem cone but that has long gone and this is a further backwards step emphasising that Holland and Barrett are far more interested in making a profit than in providing a service to their many vegan customers.
It was a less permanent drought when Tesco didn't have the cheeze either but with Holland and Barrett no longer stocking it at all it will now be even more of a piss-off when Tesco doesn't have it....and yet people who eat cheese made from the breastmilk of cows can't even imagine walking into a supermarket and discovering the shelves are bare of cheese and they can't have any today...

Gang Keow Wan!!!

Went out on a bit of a limb...made Another Soup....kind of really knew that Pony would not be impressed with Thai-Inspired Veggie and Rice Soup and thought Fin and Mouse might also have qualms...but what the hey..faint heart never won fair lady!
We have to keep trying new things, not really because we can actually imagine what it would feel like to make something new that Pony turned out to like but because we are jaw-achingly bored at the prospect of a week filled with quesadillas, macaroni cheeze and tofu tart...all things that we like but they are coming around a bit too soon after we last ate them.

We had rather a leisurely start to the day and didn't have breakfast until hours after we got up - the children are working on their dolls house and were very busily scrubbing bannisters and carpets with old toothbrushes. We bought it secondhand on ebay a few years ago and reminisced to the seller how it was the same model of dollshouse that our friends had had when we were children and we had really coveted it. The seller had replied how thrilled she was to imagine the dollshouse being renovated and 'coming to life' again...about half an hour after it arrived it had come to life again: the DINOSAURS had moved in (the children were obsessed with model dinosaurs at that time) and utterly finished it off. Carnotaurs removed window frames and doors, Pachycephalosauruses tore off wallpaper and even the plant-eating Parasaurolophuses covered the bannisters and walls with wax crayon...
But now the dinosaurs are out of favour and languishing in a cardboard box somewhere and Sylvanian model cats and some dancing ladybirds have moved in and the children have been frantically making good the damage done by the previous tenants...Even Nelly helped by overseeing operations from the roof!
So when they finally took a break we had breakfast and were then running so late that I started making the soup immediately afterwards.
I have never had Thai food and nobody could remember what we had thought looked so promising about the recipe but it was too late to change plans so I started chopping and sweating (the onions, not me..). I left out a green pepper as think they are completely pointless - they don't look good (like red peppers do) and don't really add flavour to anything they are in..all it does is add 70p to the cost of the dish..
Actually, I just forgot to buy one...
The recipe had chopped greens so I used spinach as I love it and I used white rice instead of brown rice which I prefer...but that made everything start looking Ready a lot sooner than I expected (we only just finished breakfast!) as the white rice cooked much faster than the brown in the recipe so I had to quickly fry cubes of tofu to throw in. Another time I think I would season the tofu as Pony is the only person I know who eats plain tofu..but it looked attractive and was a nice texture.
It was tasting so good already - I've never used Thai green curry paste before and thought it smelled a bit ..musty? But accompanied by dried basil and turmeric it was lovely and so I was hesitant in adding a whole can of coconut milk and juice from one lime to it so I just sloshed some coconut milk in - about 1/3 of the tin - and the flavour changed completely so I didn't add more and the same with the lime. I only put in half the juice as I could taste it as soon as I'd added half the juice and didn't want the lime flavour to take over.
So it was all done as soon as the rice in the soup had cooked and we all tried it as we needed to know whether an alternate meal was required. Pony didn't like it but it got the thumbs up, unexpectedly from Fin and Mouse although Mouse was terribly tempted by Pony's tofu wiener and had to be furnished with one too...
I thought it was absolutely lovely and refreshingly different from anything we usually cook. The one niggle is that because the rice is in in the soup I can't heat it up and finish it off (we are very thrifty!) as the rice has gone mushy so alternatively, I could have done the rice separately and only added it as I served the soup.
And finally, your first lesson in Thai..Gang Keow Wan is Thai for green curry paste!

Plan B...

 I decided to make a soup today with it being so autumnal and settled on Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Ceci-Roasted Red Pepper Soup from her book 'Appetite For Reduction'. It is the first thing I've made from that book and hopes were high!

Smokey coming home yesterday

We often have a spicy peanut soup with red peppers in it (WHICH EVERYBODY IN THE FAMILY EATS!) so thought I had a sporting chance of getting this one past Fin, Pony and Mouse and it also seemed a good one to choose because it had 1lb of tomatoes in it and we have some from the garden...don't ask about the pumpkins...
We also wanted something quick because we adopted a new cat yesterday....well actually a recycled cat - and felt we needed to be very available to referee today as he settled in..

September 2011: teaching Smokey to knit

We volunteer at Feline Care which is lovely cat shelter run by lovely vegan Molly Farrar - we home educate so we go and do home ed sessions with Fin, Pony and Mouse in the various cats' rooms to give them company and laps and cuddles while we're working. We take our knitting too sometimes!

An educated cat..

It says on their website that the cats' rooms have under-floor heating in the winter which we are REALLY looking forward to as we live in a really cold house...!
On these visits our whole family had fallen very much in love with Smokey who through no fault of his own had ended up in a shelter, aged 18. He always really welcomed us into the room he shared with his friends and sat on books and laps and always really enjoyed our visits but we felt really sad that he couldn't seem to find a new home and only held back from taking him ourselves because we share our home with some rather fiery cat personalities and thought it might be too hard for Smokey and not a very welcome contrast to his life at the shelter which is very peaceful.
Anyway to cut a long story short we had one of those arrangements going with Smokey - like they do in films - where if neither of us was married in three months' time we'd marry each other...so we went and got him yesterday!

It was very touching as he was so thrilled to be in a house and was very soon sitting purring on the couch and after some surprisingly calm introductions to the 'tribe' he sprawled on the bed listening to the children's bedtime story and then settled down to a well-earned sleep after his big day.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes - soup! so I made the soup and thought it had quite a 'grown-up' complicated flavour, tasting of rosemary (a bit twiggy so even though the recipe suggested only pureeing half of the soup and mixing with the rest, I pureed all of it because the rosemary was too bitty otherwise) and the slightly blackened peppers I'd roasted.
So I was really pleased that both Fin and Mouse liked it although Pony started a bit of a stampede by having pasta as a Plan B so then Fin and Mouse had to have that too and ended up having double lunch: soup AND pasta with an assortment of ..'toppings' - yeastflakes, bakin bits, vegan parmesan... ugh...

Just THINKING about food today

Today is Yom Kippur so we aren't actually eating, just thinking about eating and feeling hungry...we are making Armenian Potatoes later - not much later actually, as it takes hours to cook and is nicest when it is all quite mushy.
Armenian Potatoes is a good meal to make if you aren't eating while you're cooking as there is nothing to nibble along the way unless you're a fan of raw potato or tomato puree and it is very straightforward to make as it just needs lots of chopping, a bit of seasoning (GARLIC!..we always double whatever quantity of garlic a recipe suggests) and putting in a pot in the oven to get on with it until it's time to eat.

Noah enjoys being home educated...

In the meantime the children have had bread rolls left over from last night - Mouse ate his with sugar and yeastflakes...and got on with writing their home ed diaries (Yes I know it's Saturday but the children enjoy it!).
Noah sprawled on Pony's lap while she wrote about the day we got the kittens so she could use him for reference and make sure she got his markings right in her picture!
While Armenian Potatoes is a good dish to break a fast with as it is lovely and hearty and filling and warming (I seem to be making myself feel hungrier so we'll just leave it at that..!) it is not universally loved (Why? Why? Why?) and Pony and Mouse (who eats yeastflakes with SUGAR!) need special arrangements which with this meal are very simple: we just dice some more potatoes and roast them for the non-believers...if we remember...

The secret ingredient (although it won't be secret if I tell you) is Smoked Paprika as well as Paprika. The Smoked Paprika adds a kind of darker, deeper, richer flavour (hungry) which feels very autumnal and warming.
It has been a peculiarly unsuitable day to tackle our long overdue order to our wholesaler for our special little 100% vegan shop VegaNation as we have spent HOURS (without eating anything) weighing up the merits of the Organica White Chocolate Bar v. the Plamil White Chocolate Bar and whether to stock Yummy Earth  Peppermint Storm Candy Drops (No) or the oddly-named vegan Mulu Silk chocolate bar (Yes!) and Granovita Spray Soya Whip (YES! YES! YES!)...and making ourselves hungrier and hungrier in the process.
Right, time to stop Writing and start Doing as I have 3 lbs of potatoes to chop and we have just had a power cut so really hoping but not completely confident that our fast will be over when there are still only three stars in the sky..

YUM!