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!

Will work for muffins...

Horrible horrible shock...we were in the middle of a home ed cooking session making Banana Muffins with the children when Fin suddenly looked out the window and said someone was coming.
We live out in the middle of nowhere so there aren't many random people about so I thought it might be a parcel being delivered (I am expecting a 'new' RED laptop...yippee!) and carried on with what I was doing.

But then Fin called that it was Nina, the children's French teacher. I knew it couldn't be Nina as she was due in a week's time .....but OMG when I looked out the window it WAS Nina wrestling with the gate (we normally have it open WHEN WE ARE EXPECTING SOMEONE!!!) and we all looked at one another in absolute horror...Not only were we in the middle of a cooking project, we hadn't done the french practice we normally do before their lesson, but - quel horreur - worst of all, the house was absolutely SHAMBOLIC!
A quick look at our home ed room (aka our sitting room..) to weigh up the scale of the problem flagged up: acorns scattered all over the room (used as Units in a maths session),  a Double Action Heavy Duty Push Pull Pump (used to launch some homemade rockets), a stomp rocket (ditto), foam packing material (some of which Fin had made into a pair of vegan shoes with some brown yarn), Pony's tutu  which was waiting to be mended, stacks of books (always), Blush (a pink stuffed snake from a visit to High Lodge Forest Park), catalogues from the wholesaler we use for our little shop Veganation , a biscuit tin (full of homemade peanut butter cookies but still no reason for it to be on the sitting room floor!), a gluestick, a necklace, a plastic model of a unicorn and a wind-up mouse (don't know)...

But it is when you are REALLY up against it that you find out what you are REALLY made of...and it is amazing what you can get done in 45 seconds...we were thrown a lifeline when Nina came to the door and asked if we were expecting her ...("Yes, of COURSE!!") so then she went out again to bring her car onto the drive (which took her about 52 more seconds..) so we were able to get loads more done...
Anyway, the children had their impromptu French lesson (Nina rather embarrassed by then as had worked out that she was a week early!) while the Banana Muffins were cooking...
Although Pony would beg to differ, we think these muffins are delicious - must give credit for them to my BF Paula (of soon-to-be quirky knitting blog 'The Purple Cricket' fame...). The absolutely brilliant thing about the muffins is that they are made with all those brown spotty bananas that our fruit bowl is always full of...sigh..
And best of all, because the french lesson had been so ...unexpected..we didn't have any cash in the house to pay Nina, so we sent her on her way with two muffins instead!