Chocolate and Beyond

My vegan challenge for November

I found out that November is Animal Aid's Vegan Month and I'm planning on trying out a vegan diet through the month, to see how I get along and to learn some more vegan recipes.

I bought a vegan cookbook called Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook which is supposed to be excellent, and having tried a couple of things from it, I can see the authors know their stuff. The banana bread in here is amazing, and I baked it for my son's leaving party and everyone loved it (I never mentioned it was a vegan recipe!).

On their GoVegan site, Animal Aid have a huge amount of resources to help get started as well as find out about the arguments for veganism. I have to say, I currently can't imagine being 100% vegan for life, and especially when I travel, but I'm more than happy to cut down on my use of animal produce overall (free-range eggs, cheese, etc), and make far more vegan choices than I normally do.

However, another part of me is concerned that I'm not going to be able to manage my challenge for the whole of November! Already I'm wondering about how to deal with dinner invites and so on. I know a few restaurants that I can eat vegan food at when dining out - but what about when people ask me over for a meal at their place?

Wish me luck. I'll try my best and what I reckon is, every bit helps towards a lifestyle that does not involve cruelty, exploitation or destruction of the environment. So, just being aware of making such choices is a positive step forward.

My roasted garlic & carrot hummus recipe (tasty & vegan too!)

I know I'll never switch to a fully vegan diet, though I do overall want to cut down on my consumption of animal products. I failed miserably to cut out dairy completely (well, not miserably, because I have switched to soya milk and I have cut down on cheese), but I have still decided to increase my repertoire of vegan recipes for cooking at home.

I made this recipe up at the weekend, when I did an afternoon tea, and it turned out to be delicious. I thought I'd share it with you (sorry I can't be more precise over the ingredients, I wasn't intending on writing about it when I first started making it!).

Andrea's roasted garlic & carrot hummus

6-7 large carrots

3-4 large cloves garlic

Approx 800g (2 cans) chick peas (mine were previously cooked from dried)

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon smoked paprika powder

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

4-5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Zest & juice of half a lemon

Heaped tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley

Salt & pepper to taste

Some vegetable stock to 'wet' while blending

1. Chop and roast the carrots (with a drizzle of olive oil) for about 40 minutes at 190 degrees celcius then add roughly chopped garlic and cook for about another 20 minutes until the carrots are golden brown and soft.

2. Allows to cool, then blend the roasted carrots and garlic with the chick peas, spices, oilve oil, lemon juice and seasoning in an electric blender. Keep blending and stirring down, slowly adding the vegetable stock until you get the consistency that you prefer for your dip!

3. Allow to cool in the fridge and serve with pitta bread or crudités as a dip or a starter, with a sprig of parsley in the top to garnish.

There you go - easy as pie! If you end up making this, I'd be interested to know what you think (my disclaimer though is to remember that my ingredients are approximate - try the taste test as you go along to see what it's turning out like!).

 

What do you mean when you say you're eating 'healthily'?

When you talk about 'healthy eating' do you actually mean you're 'dieting', or at least switching to low-fat eating? It's become a bit of a bug bear of mine that people use the term 'healthy eating' as a euphemism for eating a low-fat diet, when there is so much evidence to show that eating the standard 'low fat diet' isn't healthy at all.

When I say I'm eating 'healthily', I mean that I'm being mindful about including nutritional foods in my diet again, when maybe I've been a bit slack for a while (such as the times I've been travelling and living off pizza!). My healthy foods include things like nuts, seeds and avocados - which are some of the most nutritionally dense foods you can eat, and are ones which dieters tend to avoid.

Also for me, a healthy diet tends to mean eating less white carbs, which don't make me feel great (though I did eat 2 slices of buttered white toast for breakfast this morning!), but I don't start using less fat, and I certainly don't start eating 'diet' foods. Again, there is so much evidence to show these do us more harm than good, and also make us hungrier in the long run because they contain so many substitute ingredients.

Of course, I do include a lot of vegetables and salads when I'm eating 'healthily' - but that's because they are the foundation of a good diet, not because they help me lose weight.

I know I'm no skinny minny, but I do now stay at a stable weight, pretty much whatever the occasion. And I am a lot happier than I used to be, when I was spending what seemed to be every waking moment thinking about how to keep the number on the scales down. For me, the way I now eat 'healthily' actually feels healthy.

 

Not in my cuppa - why we need to keep mega dairies out of the UK

We like our great British countryside don't we? Rolling hills of green, privet hedges and cows grazing the pasture. But imagine the cows and fields were replaced with massive, corrugated sheds instead? Doesn't quite sum up what a day in the country is all about.

But we need to act if we don't want our beautiful landscapes to change in that way, and if we don't want to drink milk from 'battery cows'. That is, cows kept in conditions not dissimilar to the millions of poor hens who suffer terribly in barren battery cages. I definitely don't want that to happen, and it was great to hear of the recent WSPA campaign success when Nocton Dairies had their application turned down (yet again) to install a US-style intensive dairy farm in Lincolnshire.

The threat isn't over though. While Nocton Dairies were unsuccessful on this occasion, they will no doubt try again, and other dairy businesses continue to push towards building intensive dairy farms, such as the proposed Leighton Farm expansion in Wales.

'Mega-dairies' impose terrible suffering upon cows. They are kept not in fields but inside stalls with little room to move, and have no opportunity for natural grazing. They are milked to the extreme, three times a day, and the burden this places on them makes their lives even shorter than dairy cows' lives already are. It isn't just the cows that suffer though, the environmental impact is also significant, with waste polluting local water supplies and causing massive problems.

Dairy cows in the US are already subjected to dreadful suffering through intensive 'mega dairies' - PETA are investigating one currently. We must prevent this from ever being the case in the UK. It must not be that we have to keep campaigning against mega-dairy applications, but that there must be no opportunity for dairies to make the application in the first place, with a forwards-ban on this style of farming in the UK.

I have become part of the WSPA's 'Not in my cuppa' campaign, and part of a small team of people looking to spread the word on this issue, to make sure intensive dairy farms never become part of the UK landscape. We want our cows in fields, not in factory farms (can you imagine looking at huge ugly sheds while driving in the countryside, rather than seeing cows grazing in fields?). I hope after reading this, you'll think the same.

Join the 'Not in my cuppa' campaign and make sure the milk in your tea or coffee never comes from a battery cow.

We stink, courtesy of Ottolenghi's caramelised garlic tart

How does three full heads of garlic, with the cloves left whole, sound for eating within a recipe?

Last night, my friend came round for a belated birthday dinner so I cooked one of the recipes from my favourite cookery book of the moment ('Plenty' by Yotam Ottolenghi, which I incidently also bought my pal for her birthday too!).

We both agreed that the Caramelised Garlic Tart was extremely yummy and of course, we didn't think we smelled. But I received a text this morning from my friend, and she says her husband almost shunned her from the bedroom upon her return home!

She told me he's opened all the windows, complaining that she reeks. He can't stand garlic, it seems (more fool him!) but we're both lovers of the stuff. Three heads of it does sound a lot, but the end result in the eating of this tart is devine.

Worth becoming a social pariah for, in my opinion, though not a dish to have if you're single and planning a night on the pull!

If you want to try it yourself, the recipe on the Guardian's website is actually different from the one in Plenty, but I found a link to the one in the book on About.com.

Did you have your pancake and eat it?

This is the second year running that I only remembered it was Pancake Tuesday after I'd had my dinner. Damn - I love pancakes. We used to have them mainly with sugar and lemon at home, but I like to invent all kinds of varieties and a favourite was bananas and cream.

I did have wholemeal tortillas for my dinner though, does that count instead? They are pancake shaped, at least. My son had left some refried beans in the fridge after staying for the weekend. He'd been caring for the dog while I was swanning around Berlin (well, it was bloody freezing so swanning isn't exactly the right word for it!), so I decided to use them up with some salad and salsa in the tortillas.

I suppose Shrove Tuesday was never too much of an issue for me 'diet-wise' - you can make pancakes pretty low-calorie and low-fat if you try, so I just made sure I did. Now of course, when I remember to have them, I just make them delicious. No faffing around trying to make one that doesn't count too much as actual food.

Anyhow, for missing out last night I'm going to plan to have a pancake weekend instead. And that may have to include Nutella.

EDIT: I haven't missed Pancake Day - I have just been informed it's not until March! So I'll have in March and probably this weekend as well... :-)

Celeriac chips

In my bid to try out new and interesting, instead of sticking to my old fare of 'one-pot student grub' style recipes, I bought a celeriac sometime ago. Well let me tell you, I have never looked back (do I need a life?).

If you don't know what it is, check out the fabulous description on BBC website, which says it is "a large, knobbly root vegetable, the base of the stem of certain types of celery". It also adds that it tastes similar to celery, which I don't buy. But hey ho, a difference of opinion is allowed.

Anyhow, I cut the whole thing into 'chunky chips' after peeling off the thick skin (like you would with a swede) and then put a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a roasting tin, with plenty of chilli pepper and black pepper, coated the celeriac chips in the oil mixture then shoved it in the oven for about 40 minutes.