End of Veganmofo celebratory meal :)

I made Winter Vegetable Bake. The recipe is on the Pure (margarine brand in the UK) website. Here is the recipe. I added chickpeas to use them up and onion. It surprised me how filling it was! I'm having the last two bites now. Gooey yummyness. It did take me forever though and I need a bit more practice to stop my sauce being lumpy!

I made chocolate banana popsicles for dessert but I don't think I can fit them in. I will have to post that another day.

Veganmofo has been fun but a lot of pressure to post! I found I wanted to spend time reading other people's blogs and making what they made rather than create my own dishes. Perhaps next year I can blog as a mofo fan? I am however proud of my 23 posts (including this one) in a month as it is the most I have ever done in one month. Now to get stupidly overexcited about Christmas food!

The Fridge and The Secret Stash

The food that I have in the fridge and my secret snack stash!

Tropicana orange juice, red pot of smoked tofu, onion, clear box with Japanese sweets, dolmio, left over soya mince, kale, lettuce and indian snack in brown bag.

Peri-peri hot sauce, strawberry jam, housemates peanut butter, floravital, housemates jam, Jack Daniels BBQ sauce.

Goodies mmm

The new way to fondue

I often go with the boyfriend to his mums house for a roast on a Sunday. She has always fed me well for the 4 years and almost a half that I have been going out with her son. This Sunday she surprised us with a do it yourself style meal. She handed me a plate of roast potatoes and Linda McCartney sausages. I went into the dining room to find a little burner in the center of the table and two plates of vegetables. Out of the kitchen she came with a pan of hot oil. We were going to batter our own veg then fry it. She found a recipe for vegan batter online. The result was great fun. For some reason I kept forgetting to put my veg in the batter so made more veg chips than battered veg! I think we were fairly agreed that sweet potato and onion were the best.

Fried, battered broccoli

Veg and bowl of batter

Vegan food in the snow

There has been a lot of snow talk this week in Brighton as the weather forecast suggests it might snow this weekend. Last year the snow caused businesses and schools to close for a few days and the ice left over was very dangerous. This means the council are showing that they are prepared for any sign of snow. Last years snow benefited me though because it meant I got a uni essay deadline extended by a day because I couldn't travel there. I definitely needed that extra day!

I'm just lucky I live near a supermarket this year.

So thinking snow. I found this website today about vegan snow trips.
http://www.veggiesnow.org/index.html

I've never been skiing but I am considering going when I finish my degree to work in a creche for a week or two. This is just at the ideas stage.

Here is a link straight to the desserts recipe page for catering for vegans. They all sound simple and easy to make. They have the cheesecake recipe I mentioned yesterday that I want to try.
http://www.veggiesnow.org/articles/184.html

I'm thinking of making hot banana and chocolate wrap tonight but that means going to the supermarket...

'meat' and two veg

I'm getting busier with uni in the run up to Christmas and deadlines so posts might be shorter. Like this one. This is something I had for tea recently. It looks a bit meaty but it is really smoked tofu, potatoes and kale. I added omega 3 oil, rice vinegar, chilli and garlic powder. Yum Yum.

The health benefits of sponge pudding

I'm justifying the fact that I lived off cake today because of the healthy ingredients (blatantly ignoring the 'healthy in much more moderation' ingredients). I made microwave sponge pudding. I made extra for my housemates (extra brownie points, so it was almost angelic of me to make it and eat it).

It is from the book The cake Scoffer by Ronny. I also want to try the very simple cheesecake recipe as I have struggled to find a simple one.

I used wholemeal flour, black treacle and saltanas. So wholegrain, iron and fruit.

I have asked for Return of the Cake Scoffer for Christmas.

I forgot to mention the emotional health benefits of the pudding. Warm, comforting, easy food to get you to a place where you can study.

Too many bananas = happy low fat banana cake

I'm not a big fruit fan. I do sometimes like to eat bananas but I often buy too many but then don't always remember to eat them until they get a bit too ripe. I often do this on purpose though so that I can make lovely banana treats!

Below are pictures of my all-bran cake that I make often as it is really simple to measure (one mug of this, one mug of that). It is also fairly fail safe so it is possible to experiment. I tried putting a whole banana in the middle of the cake this time and it sunk a bit so I'm not sure if I would do it again. I often eat this cake for breakfast. The recipe is from "So what do you eat?" by Liz Cook. I used half a mug of mashed banana and half of sultanas.

This time I tried freezing half the cake as its just me eating it. The cake texture went a bit strange and the banana went odd. It is better than wasting half of it but it is better fresh.

One final piece of advice. It takes a long time to cook (about 1 hour 15mins). It needs the time to dry out. My advice is to set a timer as its easy to forget about it. Don't leave it for two hours like I did with the last one. Although, it was still edible  and tasty inside the crispy shell.