Vegan on the Hoof

[delta-breezes]

I don’t know what I’m like. I get glimpses of myself in other people’s eyes. I try to be careful whom I use as a mirror.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet via Chatting At The Sky “What Everyone Ought To Know About Self Reflection” (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

[veganonthehoof]

This is how it goes in our house

Duke: "Do you like my dinosaur picture?" (points to the red bubbles he's drawn above their heads) "These are the dinosaurs' IDEAS."

Me: "Philosophical drawing! And do the green lines represent the metaphorical connection between thought and the physical body?"

Duke: "...Yes."

Papa Duke: "Ah, how appropriate: T-Rex is stomping all over Diplodocus's ideas."

Me: "Take THAT, herbivore! I REJECT YOUR PREMISE!"

  I fucking love this family.

[veganonthehoof]

i basically assume that people don’t like me unless they explicitly tell me they like me and then periodically remind me

Oh my god, this is me all over. I am so needy!

[veganonthehoof]

From top:

Strawberry, banana, and morello cherry breakfast smoothie and porridge with soy milk and raisins

Lunchbox with wholewheat pitta, yellow pepper sticks, houmous, cous cous salad, and red seedless grapes

Lunchbox with pasta salad, oatcakes, strawberries, and mini sugar-free banana cupcakes

Homemade vegan pitta pizza with tomato and pepper sauce, pineapple, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, and Veganic shredded cheese, plus steamed mangetout (Duke LOVED these), baby spinach, and cucumber and red pepper "cubes"

  We've been doing fairly well at sticking to healthy eating, but today Duke is getting to see his best friend (who moved to a city 3 hours away just after Christmas) for a small birthday party. Four of us at the party are vegan, so there will be cookies, cake, cupcakes, and other sugary junk. I don't know about Duke, but I'm diving face first into the party food and hoping never to resurface.

[veganonthehoof]

Top to bottom: peppermint tea with strawberry and a navel orange, and curried carrot and coconut soup with cucumber slices, cherry tomatoes, vegan cheese cubes, and houmous.

(I love Duke's Micky Mouse bowl, purely because I can put dips and sauces in the ears!)

[veganonthehoof]

I hate Valentine's Day

Not because I'm lonely and bitter, but because I'm lonely and bitter.

Normally I'd eat chocolate bars to fill the void but I'm trying to kick the emotional eating habit, so...herbal tea and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yay?

[veganonthehoof]

My Duke turns 5 tomorrow

HE'S TOO SMALL I DON'T LIKE IT MAKE IT STOP.

[veganonthehoof]

Falling off the wagon

I'm going to risk the wrath of the vegan gestapo and talk about something very few vegans seem to address: falling off the wagon.

To be clear, I love this lifestyle. The food is gorgeous and, more importantly, I believe wholeheartedly in the premise. Regardless, sticking to the vegan lifestyle has its challenges. The representation of meat and dairy as a necessary part of the human diet is a cultural norm that's deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, and rejecting that norm on a daily basis can get tiring, especially when every Tom, Dick and Harry has an opinion on the contents of your lunchbox.

Most of the time, the knowledge that you're making compassionate choices will be enough of a motivator. It certainly has been for me, despite the shock of going vegan overnight. However, veganism can become very difficult if, like me, you struggle with disordered eating (note: this is not the same thing as an eating disorder).

I have, in the past, suffered from clinical depression and anxiety. Though I'm no longer on medication for these things, I generally have a bad track record when it comes to dealing with stress. Sometimes I stop eating, but mostly, I go in the opposite direction - I eat my feels. And by that, I do not mean reaching for a chocolate bar to cheer me up. I mean eating four chocolate bars one after the other and then frantically searching the house from top to bottom for more junk food and not being able to settle down because there's nothing left so I whip up a batch of frosting even though it's 10:30pm and I don't have even a cake to frost, I just want to face-mash into the bowl until my brain slows the fuck down.

So anyway, I did this recently. After two and a half years of total commitment to veganism...pizza happened. Specifically, a 9-inch deep-pan Margherita that I ate so fast it barely touched the sides. I lay in bed afterwards feeling like the antichrist and listening to the disturbing sound of cheese beating the shit out of my small intestine, and I realised something: I still want to be vegan. I fell off the wagon, but I didn't need  any fundamentalist browbeating (which many vegans I've met are overly fond of) to convince me that I made a shitty, stupid choice. What I needed was a leg-up to get back on the wagon.

I don't want to give the impression that being a vegan is nigh on impossible, because it's not. Most of the time, it's actually a lot of fun. But when you've spent your life using meat- and dairy-based junk foods as an emotional crutch, giving that up in times of stress is just bloody hard. Is it worth it? Absolutely. But still...HARD. And maybe I'm alone in this, but I kind of think that needs to be acknowledged.

[veganonthehoof]

Today at work I was on my feet for six hours without a break and without anything to eat. I decided when I got home and tucked Duke into bed that I was going to eat sensibly instead of going on a junk food rampage, so I made myself a vegan stirfry with button mushrooms, peppers, spring onions, and sugar snap peas.

Then I ate it all and I was still hungry so I made a jam butty and ate that while some chips were cooking and now I have chips and bread and chips on bread.

[veganonthehoof]

I ordered this PlanetBox lunchbox last year and it cost me a fucking unholy amount of money to get it shipped to the UK. It was totally worth it for the joy of making up adorable lunches for niblet, though! Considering that on the one day a week he has a school dinner (an arrangement agreed between me and his dad, who is not vegan) he eats pizza and fish fingers and Artic Roll, it eases my mummy worries to know he's eating healthy vegan food on the remaining four.

  Today he has a train-shaped houmous and cucumber sandwich, mixed tomatoes (cherry, yellow plum, and tiger tomatoes), organic sugar-free banana rice cakes, sliced doughnut peaches, and green seedless grapes. On days where I'm short of a loaf, I fill the big metal tin with couscous, rice, or pasta salad, or put some houmous in the small tin and give him pitta bread to dip. He loves it!

[veganonthehoof]

So...these happened.

[veganonthehoof]

Leftovers tea today! Cous cous and tomato salad, wholewheat pitta, tomato and basil quesadillas, lentil and tomato soup, and freshly squeezed orange juice. Yummy!

[veganonthehoof]

Snack time!

I went with strawberry houmous in the end.  It was nice enough and the niblet happily dipped his way through three pears, a banana, and a fistful of breadsticks in the space of 15 minutes, but I feel it would work better with a softer, more neutral-flavoured white bean (such as cannellini) instead of chickpeas. I've tried a few sweet chickpea recipes, and I always feel they don't quite work because of the chickpea's distinct savoury taste.

In other news, I made lasagne today.  FROM SCRATCH.  Homemade white sauce, homemade sweet red pepper and tomato sauce, roasted vegetables, and some vegan sprinkly cheese.  Okay, okay I didn't make my own pasta sheets, but who the fuck does that really?  I fed myself and other people with it, and everyone asked for seconds, and nobody died.  I'd call that a success.

[veganonthehoof]

So...fruity houmous exists

SOMEONE BUY ME A MANGO SO I CAN ROCK THIS SHIT.

[veganonthehoof]

Vegan korma with rice for tea today!  This recipe is a favourite of mine because it's so easy to make - with a few minor tweaks, such as using stock instead of water, the sauce (made from spices and roasted cashews soaked in coconut milk) is so flavourful that you can team it with just about anything you have in the cupboards.  Today I went with broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, and chickpeas.  Then it's Artfully Disassembled Chocolate Fudge Cake for afters.  Om nommety!

[veganonthehoof]

Oops

This afternoon I made chocolate fudge cake because the niblet is at his dad's, but instead of waiting until the cake was completely cool before icing it like the book SPECIFICALLY said, I was all "Back off, Mary Berry, I got this covered" and I iced it even though it was still warm and the frosting melted almost immediately and the top layer of cake cracked right down the middle and it looked like some sort of chocolate volcano so I just set it on the kitchen table and attacked it with a spoon.

  I feel very, very ill.  But you guys...it tastes like dreams.

[veganonthehoof]

Willkommen

Just over two years ago, I listened to this interview and curiosity got the better of me.  I watched Earthlings the whole way through.  And then my steak-eating, chocolate-loving, fried-egg-making, spider-squashing, leather-wearing self went vegan.  Overnight.

  It was a steep, steep learning curve.  Suppressing the urge to beat wasps to death with a flip-flop was, surprisingly, one of the easier transitions.  Learning that almost every convenience food I adored and depended upon contained animal derivatives was one of the hardest.  Why would anyone put fish oil in orange juice?  What the hell was lactose doing in salt and vinegar crisps?  How was I supposed to survive on broccoli and twigs?  WHAT THE FUCK WAS I GOING TO DO ABOUT CAKE?!

  I amassed and admired over twenty vegan cookbooks before remembering something important: I can't cook.  No, seriously.  I can't do it.  I once almost blew up my mum's microwave trying to reheat a croissant.  I cannot cook.

  But here's the thing: after becoming a single parent to my four-year-old boy, I was no longer able to rely on my other half's culinary creativity and intimate knowledge of how not to break microwaves.  In between moving house and finishing my undergraduate degree and caring for a child with so much energy that just watching him gave me whiplash, I had to learn how to make healthy vegan food that would taste nice without killing us both.  So I did.

  I'm still not a great cook.  I'd describe myself as average but ambitious, a bit like that Chihuahua who learnt to salsa dance.  But I try.  This blog is mostly for my own amusement, to post pictures and stories of cooking and baking successes and failures (like that time I melted a polystyrene pizza disc onto the oven shelf...true story), to reassure myself that I'll get there eventually, and to remind myself that I (mostly) love being vegan on the hoof.