Infographic: What a Vegetarian World Would Look Like

Vegetarianism and veganism is unarguably on the upturn. I mean, even McDonald’s is offering a vegan burger now, and the-McDonald’s-of-the-pizza-world-i.e.-nothing-like-pizza-really Pizza Hut is offering vegan cheese on their pizzas (although the far superior Zizzi and Pizza Express got there first), so things are definitely on the up. Who knows, maybe one day there’ll be more choice on all restaurant menus than just a flipping veggie lasagne or – sigh – a veggie risotto.

But vegetarianism and veganism is about more than just food (apparently) and so here’s an infographic outlining some of what a vegetarian world would look like.

Continue Reading

A Few Of My Kitchen Disasters

honeycomb boiling overWe all know about safety in the kitchen – don’t cook with saucepan handles sticking out where they can be easily knocked over, don’t leave hot oil unattended, don’t leave tea towels near the hob where they can catch fire, don’t have plug sockets near the sink, don’t stab someone for interfering while you’re cooking, etc. but what about other less life-threatening kitchen disasters that can occur? Here are a few of mine:

Continue Reading

4 Tips For a Juice Cleanse and the New Self-Cleaning JUlaVIE

juice cleanse

Spring is a popular time of year for people to go on a juice diet (or cleanse/fast/detox/whatever you want to call it) to lose a bit of weight in time for the summer or because they’ve been eating unhealthily for a while and fancy a juice diet in a bid to mainline some fruit and veg into their bloodstream quickly. Whatever the reason, and for however long you’re going to be juicing for, here are some tips to keep you on track and stop you from putting down your juice and picking up the pizza menu instead. I’ll also tell you about a new juicer that’s going to be on the market soon – the JUlaVIE (formerly known as the Juisir), which doesn’t require any cleaning. Yes, I said it doesn’t require any cleaning. Okay, you can skip straight to that bit if you want, I won’t be (too) offended.

Continue Reading

3 Vegan Natural Sweeteners to Put on Your Breakfast Cereal, Porridge or Smoothies

 

Strawberries and sugar
This is a sponsored post

As a child, my breakfast cereal would be piled high with not just spoonfuls of sugar but fistfuls of the white stuff, not to mention the three teaspoons of sugar I added to my copious cups of tea each day. Then, on top of that were the sweets I bought each week at the local shop with my pocket money. All that sugar probably accounts for why my teeth wouldn’t look out of place on someone you’d see on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Continue Reading

Infographic: A Guide to Veganism for Veganuary

Veganuary guide banner
This is a sponsored post

We’re almost halfway through Veganuary and, although I’m not taking part this year, I’m still a supporter of the campaign which, with 50,000 people taking part this year, is more popular than ever. In case you’re wondering why I’m not taking part this time when I loved doing it last year, I’ve had a change in circumstances and, frankly, I can’t be arsed (I know, crap excuse – it’s not like I can’t be arsed to be vegetarian anymore). Still, it’s not too late for you to join in and I’ve posted below an infographic containing some information about veganism in general (ignore the bit about you’re not vegan if you use the new five pound note. Yes, they contain bits of animals but so do smartphones and computers and you’re not going to go back to using smoke signals and abacuses, are you? But if you really don’t want to use the new five pound notes, just send them to me and I will dispose of them for you in the pub.)

Continue Reading

My Week at Jacob’s Ridge (Pig Village) – A Volunteer’s Story

My friend Jacqui (who I did a Q&A with about becoming vegan last year) spent a week volunteering at Jacob’s Ridge (better known as  The Pig Village) and you can read all about it here. Thanks, Jacqui!

My week at Jacob’s Ridge (or Excuse me Miss, but there appears to be a pig trying to get in my tent)

Early last summer, when I was a relatively new vegan, I posted on a vegan Facebook group asking if fellow vegans could suggest suitable food that I could cook while camping in Norfolk. One of the responders, Lynn, told me to forget Norfolk and instead to get myself over to a place called Pig Village, an animal sanctuary based at Jacob’s Ridge in Southern Spain. This vegan idyll offered opportunities to volunteer with the day-to-day care of the animals, sleep in a glamping style bell tent and eat lashings of home prepared vegan cuisine. I didn’t need to be told twice, so I contacted Jacob’s Ridge for more information and, when the dates were announced in September for the upcoming summer season, I was one of the first in the queue to book.

Continue Reading

June Round-Up (and why I’m probably banned from Papa John’s)

june-roundup

I would say this is the first in a new series of monthly round-ups but, knowing me, it’ll be a haphazard monthly series that doesn’t appear monthly as one would reasonably expect a monthly series to do. This haphazardness is especially likely as I had planned to start my round-ups with a round-up of May’s recipes, reviews and samples at the beginning of June, but when it got to the 28th of June, I thought that was probably a bit too late for a May round-up. (Update: Writing this post has taken far longer than I thought it would when I started it on 6 July – it’s now the 11th.)

Continue Reading

VegFest London 2016

VegFest London 2016

I’ve been to the London VegFest a couple of times in the past. The two things that I remember most are a) it gets REALLY crowded; and b) I should have taken a bigger rucksack with me. It was at VegFest I first discovered Vego Bars. They were on sale for 3 for £10 and I thought WOAH, THAT’S REALLY EXPENSIVE but my friend Lynda said they were worth it and so I trusted her judgment and bought some. If you’ve never seen a Vego Bar, you won’t know how massive they are so when I saw them, I thought, ‘well, they may not be cheap but they’re so big, they’ll last a year’. HA. WRONG. They may well be massive but they’re so incredibly yum, they won’t last a year – you’d be showing restraint of epic proportions if a bar lasted a day, they’re that nice.

Continue Reading