Planet Veggie

We 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:

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.

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.

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.)

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.