Vegetarian and vegan food that's out of this world
I went to buy almond milk in the little Tesco the other day hoping it was on offer for £1 like it is sometimes, as I’m too tight to pay the full £1.80. While, yes, it wasn’t on sale for £1.80, instead of going down to a budget-friendly £1 as I’d hoped, it had gone up to £1.99. Yeah, one pound flipping ninety flopping nine! Well, fuck that, I thought, and went home and made myself some cashew milk instead.
As I mentioned before, in an effort to try and minimise any weight gain and hopefully accelerate the healing process while I’m housebound with a gammy leg and can’t exercise, I’m off the alcohol (40 days so far, go me!) Although come the weekend the wine has been calling me from the little Tesco down the road, despite me being able to limp down there, I’ve ignored it and stuck to water. I got bored quickly with water though and started making my own drinks – I made lemon barley water, dandelion and burdock soda, lemon, ginger and mint lemonade, and ginger lemonade. I even bought swing-top glass bottles to store the drinks in. Despite these drinks being refreshing, tasty and healthy, they weren’t really doing it for me on a Saturday night so, when Wise Bartender offered to send me some alcohol-free drinks, I thought I’d give them a go.
When I make this mushroom soup, I eat at least two servings of it, it’s that good. Despite mushrooms being filling and substantial, there are only about 20 calories in 100g of them and although they don’t have the vibrancy you usually associate with healthy eating they:
Another day, another gadget to review. Oh yes, it’s a hard life being a Froothie Ambassador. My Froothie Optimum G2.1 blender has kept me happy over the last couple of years but when Froothie told me they had a new blender out – the Froothie Optimum VAC2 air vacuum blender – and this was a special one with magical air vacuuming properties and would I like to try it I thought yes please, despite me not having a clue what air vacuuming meant. Was it like air guitaring, I wondered. I can do air vacuuming better than I can do real vacuuming.
Is it possible to use the word ‘brunch’ without sounding like a pretentious wanker? I’m not sure I’ve even heard anyone say it in real life out loud but I’ve been for breakfast-type food mid-morning a couple of times in the last month at The Bistro at Lympne Castle and going for breakfast in a castle is pretentiously wanky enough without bringing the word ‘brunch’ into it too (if castles aren’t your thing, there are plenty of other places to get food and loads of discount vouchers about). Despite serving avocado on toast (sorry, I mean ‘crushed avocado on toasted sourdough’), The Bistro isn’t pretentious or wanky in the slightest and you don’t have to dress up like a dog’s dinner to eat there and ever since I ate their scrambled eggs on toast with spinach, tomato and seeds, I kept thinking about it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to go back to The Bistro in the last couple of weeks, so I decided to recreate their scrambled eggs on toast with spinach and tomatoes with my own vegan version made with tofu.
I broke my foot. People keep asking me if I broke it by slipping over in the recent snow and, as much as I’d like to say, ‘yes, it was the bastard snow, dammit’, the honest answer is, ‘no, I fell over pissed on the way home from a party’. That was about four weeks ago and the nurse said it takes about eight weeks for a broken foot to heal, so I should be about halfway to being able to walk again without wearing a big boot thing, yay. Oh, and in case you’re interested – and people seem to be – the bit of foot that broke was a couple of metatarsals – you know, the bits of feet no one had heard of until David Beckham broke his. So, you could say, I bent it like Beckham. Ha!
Cider’s had a varied reputation over the years. For me, it was the first alcoholic drink I started drinking regularly (42p a half down The George in Wanstead in 1985 when I was 15 [ssh, don’t tell my mum]). After my early years of drinking sweet Woodpecker underage in the pub, I progressed onto what I thought were more sophisticated dry ciders such as Diamond White and Merrydown (okay, I only drank Merrydown to get hammered, like everyone else, but Diamond White and Merrydown came in glass bottles and not tins, so I thought they were posh). But apart from cider being the tipple of teenagers, other images conjured up by cider drinkers are:
Some of you will know I’m into my fitness and I even have a once-popular-now-woefully-neglected fitness blog at www.jog-blog.co.uk. However, just because my fitness blog has been lacking, that doesn’t mean that I’ve been slacking and I’ve just successfully completed Janathon 2018.
I did Veganuary in 2016. I didn’t do it in 2017 because – to be blunt and because I haven’t really got a valid reason – I couldn’t be bothered. However, I’m now practically plant-based, partly thanks to moving to a town with a veggie/vegan cafe just down the road and an Italian restaurant that has vegan cheese for their pizzas and partly thanks to living on my own again and being able to eat whatever the flipping flop I want no matter how vegan it is. (Yes, me and The Meat Eater have parted ways but don’t worry, it’s all amicable. And I mean properly amicable, not amicable as in publicly-announce-on-Facebook-it’s-amicable-then-publicly-slag-each-other-off-on-Facebook-a-week-later-amicable.)
I love the summer. I love the sun and the heat and it motivates me to drink more smoothies and juice and eat more salad. I moved to the seaside in July and although I thought it must be illegal for it to be anything but the summer at the seaside, it’s not, and winter arrived along with the cold and the rain and the wind and the sleet and the snow just like everywhere else.