Enough MoFo Already!!!

Well, it's National Cinder Toffee Day, so we were, of course, obligated to make that delicious sticky treat with Fin, Pony and Mouse. It is a particularly satisfying recipe to make as it takes all of about five minutes to make and then you have a treat like a Crunchie. You can even cover the pieces with chocolate to make vegan Crunchies. Oh for Goodness Sake- this is insane- I'M SOO BORED OF WRITING ABOUT COOKING!!!  IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY!!
  My blog has always contained some stuff about food- of course it has, this is a blog about being vegan, so it would be weird if it didn't mention food from time to time!! But to be absolutely honest, veganism is not even about food for me- it's not about whether or not you can replicate non-vegan foods- fun sometimes, but absolutely not central to our vegan diet. It's not about whether or not veganism is a healthy diet- it's potentially the healthiest diet there is, but clearly wouldn't be if you subsisted solely on, say, Cinder Toffee! It's not about whether veganism is better for our poor beleaguered planet than a meat-based or vegetarian diet, which it undoubtedly is.
  It's actually got nothing at all to do with cooking for me, even tho' I love cooking; or the planet, although I love our planet; and, this may surprise some readers, it's actually got nothing at all to do with the appalling conditions and terrible suffering endured by factory farmed animals, before their short miserable lives are ended in the unimaginable terror of  ''humane slaughter''.
   I am vegan because I am an abolitionist and veganism is the moral baseline of the animal rights position; it's the fact that animals are exploited that troubles me, not merely the conditions in which this takes place. All the arguments and evidence in support of veganism are very compelling: it's healthier, better for the planet and it's very easy to do, especially these days, but most important by far, it's the morally correct thing to do.
    I have really enjoyed lots of the brilliant MoFo posts I've read, and thanks for all the lovely comments I received from those who visited this blog during MoFo. I think MoFo is a great idea and in the long run it may well convert a lot more people to veganism than I ever do; but through this process which has been by turns interesting, stimulating, amusing, and stressful, I've come to realise more and more that, for me, it's not about the food.
    

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MoFo Day Thirty: Pancakes- Then and Now!

  Well, it's Sunday morning, so that means that it's Absolute 80's on the radio (looks like ASBO on the digital display!) and pancakes for breakfast!! We only have two meals on Sunday because...um..because it's Sunday??  Having a filling late breakfast and then an early supper gives you the whole middle of the day free to do things..or nothing at all! That sometimes feels really necessary as I'm sure that all vegans will attest, vegan cooking can be quite time consuming, and we cook almost everything from scratch, so sometimes it seems that we've not long washed up after breakfast, and it's time to start preparing lunch.Actually, I've just had a horrible thought! I don't want any non-vegans reading this and being put off the whole idea of veganism. Hey, non-vegan people out there! You need to go vegan! Vegan cooking is really fun! There are no yucky bits in our food!! People will think you are really cool! And the cooking is really, really easy- and SO FAST!!  There! That should do it- where was I?
  Stupid camera batteries!! After I thought everyone was finished breakfast, I used the last of the batter to make three pancakes to be immortalised in MoFo. I arranged them on a plate, adjusted the lighting, applied colourless nail polish to make them glisten alluringly (joking about the nail polish!) and ..took one photo before the camera batteries went (thanks, useless ebay seller for my rubbish batteries..). Normally, you can get a bit more juice in the batteries by re-charging them for only a few minutes. I went off to recharge the batteries and when I got back, the children had eaten the pancakes!! So, I'm really hoping that, when I put the batteries back in the camera, the ONE picture that I managed to take before my models were eaten, has turned out ok!! 
   When I worked as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant years ago (schlepping about plates of stinky cheese lasagne- bleugh!)  the chef made pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. The restaurant always had loads of vegan options (for my lunch!!) and we had lots of vegan customers, so I thought it was wrong that no-one was making any pancakes for the vegans- including me!!. I prevailed on Gilles, the lovely French chef, and: Voila! He obligingly rustled up a batch of vegan pancake batter and started production- I had the first one! 
   I still remember how lovely it felt that he did that, and how special he he made me feel. I had not yet managed to make vegan pancakes successfully at home and hadn't had pancakes for years, so it was really a very rare treat.
  Now, many many years later, I have developed my own recipe for vegan pancakes and my children are absolutely used to having them for breakfast every Sunday. They have never had the experience of NOT being able to eat pancakes, or cake, or ice cream for that matter, so although they love pancakes they are a not a particularly unusual treat, they have them every few days,and to some degree, probably take them for granted.. Their experience of eating them is really the opposite of mine in the veggie restaurant all those years ago- and that makes me feel very proud!!
  
  
  

MoFo Day Twentynine: Cake Magic!

  Well, after Miranda's Great Lemon Drizzle Disaster, I decided to take the matter in hand myself!!  I wanted to make the exact opposite of Miranda's cake, really, because hers turned out too thin, so I wanted a cake that was much bigger and more..delightfully voluptuous than that. I decided to use a chocolate layer cake recipe and convert it because it's such a big sumptuous cake, and because Miranda warned me not to!
  The flour quantity of the ex-chocolate layer cake was about double the original lemon drizzle recipe so I doubled the amount of lemon zest that I put into the cake batter, and also the lemon and sugar for the drizzle.
  The cake came out of the oven looking absolutely amazing- it was about two inches thick; and after 45 minutes was beautifully cooked all the way through. I pierced the top of the cake all over, while it was still hot, and still in its Springform tin (is that what they are called? Or is that a kind of bra?) The word came into my head when I was typing, but it doesn't seem to mean anything now it's out on the page..?? Those tins are called that have a clip so you can undo them and get the cake out that way? Anyone?
  Anyway, I poured the drizzle over the top; I had to keep spreading it as it was tending to pool slightly in the middle which was weighing down the sponge. In the end, I took off the Springform? (Maidenform?) so that the drizzle could..drizzle down the sides and the whole cake was covered.
   We have been working hard on our magic tricks today and yesterday; because the children wanted to do a magic show for our visitors. Fin did a brilliant Sword in the Stone trick, Pony did a sneaky card trick which my grandfather taught me when I was eight and which I have now taught to my eight year old (proud mother moment!) and Mouse invented one which amazed and astounded our friends by SOMEHOW turning two of those gold plastic trays from the inside of a chocolate box into ONE- and then when they reappeared from behind his back they were TWO again!! Amazing!  And me? I performed cake magic! That, my friends is how, with nothing up my sleeves,  I turned a double chocolate layer cake into a single layer, double thickness, lemon drizzle birthday cake! I am now going to saw it in half!

MoFo Day Twentyseven: Eleventh Hour Cupcakes!

  Oh it was all looking so good yesterday: Miranda had baked the lemon drizzle cake for the next stage of Pony's birthday 'season'; we were SO ahead! Then doubts started creeping in..Miranda had baked the cake in a bigger tin than usual because we were sharing it with our friends Paula, Karl and their daughter Kitty; but hadn't had enough lemon to double the recipe so the cake wasn't very deep and Miranda began to be concerned that the cake was slightly overcooked because of being so shallow. She turned it on its side (perhaps in hindsight not a very sensible thing to do!) to show me the base of the cake, and promptly snapped the cake in half! It wasn't broken all the way through but the crunchy layer of drizzle, which had set by this time, was cracked too, so it really didn't look very good!

The Batter Had Seemed Strange From the Start..

   Miranda was really upset, especially as we had no more lemons so couldn't just repeat the recipe but we decided to change the cakes round so that the lemon drizzle cake would now be at the weekend, by which time we'd have more lemons (please remind us to get some more tomorrow, ok?) and we would have cupcakes today instead. Cupcakes don't take that long so we thought there'd be plenty of time to make them this morning before we went to our friends' house.
   We were running a bit late this morning (it's a long story- you'd be bored!) so Miranda made the cupcakes a bit later than we'd planned, perhaps an hour before we were supposed to be going. She used a tried and tested recipe, which used to be Nigella Lawson's, but is now, we think, probably our friend Paula's as it has been veganised and changed so much that, according to Paula, who knits (you should see the tiny Christmas stockings she knits!), if it were a knitting pattern, it would now be hers, so we assume that the same probably applies to recipes..
   Even as she was mixing the batter Miranda was concerned that it looked a bit weird- I don't know what she'd done wrong, but weird is how they came out. They were bubbling strangely when they came out of the oven and as they cooled they sank in the middle, the surface seemed rather pitted and they became rather hard! I actually hate to admit that such a thing as a vegan baking failure exists! Vegan baking is very easy and usually very very reliable, but this definitely was a failure- there was a lot going on here this morning, and maybe Miranda was distracted and weighed out and put in the sugar twice- that seems the likeliest explanation to me, given what the cakes looked like- too ghastly to even photograph!!
   Miranda was really REALLY upset by now; it was time to leave for our friends and we had no birthday cakes! So, I calmed her down, told her to start loading the children into the car, getting coats, etc etc while I reached for my trusty and very battered copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and flipped to her basic cupcake recipe. This is an unbelievably simple, quick and TRULY BRILLIANT recipe which is absolutely foolproof. It always works EVERY TIME. And the cupcakes it makes are light and fluffy and bouncy and spongey- and they really came through for us today! I was mixing them as toys were being loaded into the car, baking them while coats and cardigans were being collected, mixing icing while they cooled, and in fact blobbing on icing while they were still slightly warm. I stuck jelly hearts on them and we left.

   Unfortunately, on the way to Paula, Karl and Kitty's house, a partridge made a dash across the road in front of us, and we had to brake very sharply and a couple of them fell into the foot well of the car, but luckily, they were fine because they were so light and airy that they bounced- straight back up onto the plate again! Now that's truly great vegan baking!
  By the way, was there something I was supposed to buy tomorrow..?

MoFo Day Twentysix: Another Inexplicable Food Flop

Everybody move to their left and see if they like THAT food..

  Today I thought I was going to be creating a lovely dish which was to be a combination, perhaps even a fusion, of General Tao's Tofu which we tried the other day and (some of us!) loved, and my tried and tested Sweet'n'Sour recipe which I think may have started life as a Patrick Holford recipe, but I'm not sure. The alternative dish for Pony, absolutely assuming that she would need one, was to be Sausage Mix Sausage Rolls.
  Well. you know what they say about the Road to Hell, don't you? Well, there may be some surplus boxes of Sausage Mix being used as paving slabs alongside the Good Intentions that prompted their fondly misguided purchase...
  As I think mentioned before, when we had our Inaugural Vegan Bring'n'Share last week, Pony didn't like the Brownies I made, the Palmiers I made, or the Coffee Biscuits that M made, the Apple Strudel, the Bread Pudding or the Clavering Pasties (think vegan Cornish Pasties), that our friends made. She ate, as she always does, vanilla cupcakes, but, rather unexpectedly, fell in love with Sosmix sausage rolls that our friend Jan brought.
  She was so delighted with them that she asked us to get some Sausage Mix the next day and said that she'd like them as alternative meals in case she didn't like what we were eating this week. We were very excited about Pony, for the first time in about two years, discovering something new that she liked to eat- and something so EASY, quick to make, portable for days out and car journeys, and freezable, so could be produced in the event of a meal 'failure', at a few minutes' notice. Amazing! It seemed too good to be true...
  When M went to town she went to the supermarket and found only one box in stock, so she bought that.  Anyway, before we'd even made any of it, M and Pony were in town together and Pony prevailed on M to buy THREE more boxes of Sausage Mix. As she did so, M said to Pony: I've got a horrible feeling about this, that you aren't going to like it any more but Pony insisted that she absolutely loved it, so the deed was done. I expect you can guess the rest..
  We made up the sausages yesterday, wrapped them in puff pastry and..Pony didn't like them..she said they tasted different from the ones that Jan made..
   Today, I was supposed to be making the sweet'n'sour General Tao dish but because we no longer had the sausage rolls to fall back on for Pony, that was then changed to Mediterranean Pasta Salad which everyone likes, but I felt a bit fed up at the thought of making it; I'm a bit bored of it as we had it quite recently. Then someone suggested noodles for the children, which they eat with olive oil and seasoning, with some broccoli. Then M suggested that I make something with the smoked tofu; we were excited to get from our new wholesaler the other day- we hadn't been able to get it for ages, and had missed its lovely smokey flavour.

She hates my cooking..

  Anyway, after discussing it all in a positive and constructive manner for a few more minutes (Pasta salad! No! Noodles! No! Pasta Salad! No! Noodles!) we decided to make sausage roll-esque things by wrapping some of the smoked tofu up in puff pastry, and eating with broccoli and potatoes.
  Pony was to have some puff pastry to do as she did the other day, when she made a pleasing concoction of puff pastry topped with ketchup, sprinkled with a few vegan bacon bits. She was very pleased with them last week, so we knew at least she'd have a few little pastry bits to nibble on while we were eating smoked tofu rolls; she'd tried the tofu and didn't like it.
  Well, to cut a long story short, the smoked tofu rolls were really lovely; Taifun smoked tofu is especially nice, better than the Cauldron smoked tofu that we used to get as the texture is firmer and the taste is stronger. But the cunning little layered fancies of puff pastry and ketchup that Pony invented last week? Sadly, she didn't like them today because they tasted 'different'... It was actually quite upsetting for everybody, as, after the disappointment of the Sosmix, and all the various ideas thrown around today and then discarded because someone didn't like them or want them, we finally thought that everyone's meal was sorted out.
  There are so, so many lovely dishes that we want to share with our family: M and I definitely never ate such delicious and varied food before we became vegan.To me cooking for someone (oops! I just wrote 'cooking someone'..!) is a way that I show love for them and so sometimes it can be a bit discouraging trying to feed someone who I love so much but who constantly refuses almost everything that I cook.
   Fin has become much more adventurous about food in the last year and now seems to love most of the meals we ate, so we have to try and stay positive about the situation and hope that the same thing happens with Pony. If there should exist out there a universally adored recipe that NO-ONE has EVER disliked then we are anxious to here about it!  Sosmix, puff pastry, chocolate, asparagus, curry, chilli, black salt, seitan sausage, noodles, couscous, rice, smoked tofu, tempeh, aubergines, bell pepper, marrow, courgettes, squashes, cauliflower, pinenuts, onions, beans of any sort except green beans, chickpeas, and tomato sauce recipes of any sort need not apply...

MoFo Day Twentyfive: Birthday Cake!

 Well, the first piece of news is that the issue over the Home Ed workshop which involved learning about beekeeping and honey tasting is now resolved; we chose not to attend, as we had said all along that we would not, as we are against the exploitation of bees, and, as we had said we wouldn't, we did NOT pay for the session. It was a very uncomfortable situation but not unprecedented for vegans living in a non-vegan world..
  I haven't done a blog post for a few days and in the meantime Pony had her eighth birthday. She had planned three different birthday cakes as she was celebrating her birthday three times with different sets of family and friends; the first one was a vanilla cake with mandarin icing.
  We don't really like too much icing so a one layer cake or a loaf shaped cakes work well because then you don't have to have that extra layer of buttercream icing in the middle. We have a wonderful chocolate cake recipe for a layer cake which we often use for birthday cakes but Pony doesn't like chocolate (sigh) so I removed the cocoa from the recipe and put in a bit of vanilla essence; the sugar I used was vanilla sugar anyway because we keep a couple of vanilla pods in our tin of sugar. I didn't put in any extra sugar to make up for the omission of the flour because it the recipe already had 6 ounces of sugar so I actually cut down the sugar because that always strikes me as a lot of sugar. I didn't want to make a layer cake so I decided to put all the cake batter in one deeper tin and increase the cooking time.

Tractor drawn with sprinkled cocoa and home made stencil

  I made the mandarin icing by zesting and then squeezing a couple of mandarins, and then mixing with icing sugar. The result was a very pale orange icing with orange speckles from the zest which I thought looked lovely, although I don't think the speckles show up in the photo. The icing had a lovely sweet tangy taste, milder and sweeter and also a prettier colour, than orange would have made it although I couldn't really get the photo which showed this. I decorated the cake with vegan jelly hearts.
  The cake was very springy and moist and had a very good firm texture, especially for a cake which was about an inch and a half deep. So, that was the first cake done! Some years we have been requested to do very fancy things with different coloured icing; we've used powdered beetroot, raspberries, turmeric and even spinach as we don't want our children to start biting us.. and for several cakes in the past we've had to draw pictures of animals with melted chocolate (using one of our waif-and-stray feeding syringes), so this one was comparatively straightforward!

Everyday Hassles for Vegans

Sweet Freedom Honey Alternative: the bees say Thanks!

 Oh, it happens all the time to vegans, doesn't it? Shared lunches where the food isn't labelled so you don't know what's in anything, and loads of people who contributed smoked salmon, parma ham and sausage rolls, are enjoying your lovely bowl of couscous salad and fruit from your garden (what's the word for the opposite of a bring'n'share?..Bring UN-share...); hot drink machines with no decent vegan options; outings to restaurants that cater for vegans offering them only salad or a bowl of chips while everyone else is having a proper meal. These are the everyday facts of life for many vegans living in a non-vegan world; and we're all used to it, I guess. But, at least no-one expects you to PAY for the ham or sausage rolls, or buy a non-vegan meal which you aren't going to eat. Or go and buy tickets to an animal circus to which you are ethically opposed and aren't going to attend.
  We are having an issue today in which our family is being expected to pay for an outing to see a talk by a bee keeper, which also involved honey-tasting. There may be people out there who like to call themselves vegans and who eat honey, but we are not those people. To be quite clear, true veganism is not just a diet, it's a whole philosophy, a way of life, which seeks, as far as is possible, to avoid the exploitation of ALL animals, so, for us, attending this workshop was not an option. You can argue until the cows come home (and they DEFINITELY WILL come home one day..) about local beekeepers, how much they love their bees etc, but there is no doubt in my mind that bees are exploited by the beekeeping process and have the fruits of their labours taken from them, which in my book is exploitation. I wrote a piece for this blog in August with some thoughts on honey: Home made 'Hunny' for Grounded Bumblebee
  We were not given the choice several months ago about what the planned series of workshops were about and one of them turned out to be about bee keeping and honey. We made our objections known to this subject several months ago, and made it clear that we would attend the other sessions but not the one about honey, and we made it quite clear why this was.
  Now we are in the position of being expected to pay for all the sessions including the honey tasting one. We are being put under pressure to pay even though the cost of all the sessions is already covered even without our money for that one session. I'm even more disappointed that the person trying to insist that we go against our principles here is an Associate Member of the Vegan Society.

A Bumblebee We Found In Our Garden in the Summer.

   We always happily pay for any sessions that we are unable to attend, whether we knew beforehand, or not, that we wouldn't be going, but this is different. As vegans we will not knowingly support the bee keeping industry and that's what we would be doing if we paid for that session, as obviously some of what is being covered is the cost of honey for people to try.
  It's a very uncomfortable feeling being in this position, but there's not much point in having principles if you aren't prepared to stand by them. If we were going to pay for the honey-tasting session, then we might have just as well turned up on the day and eaten the stuff ourselves.
  We are bringing up our three children as vegans- what sort of message would we be giving them if we tell them it's not ok to harm, steal from or exploit animals, but, even though we won't do it ourselves, it's ok to pay for other people to do exactly that.

MoFo Day Eighteen: Spicy Tomato Soup

Slightly lacking in MoFo today..!

  I think I might need to go and have a sly peek at my Counter-to-the-end-of-MoFo just so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel..!
  Our cats and our children keep waking us up at night so we're feeling a bit weary at the moment and not finding it so easy to get organised to fit MoFoing into the day. M and I are paying the price of being a little TOO successful at registering for MoFo- ended up registering twice, so M nobly rose to the challenge- and has been writing 'Veganation Does MoFo' alongside my writing this one. This means that we have to be exactly TWICE as interesting as everyone else in the food department so that all the excitement is divisible by two and we can write about half of it each! I guess most people could probably  find one interesting topic arising from their day's food, but we have to try and think of TWO! And the thing is, although obviously we ARE a very unusually fascinating family, who clearly have a LOT to say and share about vegan food, I'm beginning to secretly doubt whether we actually do have twice as many fascinating thoughts on food as everyone else.. ? So, anyway, there are twelve days, 5 hours, 58 minutes, 26 seconds and 432 milliseconds to go until the end of MoFo 2011 and today I managed to find a new recipe for the future as a sort of side effect of M cooking our main meal (unwritten rule of Double MoFo: if you cook the main meal then you own the MoFo rights!) so she's writing about that.

   Today we were having a Cannelloni dish which was one of those ones which tells you to get a jar of pre-prepared casserole or lasagne sauce, and the poster mentioned their preferred brand. It was an American brand, not one we'd heard of and we don't really like that sort of thing- they often are a bit bland and usually quite sweetened; we prefer to make our own.
  We decided to use the sauce we had on the enchiladas we had the other day as it was so nice, and would add a bit of zing to the dish. In fact, when I'd made the sauce and sampled it by dipping in a crust of bread it was so lovely that we all just stood there taking turns to dip in a crust of bread and 'try' some more..and then some more..and then some more!
   We had banana and red fruit smoothies for breakfast which are lovely but don't always leave you feeling as full for as long as a couple of pieces of wholemeal toast would do, so I think that we really did like the sauce but were also feeling a little bit hungry by then.

Molly said this was the biggest cheque they'd been given!

  The sauce needed a lot more water added for the Cannelloni dish, and that was what gave us the idea of turning it into a soup, so I added a bit more water and a little more tomato puree to some of the sauce and Voila!' (Mais oui, we had French this morning..!) we had a delicious little bowl of very warming, spicy soup. I like tomato soup with a bit of rice in and it would be extra special if you have some rosemary flatbread to go with it.
   By the way, Feline Care, the fantastic cat shelter that we support, just received an anonymous donation of £8,000 and have now exceeded their goal of £70,000 to permanently secure the future of the shelter. I can't say whether or not it was me who gave that amount, but we are all very happy that the shelter is safe. Feline Care, Thetford will now become a registered charity in its own right and will own the site and the shelter buildings. so it's a very significant step and we are all very happy that the future looks so bright for Feline Care, lovely vegan manager Molly Farrar and the 140+ very special cats in her care!
  By the way, our family did donate to help save Feline Care,  and when we visited we took homemade pizza for Molly and her partner Paul as they were so busy that they often didn't stop for proper meals, but, in case you're wondering, we weren't responsible for the very kind donation of £8,000- although we would have if we could!

MoFo Day Sixteen: Charlemagne and Seitan Sausages!

  Grumble, grumble, grumble...Oh, I probably shouldn't say this in case I alienate any Charlemagne-o-philes in my readership but we have just spent a VERY frustrating morning researching Charlemagne for a Home Ed history workshop all about him  which we are supposed to be attending tomorrow, and really just finding a load of material about war and battles, territory, 30 year military campaigns and politics and the odd fact, frequently mentioned, that he apparently had a very large neck... I did History at University so I do feel a bit shamefaced about finding it so bo-o-oring and feel that I have probably been very irresponsible and put my children off Charlemagne (whoever he was!) for life!
  Anyway, after literally HOURS of research we learned that he oversaw the move to a standardised script so that people could actually read each other's writing which was obviously quite a step forward although not one he benefited from as he was never completely literate.
  The other thing I found out was that he had between 18 and 20 children from five wives and four concubines- or four wives and five concubines, depending on which book you read and whether you count Himiltrude as a wife or a concubine. The only question still remains as to how to turn either of those pieces of information into an activity for tomorrow's Charlemagne workshop.. Ideas?
  So, today, because I have spent so much time researching Charlemagne I am going to have to write about something very simple: seitan sausages!
  We made these for the first time using a Joanne Stepaniak recipe from Vegan Vittles and I liked it but felt that it was really overcooked as, with no experience of my own on which to draw I had simply followed the instructions in the book.
   There are  recipes all over the internet for Seitan Sausages or Loaves; I'm not sure exactly where it originated, as some people said that it was originally from the Post Punk Kitchen, but a lot of the ingredients, including some slightly unusual ones are the same as in the recipe from Vegan Vittles so I don't know. I didn't follow a recipe because I already knew what I wanted to use for flavouring my seitan today. The basic recipe for making two sausages would be about 3 cups of gluten flour and 1.5 cups of water. You can flavour it how you want, and if you want advice as to how to make it taste more...you know..like....BEFORE..then you can check out Vegan Vittles or the Post Punk Kitchen for their ideas, because I'm not allowed to tell you!
  I can tell you what WE do anyway: we always put in a few tbsp of olive oil, 2-3 tbsp soy sauce, and 8-9 (several!) tbsp of tomato puree, 3 tbsp worcester sauce (make sure you get the vegan stuff if you want no fishes in your dishes!!), and we like about 1 tbsp of liquid smoke added. Add all the wet stuff to the other wet stuff- you'll see why later because once you've added the wet stuff to the dry stuff THERE IS NO GOING BACK!! It's no good standing pitifully beside your big gelatinous mound of seitan WISHING that you had put in your smoked paprika and your garlic- IT'LL BE TOO LATE!!

Gluten Flour: for vegans who miss chewy stuff!

  So, to 3 cups of DRY gluten flour, you can add 1 tsp paprika which gives it a warm earthy taste, about 3 tsp of smoked paprika, 2 tsp cayenne, 0.5 tsp cumin, 0.5 tsp mustard powder, 2 tsp salt and about 5 tsp garlic powder.
  This is how I make it because I like it to taste quite smokey and spicey. Some people put quite a lot of yeast flakes in their seitan sausages but I just choose not too because it always seems a bit profligate to me! I never think that it adds any taste in a recipe like this so I don't see the point in adding a fairly expensive ingredient that isn't really doing anything. It's possible tho' that some of the other things that people use such as cinnamon, all spice etc for flavour would be more detectable if it were a little less spicey- it's your seitan so you decide!!
  Now add the wet ingredients to the dry, mix and knead to make sure that it's all mixed well. Form into two sausages, a few inches long.and  wrap it up tightly in baking parchment, folding the ends up tightly and then lie the sausage on a baking sheet and cook at 170* for 55 minutes to an hour, turning over at least once, as the side underneath tends to get the hottest.
   Everyone else seems to cook it for a lot longer than me, not sure why. We do have quite a fierce oven but we had a different oven years ago when I first made seitan and it still seemed very overcooked and tough to me after 70, 80, or even 90 minutes in the oven. If you disagree, then it's fine (see how reasonable I am?), you can just check it at 55 minutes or an hour and cook for longer if you wish, but DO CHECK IT, OK?
   If you are just dipping your toe in the water about seitan then halve the quanitites above and just try making one sausage first. Aside from the cooking this recipe only takes about 5 minutes to prepare so it's very handy.
   You can eat it when it's still warm; it will firm up a little as it cools so give it a few minutes so it's easier to slice, or you can let it cool and then chill it in the fridge. It slices very well and is great in sandwiches, pitta bread, on pizzas, or you can chop it into chunks and add to stews and casseroles.
  We used to find gluten flour almost impossible to come by which is why we now sell it in our shop VegaNation, as we wanted to make sure that other vegans, country mice like us, could get hold of the amazing vegan products that rumour had it were being enjoyed by our sophisticated city cousins!! Enjoy!

MoFo Day Fifteen: Quality Assured Braised Tofu Sandwiches!

  We had Enchiladas today topped with cheese sauce (a veganised Rose Elliot recipe for cheese sauce from her macaroni cheese recipe) and sour cream, made with plain soya yoghurt with enough fresh lemon juice to make it a bit tart. You need quite a lot of lemon juice because the yoghurt is slightly sweetened so you have to combat that with lots of tartness. We ate the enchiladas with a mixed salad and it was lovely; Pony and Mouse ate Quesadilla although Mouse insisted on being served some enchilada which then had to be chopped up for him and then, as predicted, lay congealing on his plate while he ate quesadillas, so they were completely wasted which I really hate.

  We've already had Enchiladas since we started MoFo so I'll tell you about what we had for lunch as well! We were feeling a bit bored of flat, empty sandwiches so we decided to have Braised Tofu sandwiches. If you aren't already familiar with braised tofu, you may think it looks a bit strange, the way it comes submerged in oil. I'm not sure why it comes like that; maybe braised tofu is highly reactive and has to be kept away from contact with air, like Caesium? We eat it with vegan mayonnaise (the best kind is Plamil Egg-Free Mayo with Garlic) and it is slightly reminiscent of t*na sandwiches; if you want to add a mild taste of the sea to your sandwich you can sprinkle some Nori on the tofu as well.

Braised Tofu ''Always A1''

   We love braised tofu and nori and that's why we sell them in our shop VegaNation; we decided when we set up our beloved vegan shop that we would only stock things that we love because that way if something turns out not to be a particularly good seller we can always eat it! Ok, that plan isn't going to work quite as well with our lovely Fair Trade tea set, or beautiful Fair Trade tisanieres but you get the idea! 
  The Braised Tofu is selling, so we have no need to eat it up for that reason but, as responsible shop owners we do occasional have to take tins from our stock for ''quality control''....

Mofo Day Thirteen: A Quick Rescue While My Pastry Chills.!

b  We had a visitor coming over today so I decided to make some Palmiers, also known as Palm Leaves or Elephant Ears Cookies. These are a lovely mixture of puff pastry and caramelised sugar which always looks impressive even thought they are really very simple to make.
  Puff pastry is quite easy and very satisfying to make, but it's quite time consuming, so if you want to make something fairly quickly then you can use preprepared puff pastry- Jus-Rol is vegan. Roll out the puff pastry, so you have a rectangle about 12 inches by 18 inches, then get a quarter of a cup of sugar and sprinkle about half of it all over the surface of the pastry, then press it in by rolling with a rolling pin. Now lift up the pastry and turn it over and sprinkle the rest of the sugar over the second side and, again, roll it with the rolling pin to press the sugar onto the surface of the pastry.
  Now roll the pastry up from one of the short sides almost into the middle; not too tightly because you need to leave room for the pastry to expand when it cooks. Then roll the other side almost up to the middle too. Flatten the rolls slightly by rolling along them gently with the rolling pin. Now fold one of the rolls over on top of the other roll, like closing a book. Dampen the sides slightly with soya milk so that they stick together. The pastry should now chill for 20 minutes in the fridge; you can make yourself a fruit tea or something while you wait for your pastry to chill!!
  After you have put your pastry in the fridge, and put the kettle on for a hot drink, look idly out of your kitchen window, into the garden. If you see one of your cats patting playfully at what looks like an autumn leaf, run out just to check what it actually is. If the 'leaf' turns out to be a vole, pick it up quickly and transfer it to a safe receptacle so you can examine it. Quickly (speed is REALLY important here) dissolve some homeopathic Arnica in water and then get some on the end of a clean finger or a cotton bud, then moisten the vole's mouth with it. The vole will probably look much brighter immediately. Repeat every few minutes as voles tend to suffer badly from terror and find even temporary captivity very difficult, so you need to be aiming for a safe release as soon as possible. After a few minutes, if the vole is moving freely, washing, looking about  etc. take to a safe release site and let it go. If the vole shows any hesitation at this point, do not release but administer another dose of Arnica and see if the vole is now ready to leave.

  Ideally, as today, this should all fit in the interval in which your pastry is chilling in the fridge- if you are a very slick operator, you will be returning to the house with your empty vole-carrying receptacle at the very moment when your pastry is ready to be removed from the fridge- now THAT's time management..!! It's a pity you never got your hot drink but, hey, never mind, you saved a life!!
 Now it's time to get your pastry out and slice it into quarter inch slices. Lay them on their sides on an oiled baking sheet, sprinkle with a little more sugar if you like) and cook at 190* for 8-10 minutes. Then turn over carefully (the undersides should be turniing golden), and cook for another 8-10 minutes. When the palmiers are looking really golden take them out and allow to cool.
   Our daughter Pony doesn't like palmiers and also didn't like the cheesy straws that I made her as an alternative last time, so this time, I cut some 'straw' shapes out and put them on a tray or her and she topped them herself with tomato sauce, scattered on some 'bacon bits' and then sprinkled some yeast flakes on some of them. Yeast flakes, also known as Nutritional Yeast, or 'Nooch' adds a mild cheesy taste to vegan dishes (we sell it in our shop VegaNation ), and is nice on 'buttered' toast, possibly sprinkled with a few caraway seeds..
   The tomato sauce looked a little blackened by the time the pastry was cooked, but I think that was because it was spread a bit thin. When our visitor arrived, who is a busy RSPCA volunteer, and well-deserving of a treat, we all enjoyed our palmiers very much and Pony pronounced her savoury straws to be excellent!

MoFo Day Eleven: Brumbies and Damper.

  Pony, our seven year old, is reading aloud the Silver Brumby books to her brothers- remember those? M and I read them when we were about her age and they've stayed with us. The books are about the lives of wild horses in Australia and the way they are written is very natural i.e the horses do not have special or magical powers, and are driven by natural needs: food, water, safety, companionship etc. There is a lot of information about the tough lives of the wild horses and the dangers they face, not least from humans, and also a lot about the Australian countryside and native wildlife. It was reading books like that, I think, that really helped make me feel close to animals, or, conversely, I felt close to animals, that is why I enjoyed the book.
     I have always felt very passionately about animals, from long before I knew about vegetarians and vegans or animal rights. I always felt a great affinity with animals and although I was very moved by reading for the first time, the wise words of Jeremy Bentham ''..a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? '' 
 But I think the wonderful words of  American writer and naturalist Henry Beston describe my view of animals  even more powerfully:
 ''We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. ''


  That view of animals fitted so well with the way I had always wordlessly felt about animals and it encapsulates why I am vegan, and why we are now bringing up our children as vegans. Which brings me to today: I made damper today because I first read about damper in the Silver Brumby books and, for some reason, always wanted to try it! I finally got round to making it a few years ago and it was a huge success- everyone loved it, and it became a very useful snack, and since it could be rustled up in about half an hour, it was great when we didn't have time to make bread or had forgotten to bake!

 A swagman. (wikipedia)

  Damper is a traditional Australian soda bread, prepared by 'swagmen', travelling casual workers, who travelled about carrying their bedroll ('swag') as they looked for work. The basic ingredients were wheat flour, water, salt, and sometimes milk. Baking soda was used as a leavening agent, and the damper was cooked in the ashes of a campfire.
  Today, I made damper with 250g self raising flour, about 25g Pure margarine (I read that damper sometimes had a small amount of fat in it), about half a teaspoon of salt, and 175ml of soya milk. I mixed it all up, and then cut the traditional slashes forming a cross on the top of the loaf, and cooked it at about 190* for about 25 minutes until it was turning golden and sounded hollow when tapped underneath. I glazed it with Pure margarine, using a pastry brush when it came out and that made it even more golden.
  Because of the slashes on the top, the damper can be broken into chunks very easily so it is especially nice to eat with soup, as we did today. The only thing which put a damper on the meal (did you see what I did there..?) was the fact that Pony has suddenly decided that she doesn't like it..

MoFo Day Eight: Two Cakes In One.

Well, it's Yom Kippur and since our family has a Jewish heritage, we are fasting today. Yesterday, after doing about a year's worth of cutting and pasting, letter and number recognition, drawing, tracing, counting and colouring from his big 'Learning at Home' workbook from the U.S. (he just wouldn't stop!), Mouse, 4, suddenly announced that he wanted to bake a chocolate cake, right there and then. It was bedtime by then, so we managed to get him to agree to rolling over the cake project until today. The result was that I scored good mummy points by cooking with the children, but not so many Jewish points because of having a lapse in concentration and dipping my finger in the cake mix to try it.. The other thing I forgot was that Pony doesn't like chocolate cake (how is that even possible.?) so, after a lot of flapping about, it transpired that Pony was happy to help make a chocolate cake as she still had a vanilla cupcake in the freezer which she could eat while everyone else ate chocolate cake, later. Every now and then we make a batch of vanilla cupcakes for Pony to eat if she doesn't like some other treat that has been baked. We tend to use one of  Isa's cupcake recipes, or a heavily veganised recipe which may still belong to Nigella Lawson, or, by now, our best friend Paula (of soon-to-be-cult-blog Purple Cricket..)..I don't really know what the rules are about these things..you decide!

   We're planning to make a chocolate cake and putting in a mixture of frozen raspberries, blackberries, currants and cherries, pouring the cake  batter over the fruit before cooking which makes a lovely moist, juicy cake. There were strawberries in the frozen fruit as well, but I picked them out as I think they would just turn to mush.
  Today I hit on what seemed like the perfect solution: I split the ingredients in half and poured half of the batter into each side of the cake tin. We only put the fruit in the chocolate half because Pony apparently doesn't like raspberries, blackberries, currants or cherries. Except that when I did that, she changed her mind and decided that she did, after all, want some fruit in her half- just two berries..
   I'm not at all sure this is going to work because I was fairly relaxed about the process of dividing up the ingredients, so the two batters have worked out quite different in consistency, so may require different cooking times.. I've made marble cake lots of times before, cakes and cupcakes, and they've always worked ok, but the different mixes were more swirled together,not in two distinct halves as in this case, where different thicknesses of batter may matter more..We'll see.
  Oh no! We just had a powercut! The cake had only been in the oven for about five minutes- that's not likely to help matters, is it?
  I don't LOVE cake, but there is something magical about them- I love it that we now have an oven with a window in the door- not had one of those before- so you can watch cakes and bread rising- it's better than TV- except the first series of 'Mad Men', of course! The oven was a secondhand (pre-loved!) bargain from eBay; it's been great, with the window and everything, except that, being secondhand,we didn't get a manual with it. Never really worried about that- I mean, it's an oven, how complicated can it be..? Well,actually, the answer to that is QUITE complicated, when there's a power cut! Even when you get the power back, the clock isn't working,just flashing a row of zeros. The stupid oven doesn't work if the clock isn't working (logic?), so, with our poor vulnerable sponge shrouded in silent, rapidly cooling darkness inside the oven, we were frantically trying to GUESS how to re-set the clock. In the end, Miranda managed it, but doesn't know how she did it, so although she may have saved the cake, that's no help at all for the future..
  There was a picture of a chocolate cake in a book we had as children- it was a Babar the Elephant book and it had a page showing the Old Lady making a chocolate cake; I always loved the picture.
  I've just got the cake out of the oven and it looks great! When I make a chocolate cake I often just sprinkle it with a bit of icing sugar which looks lovely in contrast to the cake, or ice it and stick 'smarties' on it (we sell them in our dear little 100% vegan shop VegaNation but I'm not going to do that with this one as I think it looks nice as it is. So, vanilla sponge for Pony; chocolate cake with raspberries, cherries and blackberries for the rest of us!

MoFo Day Seven: Woodward Veggie Burgers.

Vegweb really came through for us a few months ago with this delicious recipe. We'd been wanting to try a new burger recipe and this one appealed because it was made of nuts and rice rather than beans, or soya mince. This recipe was on Vegweb but apparently came originally from the late Paul Newman's website and was named The Woodward Veggie Burger after Joanne Woodward, his wife.
  I really love the idea of Vegweb and I don't want to be castigated for a lack of vegan solidarity because come the revolution I'm there, rounding up the meat eaters with the rest of you (!), but I do think that a few of the recipes are a bit strange. I mean I really don't understand when someone posts, say, an enchilada recipe, and lists the recipe as needing: one jar of enchilada sauce, enchilada spices, one packet of vegan cheese sauce mix etc etc.  Maybe people find it helpful to know that such things exist at all, but apart from the fact that many Vegweb users just won't have access to vegan cheese sauce mix, if you did have access to all those things, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that you could use them to assemble vegan enchiladas..isn't it? Oh, am I sounding horrible? I don't mean to- I love Vegweb. But I just saw a reference to Mock Crab Salad and the main ingredient is..Mock Crab...Just saying.
  Where was I? Some reviewers described this burger as not holding together well when it was cooked, but we haven't found that to be a problem; sometimes if it seems a bit crumbly we just add a bit more flour and until it is holding together better.

  I always usually make our bread a mixture of white and wholemeal or white and spelt flour, but we always make pizza bases white and we usually use white buns with burgers. We hadn't bought any burger buns this week (oops!), which we didn't realise until after I'd made the burger mix. We were going to change our meals round so we didn't need the buns today,and have Lemon and Courgette Linguine instead, because we were busy ordering more chocolates and sweets for our lovely 100% vegan shop VegaNation  (we're so excited: we found Pear & Licorice Bears and also Cola & Licorice Sheriff Badges- ideal for the 'vegan police' amongst us!!) but after shopping like..er..children let loose in a sweetshop (think ''trolley dash''!), we were finished sooner than expected, and I made some bread rolls to eat with our burgers.
   Woodward Veggie Burgers are only a three star meal because Pony doesn't like them and now Mouse, who used to really like them, has decided that he doesn't like them either (sigh).. So, this evening the non-believers are going to be eating..um..not quite sure, actually! We were supposed to be giving them some Tofu Wieners in a bun instead; we all love them and we were going to finish the packet up next week- if we'd remembered to buy them, that is..!

   So, this is where it gets 'real'! I said that I wanted my MoFo theme to be feeding a vegan family- this vegan family in particular! As I said before, Pony has particularly strong food likes and dislikes- it seems to be something that she has grown into. She was breastfed (yay!) and we had always read that children who were breastfed were more likely to welcome and enjoy a range of foods because they were used to getting different flavours through their mother's milk, but although Pony ate a very varied diet as a very small child, I don't think there has been a single new food within the last two years or so, that she has liked; which I can't help finding slightly disheartening at times. For me, cooking lovely vegan food for my children is one of the ways that I express my love for them so it can sometimes feel a bit crushing to have that expression stifled day in and day out, although I do try really hard to remember that she is not doing it deliberately.
  So, we will be eating Woodward Burgers and Pony and Mouse will be eating something else. And if you want to know what it's going to be..it might even be Alphabetti. If any of you keen cooks out there want to re-create this dish, here is what you will need: one 400g tin of Heinz Aphabetti...