We've chosen the fudge!

It has to be the fudge!! This is the richest, creamiest vegan fudge ever; no contest! We stock this fudge in our all-vegan shop VegaNation (www.veganation.co.uk), so if you want some too, you know what to do! x

Hmm..what should we 'borrow' from the stock cupboard?

 Hmm...we're feeling a bit hungry this evening..not sure whether to broach some stock from our vegan shop VegaNation..we have vegan Sm*rties-like things, bars of white chocolate, bars of milk chocolate, fudge, coconut ice, mini raspberry chocolate bars, chocolate with white mint choc chips, orange chocolate, chocolate footballs, cola bottles, jelly bears, pineapple chunks, gourmet gorilla chocolate with almonds and raisins, licorice teddies, organic dark ginger chocolate..all vegan and all delicious..what shall we choose..?
  If you are feeling inspired by this array of vegan delicacies, (or just a bit hungry!) then please visit our delightful vegan shop VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk and we will get your order out to you as quick as is humanly possible!!

Samphire and Seitan!

 We found samphire in town the other day which we love love love love!! It's the pure cruelty free taste of the sea!! If you haven't eaten samphire, then try and imagine asparagus (but better!) that comes already salted, so all you have to do is steam it or cook in boiling water for a few minutes and then serve with dairy free margarine- absolutely delicious! You really have to eat the bigger bits with your fingers so it's nice and messy!

  We ate it with a lovely dish which we made with asparagus, pine nuts, lemon juice and what looks like vegan octopus tentacles, but is actually, of course, just a nice frilly shape of pasta!
  I also took a photo of our meal from yesterday: vegan pot roast!! It's made with gluten flour which is used to make a chewy protein meat or tofu substitute  called Seitan. This dish is based on a recipe by Joanne Stepaniak in 'Vegan Vittles'; it takes an absolute age to make, so you need to at least double all the quantities because if you have a dish that takes two and a half to three hours to cook, you really don't want to run out of it- you would be so far from your next helping!!

  It is a little bit m**t-like, altho' having said that, I haven't eaten meat for over thirty years so I'm not actually too sure about that! I will never never eat meat again but I was brought up eating meat, until I rebelled as a child, and, I guess, sometimes it makes a change to have a food that's chewy! Our children have never eaten meat, so it was a slightly different experience to them, but they all loved it. We liquidised the vegetables and stock in which the pot roast simmered (for an hour and a half!) to make a lovely gravy- we  got lots of carrots down the children who don't normally eat cooked carrots- and also mint sauce and it was amazing! It's not a great picture, but I just had to photograph the pot roast!
  Th pot roast is made of wheat gluten which we sell in our vegan shop VegaNation, at www.veganation.co.uk,, one 500g bag is enough to make one or two pot roasts, depending on whether you double the quantities and still have some left over to make something else.

We now stock Helios Herbal Creams

 As vegans and as natural healthcare practitioners we know how important it is to take responsibility for your own health, and we'd been wanting to expand the natural health products in our vegan shop VegaNation, so we are thrilled to be stocking Helios Herbal Creams. These creams are all vegan and are very light and pleasant to use. They have been made using organic tinctures and natural plant based ingredients so have not been tested on animals and are lanolin free, and they are also free from artificial preservatives and petroleum derivatives, making them gentle enough for the most delicate skin.

 

 We now have in stock Arnica cream which is made from organically grown Arnica with added essential oils of Geranium and Lavender. This cream is excellent for bruises and soft tissue injuries.

  We also have Calendula cream made from organically grown Calendula plants and containing essential oil of Lavender. This cream is particularly soothing and very good for calming sore, dry, or chapped skin or nappy rash.

  Hypericum & Calendula (combined, it's sometimes known as 'Hypercal') cream both have antiseptic and pain relieving qualities and make a very good topical application for cuts, grazes, bites and stings.

  Lastly, we have Tea Tree cream; Tea Tree is well known for its antiseptic and anti fungal properties and has traditionally been used on cuts, abrasions and fungal skin complaints.

  If you would like to buy any of these products or see what other products we have, including our range of vegan homeopathics, please visit our shop VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk.

We went and did Maths with the Cats at the Shelter!

 We went to Feline Care again today; the lovely, peaceful shelter run by Molly Cutmore, with her partner Paul, at East Harling, near Thetford. Poppy, the lovely calico cat pictured in a recent post, has gone to a new home, and another one of our favourites, beautiful Roy is being collected on Saturday to go and live with his new family in Diss, but we met gorgeous fluffy blue and white Smudge and friendly white Harry who has a purr which filled the room!

  I had had the inspired idea of combining Home Education (very little of which, contrary to popular opinion, actually takes place in the home..!) with visiting the cats, who need cuddles and human contact while they wait for their new homes. So, today, we decided to do some Maths and English with the older cats. Sweet, friendly Smokey was very pleased to see us, and fascinated with what we were doing. He climbed onto laps, peered over shoulders, gazed into eyes and purred and purred and purred! He is a lovely cat, and really needs a lap of his very own to sit on; maybe with the extra publicity that Feline Care is generating with all their fundraising, a lovely, caring home will be found for Smokey; someone who sees the value in a sweet natured, friendly older cat.       We'd love to take him home ourselves but two of the VegaNation rescue cats are very new and we're still in the 'settling in period' at the moment, so we really can't, but Smokey is such an easy cat to love, and so open and friendly and cuddly, and it was heart breaking to leave him, gazing up at us through the window of the door; he looked so small and alone. This shelter is a lovely place, the cats are looked after so well, and Molly works very hard to make sure that the cats go to really good homes, but is still sad to see an older cat in the shelter, competing against younger, more playful cats, and waiting that much longer than a younger cat to be chosen.
  Feline Care is threatened with closure if they can't raise £70,000 by the end of September, as they need to buy the land on which the shelter stands. They have done fantastically well so far and have already raised £33,000, but they have a long way to go, so please, if you can help at all, now is the time to donate to this worthy cause. If you think that you can give a home to Smokey (you would need to be in Norfolk, or not too far from Thetford, so that it's not too far for Molly to do a home visit!) or another deserving cat, or could donate to the Save Feline Care Fund, then please visit Feline Care's website on www.felinecare.org.uk.

  We love going to Feline Care and giving some of the cats some cuddles and attention. We really care about animals which is why we are vegan and want to help others on their path to veganism: we sell lots of lovely things in our shop which make being vegan so easy and yummy compared to when we became vegans, over 20 years ago. If you are looking for vegan snacks, chocolate or groceries, perfumes, bath sets, lovely vegan gifts or household items you'll find them all in our shop.We also sell a range of vegan homeopathic remedies and vitamins, and- my favourite bit of the shop: our second hand book section, with recipe books, animal rights books, and our favourite animal friendly children's books. Please visit us at www.veganation.co.uk and have a browse.

Oh, you are so missing out if you don't go vegan!

 We had Broccoli Pasta Arrabiata today;one of our favourites- it is so brightly coloured with the chopped tomatoes and red pepper and the broccoli. It started life as a Jane Sen recipe (her recipes are brilliant, subtle and always beautiful to look at- we stock one of her recipe books in our shop VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk ), but we've made lots of changes to it, so I'm not sure whose it is now..!
  Here it is, anyway:

10 tbsp olive oil
16 cloves garlic
1/2 mild chili pepper
1 tsp black pepper
grated zest of a lemon and a lime.

Heat oil in  large pan and throw in all of the above, Sizzle and stir until garlic goes brown, but don't let it burn. Do this FIRST.

450-ish g broccoli, cut into florets- steam, or roast, or boil if you want to- more colour and goodness if you steam it.
500g pasta- cook and drain

1 ripe sweet tomato, finely chopped
1 red pepper, finely chopped
1/2 tbsp (or to taste) soy sauce

Quickly stir in all of the above to the pasta and serve.

Yesterday, we had stuffed marrow, using an organic marrow that a friend had grown in her garden and given us. I stuffed half of it with a mixture of vegan cheese, breadcrumbs, a few vegan bacon bits and seasoning,and the other half I did with some of the same mixture to which I then added mushrooms and loads of garlic. I remember stuffed marrow when I was a child as being quite dry, but I made this quite moist and, after setting the marrows in a roasting dish containing water to keep them moist, I cooked them with the stuffing in for about 25 minutes and they were both lovely. I'm not sure how photogenic they turned out, as I've not seen the pics yet, but they tasted really good!

  I spent this afternoon listing some more books in our second hand book section in our shop, including some of Jeffrey Masson's marvellous books about animal emotions; he writes about animals so well- he became vegan while writing 'The Pig who Sang to the Moon' about the emotional lives of farmed animals- and it just underlines how very wrong and cruel it is to enslave animals, steal and kill their children, drink their breastmilk and then kill them too, when their capacity to suffer, something that we've all really KNOWN all along, is so clearly and compellingly documented here. If you want to have a browse through our brilliant collection of animal-friendly second hand books, please visit us at www.veganation.co.uk .

Dormouse Wedding with Vegan Catering!

 I thought these pictures were too sweet not to share! This was the first toy dormouse wedding that VegaNation had ever attended and we really enjoyed all of it; the soft toy guests, teddy bear choir, the red (ribbon) carpet, it was a lovely occasion, it was particularly special because the lovely food at the reception was all vegan! We took cupcakes, which looked gargantuan compared to the delicate fare already provided; little heart-shaped cookies, decorated with pink sprinkles, mini cupcakes topped with icing and pink icing hearts, and flapjacks and lemon iced ginger wedding cake decorated with handmade sugar rose petals: all vegan!
  The wedding was very sweet, the personally written vows exchanged, ring slid onto dormouse tail, tails tied in a symbolic knot, the first dance etc etc and then we feasted! All the food was delicious and we can' t wait for the next vegan soft toy wedding!

   Our cupcakes were made with flax seeds (a.k.a linseed) which makes an excellent egg replacer, producing very moist, tender vegan cupcakes; we sell linseed as well as No-Egg egg replacer in our vegan shop VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk . We also sell some lovely vegan gifts which would make great wedding presents!

Joan Court: Poster Girl for Humane Research!

 Big Hugs for our very special friend Joan Court who is taking part in Animal Aid's campaign against the big four medical research charities that fund cruel research on animals.

Soft Toy Wedding; We Baked Cupcakes!

 We went to a soft toy wedding today (yes,really!) so we contributed some cupcakes. We made some coffee chocolate cupcakes first that were so strong when we first tried them that we thought we'd forgotten the sugar! I thought that they'd be ok if they had some frosting on- I don't like cake being too sweet anyway. So, I made some butter cream icing using Pure Margarine and icing sugar, a touch of soya milk and then flavoured with Sweet Bird English Toffee Syrup. It came out pretty sweet, but I thought it made a nice contrast to the less sweet cupcakes and together they tasted really lovely; I would definitely make them again. I thought a bit of colour would be nice, so I took some of the butter cream and whizzed up a huge blackberry in it; the colour was amazing and it added a nice berry flavour which I thought went very well with the cupcakes too.

  At the point at which we'd just tried the coffee cupcakes for the first time and they seemed a bit 'sophisticated' and not very sweet, we decided to make some others as well, as a Plan B, so we made some peanut butter cupcakes with a bit of ganache and roasted chopped hazelnut on top. By the time they were out of the oven, we'd iced the first ones and they were fine, so we ended up taking them both- and being rather late!
  Yesterday evening, I saw one of our VegaNation rescued cats with a little creature in her mouth; we all piled outside again; she dropped the vole in the grass as soon as the Vegans appeared, and we were able to divert her while one of the children caught the vole in the grass and we quickly took it to a safe release site and let it go.
  This evening we had taken the children upstairs and then I just came downstairs again to fetch something. I was just coming back up when I heard a rustling in the back hall, and when I went to investigate I found one of our cats, the same one, pawing about among the wellies and other detritus on the hall floor. I quickly spotted a vole scooting about and, after calling for re-enforcements who arrived on the scene admirably quickly and very sensibly put a new lightbulb in the hall light and then scooped up the vole and released it in a safe place outside.

VegaNation go for a Coffee and Bake Key Lime Cookies.

  I took one of the children into town to do some errands and we treated ourselves to Soya De-Caff Vanilla Lattes while the others visited a duck pond and then went home and baked Key Lime Cookies.

  I would hardly call myself a vegan pioneer but I do remember that when we became vegan over twenty years ago, we did feel that we were giving up a lot of things in order to do the right thing. There was no reasonable vegan cheese, soya milk wasn't nearly reliably good as it is now- some brands were awful, vegan ice cream and yoghurt were terrible, thin and watery and horrible and as well as not being very nice, these things were not very widely available.
  Vegan cooking has come a long way too; when we became vegan there were very few vegan cook books and those there were tended to be quite dull in presentation, without photos, so they didn't exactly inspire or encourage! These days there is also a much wider choice of  vegan recipe books available; there are so many exciting vegan cooks out there these days, as well as the vast resources of the internet to help share vegan recipes and ideas and, now that there is a decent vegan cheese it's much easier to adapt vegetarian recipes as well, something that wasn't possible in the bleak days of  early vegan cheese replacement 'Veeze'..! An illustration of quite how vile this stuff was (sorry, Plamil- we love your chocolate!), is that I was once given a tray of it by my boyfriend-at-the-time, who worked in a wholefood co-op, because no-one (including me, later) could tell whether or not it had gone off..!! It was greyish and smelled faintly of fish, actually.. It was clearly an evolutionary cul-de-sac; no-one except us seems to even remember it!

   So, we have a very long way to go before we have the vegan world that we need, but all the same it's lovely, all these years after embarking on what felt at the time to be a slightly austere regime for the sake of animals, to be able to take my son out into a small, fairly conservative country town and buy him a vegan drink at a national coffee shop chain and then come home to Cauliflower Gratin made from a veganised recipe, and home made Key Lime Cookies!
    In our vegan shop VegaNation  www.veganation.co.uk , we sell yeast flakes which are often used to give a mild cheesy taste to vegan dishes and two different kinds of egg replacer as well as black salt which adds an eggy taste to vegan cooking such as pancakes and french toast. So, today veganism is as much about animals as ever but, thank goodness, we no longer have to eat 'Veeze'!

Update on Vegan Eggs!

Bought some cress this afternoon and finished the rest of the Vegan Egg Mix- even more astonishing- you MUST try some! Don't forget the black salt, which you can buy from VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk.

 Please buy vegan; if you want to know how many animals die every year because of the global meat and dairy industries, see our animal kill chart on our website. Thanks.

30-40,000,000 reasons per year to stop eating eggs

 Look at this cute little chick- adorable, isn't he? You can't imagine anyone wanting to hurt him, can you? Of course not. But anyone who eats eggs is contributing to the horrible deaths of millions of these little ones.

  Male chicks are unwanted by the egg industry as, of course, they will never lay eggs. They are not the same breed as those used for meat production, so they are considered worthless. Because they are not going to be eaten by humans, there is very little concern about how they are killed. Between 30-40 million of them are killed every year in Britain, by either being thrown alive into electric mincers, being ground up alive, or by being gassed in their thousands. I am not going to go into details here, but these deaths, as you might imagine, involve a great deal of suffering and are not particularly quick.  This is a needless destruction of life to an unimaginable scale – and all to bring eggs to our tables. It happens in all egg production: from batteries through to organic farming. The ONLY way to prevent this is to go vegan. 

  Since egg producers will always require that some eggs are hatched to replace their 'spent' hens ('spent'  when their egg production drops, at two or three years old,when their natural lifespan should be easily eight or nine years) , and half the eggs hatched will always be male, there will always be this appalling slaughter as the hidden side of egg production. If you buy eggs then you are paying companies to grind up male chicks.

  If you really want this to stop happening, please go vegan. We run a vegan shop and we can help. We have lots of lovely vegan products including egg replacers and if you need any advice, please ask. We make great 'Vegan Fried Eggs' and  'Vegan Egg Salad' sandwiches at home, flavouring with black salt, which we sell in our shop and we also sell linseed and specialist egg replacer for use in baking, pancakes, waffles etc. Please visit us at VegaNation www.veganation.co.uk - the hens will thank you! x

By the way, the chick in the picture (sorry, blurry pic from a video) is safe at Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary (www.harvesthomeanimal.org) in the U.S.A..

Vegan 'Egg' Sandwiches!!

 Wow! These were absolutely lovely! I made vegan egg salad years ago and it wasn't good at all, so hadn't made it since. In hindsight, I can see that the previous recipe was way too heavy on the turmeric, as tho' the yellow colouring was more important than the taste, and also we didn't have black salt in those days, so it wouldn't have been as good as this, even without all the turmeric! I am a much more experienced vegan cook these days and wouldn't blindly follow a recipe like that and end up with something that tasted horrible!

 This was really simple: I just pressed and drained a block of tofu and mashed it up with a fork. Then I added vegan mayonnaise- I had two kinds, because we were just finishing up a jar of garlic mayo, so some was garlic and some was plain mayonnaise. Then I added some black pepper, and, the secret of my success, black salt, which we sell in our vegan shop at  www.veganation.co.uk which made it suddenly taste so eggy! I chilled the 'egg salad' in an old ice cream tub in the fridge until we were ready to serve and eat it. I didn't have any chives but I went and picked some organic salad leaves from the garden. A good vegan tip- you'll thank me for this one- if you decide to grow lettuces at any point in the future, make sure that you don't sow anything FRILLY like my old adversary 'Salad Bowl Lettuce' which takes hours to check over for bugs, because each leaf is so frilly- each frill has frills! So, make sure that you sow something with FLAT leaves- it honestly saves so much time! We also sowed a kind of heritage beet, this year, called Bull's Blood Beet which has small beets but also salad leaves, and the leaves are a beautiful wine red, so, since evolution is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't work THAT fast, all the green bugs in the garden show up really well on the red leaves! In a few generations, I suppose, their mutant maroon great great grandchildren might be quite hard to spot, but we're ok for now!!
  ANYHOO, where was I? Oh yes, I served the Vegan Egg Salad on home grown salad leaves in home made bread rolls. It was..astonishing. Two of the children loved it (which is quite good going, round here..); it must have been a quite different experience for them because they've been vegan since birth so they've never eaten eggs. The same two really like 'Vegan Fried Eggs' which we also make using Black Salt, so they seem to really like Black Salt! Whereas, for people who have eaten (and miss) egg sandwiches, it was just so amazingly like hard boiled egg chopped up in mayo- a taste we thought we'd never have again- that we had to keep reminding ourselves that it was tofu! If you'd like to try and make this, then I'd really recommend buying some Black Salt first, it does make the difference. The hens say thank you and send pecks on the cheek! xx

We made chewy coconut cookies dipped in chocolate!

 These were made from a great recipe by Isa Chandra Moskowitz- they are lovely and chewy because they have ground up flax seeds in them which is an excellent vegan egg replacer. I also make doughnuts using only flax seeds to replace the two eggs in the recipe. Flax, also known as linseed, has a huge range of health benefits as well as being great for replacing eggs in recipes. We sell linseed in our very vegan shop VegaNation (at www.veganation.co.uk ) so please come and buy some. The hens will thank you!!

  Eggs are completely unnecessary in our diet and hens are one of the most abused animal in today's industrialised farming. In this photo, (courtesy of Farm Sanctuary) you can get some idea of the conditions that hens endure in their short stressful lives as egg producing machines.

 Oh wow! One of the children just spotted a baby vole hiding in the back hall; we thought that one of the VegaNation cats had caught a creature and then let it go in the house, but although we searched and searched we couldn't find anything. Then,a few minutes later, one of the children realised that there must be a creature inside a hat which was strategically placed on the floor. She swooped to pick up the hat  and when we peeped inside we found a very active young vole that we were able to release immediately.

Oh Wow!! Our Fudge Order Arrived!! Come and Get It!!

  I'd just finished quite a serious post about Feline Care, near Thetford in Norfolk, who are giving wonderful care to over 140 cats and is now facing closure unless they can buy their premises for £70,000 by the end of September (www.felinecare.org.uk if you can help in any way) when there was a knock at the door at VegaNation and a very nice man delivered a huge box of FUDGE!!! This is the stuff to make non-vegans jealous (only joking- they are allowed to buy it too, of course!) - it is absolutely sublime fudge, rich and creamy and completely...fudge-licious!! It is dairy free, with no hydrogenated fats, artificial colours or preservatives and all ingredients are GM free..what's not to LOVE?

  We also have some new kinds of chocolate, more vegan jelly (hard to believe, isn't it, that non-V's actually eat jelly made with boiled up hooves (sp.? hoofs?) and urgh..skin..) and some bottles of that delicious humane alternative to honey Sweet Freedom. If you choose not to eat the fruits of bees' labours, (a.k.a. bee vomit..) then enjoy Sweet Freedom  on toast, drizzled over porridge, in marinades, or baked in cakes and biscuits If your toast seems a bit dull and ..savoury?? then give marmite the boot and slather your toast with Sweet Freedom- do it for the bees!
  We are at www.veganation.co.uk and if you don't eat it, we will!
 

We Donated to Help Save Wonderful Feline Care!

Lovely Poppy waits for a special home.

  We heard from Feline Care near Thetford yesterday, that Ruben, one of our favourite cats, has gone to a new home. We're very pleased for him as he's a very sweet cat who'd obviously been down on his luck before he arrived at Feline Care. Molly had to remove most of his matted coat and get him castrated before he was ready for his fresh start. It sounds like a lovely home for him where he'll get lots of love and attention, but we'll miss cuddling him when we visit Feline Care! There are so many cats who come in to Feline Care like that, needing help after being abandoned or neglected, ill treated or simply no longer wanted and Molly and Paul take them all in and look after them until they can be found new caring homes.This all takes a lot of time and money and at the moment, it is all taking place against a background of incredible fund raising by Molly and Paul and their helpers and supporters; Feline Care which provides so much love and support for the unloved and unwanted cats of the Thetford area, is facing closure unless they can raise £70,000 before the end of September, in order to buy the land on which the charity stands.

Millie is 19 and needs a home!

  They have been doing an amazing job and have already managed to raise over £30,000 in a few weeks, but they still have £40,000 to go and only a few weeks to do that. Please visit their website www.felinecare.org.uk and see what good work they do and if there is any way you can help. They desperately need further donations to help them meet their target of £70,000 by October, so please give what you can so Molly and Paul can secure the future of Feline Care and continue to help the cats of Norfolk. We really want to see Feline Care saved so we made a donation through their website last night- now we have a warm glow about it- you could too!
  If you like the sound of a shop run by really nice vegans then visit us and support us too! We are at www.veganation.co.uk and we now have a fantastic selection of vegan groceries, snacks, treats and chocolate, gifts, alternative health care, perfumes and a brilliant selection of second hand vegan-friendly books.

The Search for Vegan Sock Yarn and Lemon Jammy Dodgers are Vegan!

 Our friend Paula, of quirky knitting blog, Purple Cricket fame, has promised to knit us socks if we were able to lay our hands on some vegan sock yarn.  Sock yarn is typically wool with about 25% nylon for durability, but we have found this lovely yarn in 75% bamboo, and 25% nylon. Job done!

  We discovered lemon jammy dodgers today; who'd have thought it?! No, we're not going to stock them in the cutest little vegan shop in the world (that would be www.veganation.co.uk : please stop by and buy something!!) but if we sell loads of stuff in our shop this week we will definitely buy some more 'Lemmy Dodgers'!!