The Coronacrisis Chronicles – episode 1

Hunkering down

Hello, friends and strangers and everyone in between. Looks like I’m back… And all it took was a pandemic. Why didn’t we do this sooner?

I’ve had a few attempts at reviving my online presence over the last few years. I thought about starting a professional Instagram account, but why on earth would I want to restrict myself to looking and sounding professional when the biggest joy of self-employment is the right to be myself… I secretly started a blog to document my ACL recovery, but it never felt like a worthwhile addition to the Internet, so I never shared it… I secretly signed up for a new Instagram account to share some ideas for fitness and wellbeing whilst we wait for the coronavirus to get bored of frolicking freely in our streets and gyms, but I’m self-conscious enough about posting on my private purposeless Instagram account… and lastly, I have spent a week drafting a newsletter of idle thoughts, fitness tips and food ideas to go out to clients and anyone else who is interested, but inserting myself into everyone’s inboxes (with a poorly-designed and image-poor newsletter, to boot) seemed a little aggressive for this introvert.

Oh, wait, that wasn’t my last attempt. I briefly, in a moment of procrastination-induced madness, downloaded TikTok onto my phone yesterday whilst trying to study, opened it and immediately deleted the app.

As much as I would love a fresh start, on a sleek blog or social medium that isn’t already cluttered with my thoughts and opinions from nearly a decade ago (!), it feels good to be back in this space that was created specifically for and by my own voice. How ironic that while we are all “socially distancing” holed up in our homes, I have retreated to my virtual home rather than expanding into all the new platforms everyone else is exploring.

In case you were wondering, here’s where my fledgeling newsletter got to:

Well, here we are. We knew it was coming – this time last week my appointments were thinning out, I was already preparing myself to work from home this week – and yet cycling into work and casually walking into shops feels like another lifetime ago.

Thankfully, I’ve known for a long time that I crave routine; that as much as I oppose restricting food, I feel equally unhappy if I gorge mindlessly all day; and that although I am far from being an early bird, I do feel better for getting up and out of bed closer to 7am than midday (that’s all I’m saying). On the other hand, I don’t want to spend my life overtired, thinking about food, and chasing a to-do list. I’m still working out my own precise balance, and it’s likely to change daily and weekly, but for starters this is what I’m doing to keep feeling healthy and content:

1. I’m setting an alarm for just slightly later than I might wake up anyway – that way, I’m not woken by an alarm every morning, but I do wake up with purpose and intent.
2. I’m trying to stick to three meals a day, even if they’re small. It’s tempting to snack on peanut butter on toast every hour, but I have learnt the hard way that that doesn’t make me feel like my best self. By a meal I mean: a starchy carbohydrate, a decent source of protein, a fruit or vegetable, and flavour. Enjoy each meal or snack, and make it worth working towards.
3. Some of you are already familiar with my rehab board… It has morphed into a “rehab and training” board and includes not only the rehab I am doing for my left knee* but also some basic training from breathing drills to shoulder mobility to walkouts and planks – I plan to do more most days, but if I can’t face doing anything, theres always something on that board I can do. Celebrate the little victories!

[I return after a brief pause during which I hijacked Ben’s exercise session – I couldn’t sit still while he was doing his core work, so I joined in with his transverse abdominis activation exercises, oblique crunches and press-ups – whilst providing general merriment and wildness, because it turns out 3 days is as long as it takes for my energy to bubble up and out.]

*Yes, the left knee. You may be thinking, “Wasn’t it her right knee that we saw in a brace?”; in which case you would be right. Turns out there’s a very good reason I, and any other fitness professional, would advise you not to 1) run/walk 10km for your second run in a year, and indeed your second run post-ACL surgery, or 2) run through pain. It seems the niggle I have had in my left knee since the ACL tear in my right knee, is probably a meniscus tear, and it is absolutely furious with me for running. Luckily, I have a few weeks of enforced relative rest and time to focus on rehab ahead of me…

Then this bit:

Decisions, decisions

For those of us (well, those of you) who normally have a set time to get into the office, you’re going to be facing many more decisions on a daily basis than you’re used to having to make: even if you have meetings to be up and ready for, you might have more options for breakfast; you can choose between getting up at your normal time and using your commute time to exercise, or you could sleep in a little; you can knuckle down and work through your usual working day, or maybe you can be a little more relaxed about your schedule; and now, on top of that, you have so many more (hypothetical) opportunities to exercise. Decision fatigue is a very real thing, and for most of us the first thing that goes out the window when we are worn out is exercise.

If you’ve been all over the place this week, or if you’ve not managed to get as much exercise as you were hoping, be kind to yourself; we’re all still adjusting and figuring things out. Once you start to settle into more of a routine, my advice is to build the exercise into it so you don’t have to think about whether or not, or how, to exercise. At the very least, schedule “movement breaks” into the day: 15min segments at least every 2-3 hours in which you do some stretches and activation exercises. It doesn’t have to be formal exercises, just get moving and stretching, though ideally it would be a little more involved than the 10 minutes we are recommended to spend moving around out of every hour of sitting.

So for example: set an alarm at ten-to every hour, so you get up from your desk or sofa – use this time to get a glass of water or a cup of tea, check social media or reply to non-work messages – and every three hours, do 15 minutes of yoga or pilates if that’s your thing (there are plenty of great free classes available online – I like Yoga With Adriene but would love to hear what your favourite resources are!).

And finally, I was going to try and share an example or two of exercises people could do, and maybe a recipe:

How I’m training

Aside from trying to get my left knee back on track, and trying to keep fit on the bike, keeping my back healthy and happy had to be a priority. My neck and shoulders are the first to take the brunt of more time spent staring at screens, and the hardest to untangle when they knot up, so I committed early on to shoulder mobility exercises:

• 6-10 shoulder rolls, backwards and forwards
• 10-12 alternating shoulder rolls, backwards and forwards
• 6-8 one forward one backward shoulder rolls (the fun one!), each side
• 8-10 circles with a band or towel

My traps get tired and tight very quickly, so I normally only do one set, usually as I recover from something else like walkouts, and so far that has been doing the trick – but I do try and wriggle my shoulders around every so often.

A big favourite of mine this week has been aeroplanes: lying face down, arms down by the side, palms face down; lift the hands and stretch the fingertips away, then let the chest and ribcage rise off the floor, taking care to “roll” up from the top down rather than pinching the lower back, and keeping the neck neutral by looking down at the ground. 2-3 sets of 8-10 reps is all you need if you are giving it a good squeeze – I had muscle soreness in my upper back on Tuesday after giving them everything I had on Monday!

Rehab and training board for the first week of “lockdown lite” – some exercises aren’t listed on here, but these are what I knew I needed to prioritise

What I’m eating

Most of you won’t be surprised to hear that I am eating a lot of  bread and peanut butter (fun fact: I ate two peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day throughout most of high school).

We have stuck to our usual breakfast of a protein smoothie (Vega Essentials, in case you were wondering, blended with fresh banana, ice, and rice milk), which I have with homemade granola because I believe in chewing.

Lunch has been mostly bread with either peanut butter or this Bonsan tomato and lupin spread because I forgot that hummus exists and is delicious. To make it feel a bit more like a proper meal, I’ve been heating up some veggies – frozen broccoli until we ran out, then frozen peas and sweetcorn – to have with it. See above re: two peanut butter sandwiches every day for years – I’m a simple creature when it comes to lunch.

As content as I am with this simple non-meal lunch, I do want to put a little more effort into it next week. I’m looking forward to making a big quinoa salad, studded with roasted veggies, with either beans or tofu for protein. I had abandoned eating lunches like that because when I was regularly cycling home from work last year that amount of fibre would upset my stomach on the bike, but there’s no reason not to enjoy a healthy, colourful meal made with love now!

But then I realised I would probably need some photos, or a video of some exercises, then I would need to figure out how to embed it all… and tell people how and where to sign up… and there was a whole copyright bit at the end and apparently I needed to provide a business mailing address to comply with international anti-spam law, and suddenly it all seemed like far too much of a commitment. I know nobody writes blogs anymore (well, unless they’re already making money from it – or unless they begrudgingly do it to keep their website high up on search engine results) but I like that I can just leave this here and you can take it or leave it. I love writing for the sake of writing, and when my client – a published author who recently paid me to write her an essay to help with the latest book she is writing – encouraged me to “keep doing it”, I realised what a waste it would be not to.

Today, I needed a small victory. Sure, I wiped my training board clear, made some adjustments to the exercises, and ticked a few off already (the knee rehab, band pull-aparts, and some hollow holds and reverse curls, if you’re wondering) – took an online training session – and finally got through to the Universal Credit helpline to book an appointment (if you’re trying and it keeps dropping your call, yes that’s normal) – but I needed to complete a task. Maybe this can be it… if I gather the nerve to hit “publish”.

Go and find yourself a small victory to be had today too!

 

 

Sunday thoughts: post-retreat edition

Hello, and happy Summer (to those of you who count it from 1st June – I am still undecided)!

Man, have I been looking forward to writing this blog post… Since my last post about six weeks ago, I have handed in my last assignment at uni, sat my last exam, celebrated with Icco‘s new vegan pizza offering and a long-anticipated visit to Yorica, then almost immediately got my head back down to concentrate on the final bits and pieces – kit lists, medical forms, payment receipts, playlists, shopping lists – for the first ever fitness and wellbeing retreat I have hosted (co-hosted with Ben and our yoga teacher Jay) in the south of France.

To say I’m not good at dealing with unknowns would be a vast understatement, and the retreat planning was full of them, so that last week leading up to the retreat was tinged with an undercurrent of stress. I pictured myself breathing a sign of relief when it was all over, but in reality the week went so well and – most surprisingly – I had such an amazing time running it and looking after our guests, that I had no desire for it all to end. I am so grateful that we had the opportunity to stay in the venue for a couple of days after our guests left, so that we could unwind and reflect on the week together (and enjoy the sun, and finish delicious leftovers), because it is clear that had we headed straight back to London and what has turned out to be a busy week of work, I would have struggled to take the time to slow down.

So when this morning, after dragging myself out of bed early to get to Jay’s Sunday morning yoga class, I arrived at the train station only to find out that all trains in the direction I needed to go in had been cancelled due to emergency engineering works, I was actually quite excited to head back home through the sleepy streets with my coffee still warm in my travel mug, and enjoy some much-needed quiet time writing with no distractions. It’s the perfect grey, wet, but not cold, quiet Sunday morning for it, and I hope you’re making the most of it too.

Thought for food

Our typical breakfast: selection of fresh bread, homemade jams (thanks Mum!), chia-oat pudding, fresh fruit, soy yoghurt, and a berry smoothie

I had imagined that prior to the retreat, we would have thoroughly tested all of the meals we planned to serve, written out the recipes, calculated exact quantities and made our shopping lists. None of that happened. And I think that’s partly why the food turned out so well: we were able to be flexible, adapt to what we had and what we could find, taste and adjust and improvise and decorate and serve with love. I also could never have anticipated what people’s favourite dishes would turn out to be:

• Chia overnight oats: loosely based off Angela Liddon’s recipe, this breakfast staple was probably the star of the show. Ben had wanted to layer them up in individual breakfast parfaits, but I argued that people may not want any or might want to adjust components and ratios in their parfait, so we served them in a bowl as part of a spread with plain soy yoghurt, fresh fruit, and berry compote. I was a little worried that it may look a little too unappetising and outlandish for our non-vegan guests, but after the first day one guest told us he was looking forward to his chia pudding at breakfast, and by the end I think everyone had asked for the recipe!
• Sweet potato lentil soup: we had brought a tonne of red lentils with us, and I thought what better way to enjoy France with its fresh bread and warm weather with its crunchy salads than serving them with a hearty soup, thus making it a full meal? I’m not even the biggest soup lover, but even I was more enthusiastic than Jay and Ben, who argued that our guests might feel they were being underfed if soup was served as anything more than a simple starter. Well. Holy wow were we wrong – my humble soup that has no recipe, that had its lentil content roughly double about halfway through because “it doesn’t look like enough, does it?”, was perhaps the most popular dish of the week and was even requested again! Unfortunately we did not oblige as we were committed to not serving the same dish twice, but I will try and make it again soon and note down the quantities, so I can share the recipe with the guests and on this blog.
• Chilli (and all other tomato sauces): another unexpected star was Ben’s chilli; a humble concoction of beans in a rich tomato sauce, served with brown rice expertly cooked by Jay, and a silken tofu sour cream. To be honest, everyone raved about all of Ben’s tomato-based sauces, which were perfectly rich and tangy and filled with summery tomato flavour. I love how easy it is to make good (vegan) food!
• Lemon drizzle cake: I was a little nervous as the last (also the first) time I made this loaf cake (from the recipe on this page), I don’t think I followed the recipe but couldn’t remember what substitutions I had made. This time, I did – and it almost all disappeared while I was round the back cleaning the coffee machine!

Taco night: cabbage and carrot slaw, wholewheat tortillas, fajita peppers, refried beans, pulled jackfruit in homemade BBQ sauce, Violife cheese, tofu sour cream, and guac!

Frankly though, everyone seemed to really enjoy the food, talking about it amongst themselves at the dinner table, going back for seconds, going out of their way to compliment the chefs (us!), and commenting on how they could eat more vegan meals if this was what vegan food was like!

My bowl on Day 0 (before the retreat had officially started): sautéed veggies, tricolour quinoa, green salad with avocado and cucumber, a rich tomato sauce, olives, and fresh bread

Food for thought

Everyone left the retreat with at least one “takeaway” – a loose resolution, one change they could make – for most, it seemed to be either cutting down on meat consumption or preparing a batch of chia overnight oats for easy and delicious healthy breakfasts. Turns out, I have several of my own, and this seems a good place to share them:

• Every meal can, and should, be delicious and exciting. Too often, I think of breakfast or lunch as inferior to dinner, and not worthy of extensive thought or multiple components. While I do still enjoy my dinner being the heartiest and most complex meal to end the day, I really enjoyed piecing together breakfasts and lunches from a varied spread, and hope to continue doing so when I feel like I want a little more on my plate or when I have leftovers available.
• Mise en place is easier and more efficient than it seems. For some meals, it is totally feasible to chop as you go and multitask – for most weeknight meals, to be honest, this works well for us as one is home ahead of the other and has a good hour to play with, which is ample time to get something chopped and in the oven to roast before tending to elements that can cook more quickly on the stovetop. However, getting into the habit of preparing at least some ingredients in advance – washing and drying a whole lettuce and storing it in an airtight container, for example, or chopping up a whole head of broccoli when you have some spare time, or pressing and marinating a block of tofu before the start of the week – can mean that you are more likely to serve your meal with a side salad, or chuck in an extra veggie, or feel that your Tuesday lunch is just as special as your Saturday night dinner (see point above).
• Food doesn’t need rules. This is a more personal one, as I still catch myself trying to hold myself to “food rules” that even I know are meaningless. We were so busy during the retreat that frankly I didn’t have time to worry about what time it was when I was hungry and needed a snack, having enough energy to cook a meal or tidy up or teaching a class was clearly more important than a silly self-imposed rule about what and when to eat, and also cooking kills my appetite so even though I was rarely hungry I knew I needed to eat. And despite throwing all my rules out the window, everything was still fine, and I need to remember that.
• I love mustard, and salad dressing deserves to be delicious. For years I’ve been trying to make myself like mustard: I’ve always loved the smell but never liked the taste! This happened with olives, and it’s a weirdly frustrating sensation, but since I grew to love them I knew I would with mustard, too. Since we were making a lot of salads for a lot of people I had to make decent dressings, and mustard plays a key role in a good vinaigrette. As above, going out of my way to make a vinaigrette (rather than my usual salad-dressing approach which is to drizzle some oil and some vinegar straight onto the leaves), proved ridiculously simple and so much better with the addition of mustard. I bought a jar of whole-grain mustard as soon as I went grocery shopping when we were back, and shook myself up a bottle of vinaigrette for easy salad dressing at all times (see mise en place point, above).

I’ll leave you with those thoughts and this view of dusk setting in over the pool, hopefully I will be back soon with that soup recipe!

Transatlantic vegan food swap

Hello friends!

My last draft of this was saved three months ago, and this is what I had written:

This blogging thing is not on my side – maybe it’s punishing me for not having its back – and, truth be told, I spent well over an hour hunched over the keypad typing furiously away at a Sunday thoughts post last Sunday… then it was dinnertime, and I had written well over 1000 words and not even covered half the things I wanted to cover, and there was no way I was working way into the night on my Sunday night, editing and adding and searching for relevant but unrelated images and re-editing (sorry guys, it’s nothing personal, just a matter of principle). So I left it for another day… and as I returned to it tonight, half of my draft was missing. I’m never against a fresh start, but sometimes it’s just too fresh to start patching up again.

And now it’s three months later!

So without further ado, I give you a well-overdue blog post about all the wonderful treats that Amey winged over to me from California!

Kitchen fun lately

Happy Monday to all long-weekenders and working-week-starters alike!

Last week I mainly worked really hard at reducing the amount of thinking I’ve been doing. I submitted the coursework for my Dietary Assessment module last Sunday evening, with a bit of an anti-climax as the finished product didn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the amount of effort and thought that I put into it, so it was hard to totally unwind with any sort of satisfaction. Rather, the tension in my neck and the buzzing in my head ebbed away slowly last week, and a relatively warm and gorgeously sunny day off on Friday left me feeling more relaxed than I can remember being this year. And if a long bank holiday weekend isn’t the time to embrace that, then I don’t know what is…

Turns out that my go-to ways to stop thinking are: train relatively hard; do all the housework; and cook. Only one of those is really any fun to read about, I’m guessing, so let’s get straight into how dusty skirting boards can get when you’re not paying attention.

Kidding. I’m obviously here to talk about food.

Let’s start with turnips, because that is what was giving me the evil eye every time I opened the fridge, but then I promise I’ll talk about chocolate. I consider myself pretty a unfussy eater: as long as there is no animal involved in the production of my meal, I will eat whatever plants you give me. But I just couldn’t get excited enough about turnip to make that instead of the sweet potato, white potato, broccoli, aubergine, or any of the other vegetables that arrived in our vegetable delivery (we use Farmaround), so the turnip got wrinklier and wrinklier and pushed ever further back in the fridge. I even went so far as to peel and chop it, ready for roasting, before the faintly cabbagey smell put me off and I put the prepared turnip cubes in a plastic container and pushed it to the back of the fridge again.

I even Googled “how to make turnip taste good” but that didn’t bring up anything novel. I have roasted turnip many times, thank you, and it still tastes distinctly of turnip.

So I can’t tell you how I came to the idea of a curried turnip loaf, but that doesn’t matter because the important thing is it was delicious. I may never make turnip any other way again.

I rarely use recipes for anything, so I can’t give you one for this, but this is the gist:

• turnip, cubed and lightly sautéed in a pan with oil from a jar of sun-dried tomatoes (I hope you’re not throwing that stuff out!)
• turnip transferred to baking tray (or loaf pan to save washing up), covered in vegetable stock, and left in a warm (180ºC ish) oven while you get on with more fun kitchen tasks like making vegan creme eggs – stirring occasionally is recommended
• softened turnip transferred to food processor with remainder of an open can of chickpeas and the majority of the aquafaba, a bit of cumin, pinch of turmeric, as much curry-flavoured salt as seems reasonable, and some of the white pepper that you never use, and blended until scraping the processor down becomes too tedious
• a sprinkle of oats mixed with the textured turnip-chickpea mash to absorb excess moisture, and some frozen green peas for colour
• everything smashed firmly into the previously used loaf tin and returned to the oven for as long as you have to spare, or until the top dries out slightly

To be honest, I had planned for many other add-ins, or at least a mango chutney glaze, but I liked the mixture so much straight out of the food processor that I decided to leave well enough alone for once (though this does taste great with mango chutney, or any chutney, I would imagine). Grated potato would probably work well to firm the mixture up, and some cashews would undoubtedly be a nice pairing. Parsnip and/or lentils would be great too – in fact, I keep referring to this as my “parsnip-lentil loaf” when it contains neither parsnips nor lentils. Either way, let’s not avoid cooking with turnip forever.

Right, I promised chocolate!

Everyone seems to be making vegan creme eggs these days, and on the eve of my seventh veganniversary I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to add another treat to my repertoire.

Ignoring the first attempt in which I mistakenly thought I could somehow substitute granulated sugar for icing sugar in the fondant recipe, I based mine off this one, but added way less icing sugar because I just got a bit scared of adding any more (though I’m not entirely sure, as I didn’t measure because… I’m not sure why). I also didn’t bother with the yellow portion of the fondant, because we all know it’s not a real egg. I also didn’t roll and dip my fondant because it didn’t firm up enough – presumably because I didn’t add enough icing sugar – so I used our previously never used chocolate mould and made about half a dozen batches of teeny little creme egg cubes over the course of two days. And a couple of freeform splats where I got too optimistic about the firmness of the fondant.

I mentioned a failed first attempt involving granulated sugar (in my defence, I did attempt to process it into powdered sugar first, but didn’t have much success and decided to plough on anyway). It’s important because that failed start turned into one of the best cakes I think I have ever made (not an overstatement; I just don’t bake very much and I certainly don’t bake very well).

I wound up with a big bowl of creamed vegan buttery spread (1/4 cup), golden syrup (1/2 cup), and granulated sugar (about 3 cups), and wasn’t about to throw it all out. It sounded like the beginning of a cake, as opposed to cookies or muffins, and having just rearranged the cupboards (which seems to be an essential part of my baking process) I was confronted with a ridiculous amount of rosewater for people who don’t consume any rose-flavoured treats. Pistachios were an obvious pairing, and we happened to have a huge bag of them that an Iranian client had gifted us. I had recently read Amey’s annual NoRouz post and I guess it all clicked into place.

Drawing very loosely on Audrey at Unconventional Baker’s recipe, I added rosewater, vanilla extract, the juice of a clementine, some mixed spice, salt, baking soda, and plain flour. I also added a little extra rosewater, and a generous pinch of saffron, but I had no cardamom. I shelled pistachios until my thumb blistered and then ruptured, and I decided that was enough pistachios. It took about half an hour, or a generous 1/2 cup, in case you’re wondering – so if you have any recipes calling for more than that amount of pistachio, I would recommend purchasing the shelled variety (or getting somebody to help).

Since my version was so different from Audrey’s, the actual baking was a bit of an anxious time, but it worked! It tastes elegant and not overpowered by rosewater, with a light crumb and just the right amount of pistachio. This would taste excellent with cardamom-scented whipped cream, and maybe a coffee on the side.

Earlier in the week, I had some carrots to clear out, so I made Dana at Minimalist Baker’s carrot apple muffins. I used chia eggs instead of flax eggs, grated apple instead of apple sauce, and I replaced the nuts with sultanas to be more Ben-friendly. These turned out pretty great!

In non-cake-related news (but very much in clearing-out-the-cupboard-related news) I also made seitan for the first time! I’ve had an packet of vital wheat gluten sitting around for years, and I’ve been meaning to make the sausage from Vegan Brunch ever since the last time I made it, but I kept just not doing it. I had just made a batch of Zsu’s savoury broth mix from Everyday Vegan Eats so it seemed like perfect timing.

I loosely followed the Post Punk Kitchen instructions because I trust Isa Chandra Moskowitz on all things seitan, but with excess broth because I decided halfway through the process that I would only make a half batch (i.e. when I had actually found the vital wheat gluten and realised I only had enough for a half batch), with apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice, and without the minced garlic because I had just noticed we were out of garlic. Miraculously (after after a LOT of squeezing excess fluid out) it worked out perfectly! Admittedly, the two pieces I ended up with look a lot like brains – hence no photos – but when you slice them they are firm and solid and were absolutely perfect in yesterday’s stir-fry.

Last but not least… I had some leftover melted chocolate so I took the liberty of covering Ben’s chocolate chip cookies with it. Oh my goodness.

That is all. Have a happy week!

Sunday thoughts: 6th March 2016

You know you’ve been away from your blog for a little while when you don’t recognise the post editor (is that even what the bit where I type all my words in is called?) anymore.

Mounds of seaweed amassed after severe weather in New South Wales, Australia

It’s obviously a bit late to be wishing you all a happy new year, but I do hope everyone has had a good start to 2016. I know it sounds like such a massive lie, but I have been thinking of anyone who reads this blog, and about what I could tell you that would add anything to your lives, and feeling both proud and a little ashamed with each notification of a new follower, as I don’t feel like I have provided a very warm welcome. So to anyone who has joined us in the last six months, and everyone who has stuck with me, an extra warm welcome and a super sincere thank you!

Sunday thoughts: Vegan MoFo edition

Sunday thoughts are back! I hope you are excited as I am about this new development!

Although I will hasten to add that they may not be a weekly occurrence as they used to be, and that they may occur on days other than Sundays. I am trying to keep this space fun and intuitive, but I want to keep hold of the sense that MoFo gave me of having a little more thought woven into my brain cells than I may initially think.

So without further ado, some thoughts on September, these first few days of October, and my first Vegan MoFo experience!

Vegan MoFo 2015: Day 30 – Fusion challenge

I’m one of those “all-or-nothing people”.

If I don’t think I can cook a dish authentically, I don’t even really attempt it. In my mind, this means that if I haven’t eaten a dish that has been fairly authentic, or as close to its traditional form as possible, I can’t possibly attempt to recreate it.

Vegan MoFo 2015: Day 29 – Vegan road trip supplies

So… There’s not really a good way to put this, but I’ve never been on a road trip.

I mean, I’ve gone from A to B in a car, with other people, and it has usually involved snacks, but not like a proper road trip where you PLAN stuff on the journey. So snacks are usually pretty low-key, and usually in small enough quantities that they are all gone by the time we pull out of the driveway (yeah, I get really excited about travel snacks).

Vegan MoFo 2015: Day 28 – Tacos vs. Burritos

Vegan MoFo has been a great study in how my attention, prioritisation and motivation work.

When trying to draft a few posts in advance in August, I jumped on some prompts eagerly and finished them in one breath with a flourish, whereas some started out enthusiastically and then got painstakingly dragged out in quarter-hour increments.

Vegan MoFo 2015: Day 27 – Favourite herb or spice

Initially, when I was going wholeheartedly down the “food memory” route for these posts, one particular seasoning screamed out for attention.