Captain’s Log: Sunday

I wrote this last night,but could not post as I had no internet. Surprisingly,this morning, which is wild,cold and wet, I’m able to get online. I hope it lasts and I may be able to post again later.

Well, we had a lovely day. Not the weather; that was resolutely grey, threatening, and occasionally delivering, rain, cold, and generally sulky. But Octavia made her first trip to das Boot and on it, with Older Nephew piloting, me on coffee, washing up and other Anneish activities as in the Famous Five. It is my boat after all, so it is only right and proper that I should be the chief wielder of duster, wet wipe, and wearer of rubber gloves.

We drank an impressive amount of alcohol while still remaining coherent and relatively sober. What that says about our livers I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to know. MasterB, who had been distressed during parts of the car journey, voiding his bladder and bowels somewhere near Bow, spent most of the journey to the pub, The Shippe at Brandon Creek, where we enjoyed a very late but satisfactory lunch, under the pillows in the rear cabin. On the journey back to the marina he was keener to be near us, albeit hidden from view in a citadel of cushions in the fore cabin.

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Pitta Pattying!

I’d been thinking pitter patter when I wrote last night’s post, but today that became pitta patty. I was working away from home this morning, but back in time for a late lunch. I stopped off at Oli’s and bought some pitta bread, the wholemeal type. While my patties cooked, I prepared salad and warmed the bread, slitting one to slide one patty inside plus a lot of greenery and some hummus. It looked good, but how dud it taste?

Pitta patty

Cooking for the Fritterati?

I’ve got so many ex-hummus pots in the fridge harbouring fritters, left-overs, fritters, baked beans, fritters, cold potatoes, fritters again that finding the one that has hummus in it is like Edgar Allen Poe’s Purloined Letter.

The builders were supposed to be coming tomorrow to do the tiling in my kitchen. Back in 2016 I had a new kitchen fitted and the guy who did a great job on the floor tiles was not around to do the ones on the walls. The result was amateur, so they’re going to be redone. One day. I think I have had four dates so far for this work. To be fair, I dodged out of one of them, the builder had the ‘flu for another, but it is beginning to feel like the cleaning of the Augean stables, a job that’s never finished. But until it is I can’t contact Tony the painter to begin the other less well known Herculean task of repainting the flat.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Variations on a Theme

There’s a current photo challenge, Variations on a Theme

Here’s my fruit bowl, first the whole thing:

Entire fruit bowl

Then the next three pictures were taken from slightly different angles, so that the emphasis changes each time.

Balanced on bananas

What the GF?

One of the worrying things that has come to my attention during my Veganuary journey is how many vegan products and recipes are also gluten free.

Believe me, I’m not trivialising Coeliac disease. It runs in my family and I know how devastating it can be, especially when it goes undiagnosed for decades. My mother had it, at least one of my aunts, and we reckon an uncle died undiagnosed. But gluten free has become ubiquitous. A neighbour, who to be fair does have health problems, told me she was giving up gluten. Why? I asked. She looked surprised at the question, then assumed a slightly martyred expression and said it was for her health. But she hasn’t been advised by the GP to give it up, has not been tested for Coeliac disease, she’s just decided that for some reason gluten free is a healthier option.

Carry On Veganuarying

Heading into the final week of Veganuary, and like my compatriots doing dry January, this could be a watershed moment, to continue or not. I think I know the answer, which is I shall return to being a flexi-vegan. Once I have eaten the few things already stored in the freezer that contain dairy I don’t think I’ll be hurrying to replace them. Consciously eschewing dairy has been easy, though I haven’t been to the pizzeria yet, and it’ll be the end of M&S meal deals as they barely manage a vegetarian option, let alone vegan. I’ve not bought eggs from a supermarket in months, so until and unless I can get them from hens kept as pets, eggs will be off the menu too. I have quite a bit of honey at home, and that’ll gradually be consumed as well. Whether I replace it or not remains to be seen.

So no, I don’t think I’m going to be a full-time, banner-carrying vegan, but 90% of the time you wouldn’t be able to tell. I’m certainly going to be eating a lot of fritters. After the success of the beetroot and spilt pea fritters I decided to play with my recipe, swapping the split peas for lentils, adding broccoli to the beetroot, and putting the rice flour in the mix to bind everything rather than the tahini. There were more ingredients – tomato purée, garlic, onion, turmeric, soy sauce if I recall correctly. The rice flour didn’t work as well as the tahini, I had to dust them all with more flour after I’d shaped them, yet still they were crumbly. I decided to cook two and have them with mushrooms and kale. I admit my hopes weren’t that high.

Veganuary, An Undisciplined Cook, and Delicious Fritters

Half way through January, aka Veganuary, and it’s going well. I still don’t know how to pronounce veganuary, but that’s a minor issue. A advert on television last night pronounced vaginal in a way that was wholly new to me and because of that caught my attention. Clever marketing or something else? For me vagina and vaginal are pronounced with a strong i so vaginal whereas the ad was more vadge-in-al. Bizarre.

Pronunciation aside, vaginal has little if anything to do with Veganuary. My twitter followers who are legion (not) will know I have been tweeting both pictures of some of my meals and my failures with split pea rissoles. While the flavour had me wanting more, the falling apartness was something of a failing. More frittata than rissole. that thought was a bit of a breakthrough. That and advice from Sabina via twitter. I know Sabina from our MyT days, which in blogosphere terms means we go back generations. She thought the mix was not fine enough. I intended to have a break and come back to the fray in a week or so. But a lone beetroot in the fridge got me thinking. So tonight I tried again, with a radical change in the recipe.

Merry Christmas! What’s for breakfast?

Christmas Eve. Three hours until midnight. My plan is to be fast asleep. Tomorrow starts with breakfast at home – still considering my menu: porridge with fresh fruit (ie the usual), or avocado on toast topped with mushrooms, garlic, tofu and fresh spinach. Just typing that I think I know which one it’s going to be.

VegFest 2017

This weekend I have tickets for VegFest, not a music festival with vegan bands, but a food festival celebrating vegetarian food. I can’t go to the whole thing as I am working parts of the weekend. I’ve been looking forward to it, but last night I saw a programme with a piece about vegetarian food and now I am a bit worried.

All the food they featured mimicked meat. There was the line about vegetarian food that could tempt meat eaters; a comment, based on the fact that so much of the meat mimicking stuff would have passed the blindfold test, that vegetarian food has come a long way. I wasn’t giving the programme my full attention, but my expectations of the weekend’s VegFest have abated. One producer who made veggie burgers that taste like meat listed the various ingredients she uses that give the taste, texture and whatever else of meat. In other words, the things I dislike.

So will VegFest be about what I think of as vegetarianism, or a prosletysing force for people who’d like to cut meat out of their diets but still feel like they eating it? The Linda McCartney form of vegetarianism. Fine if that’s what you want, but I’m beginning to feel it should have another name to distinguish it from vegetarianism that doesn’t have any interest in recreating meat out of vegetables.

The Making of a Militant Vegetarian

I’ve been a vegetarian, the ovo lacto variety, for most of my life, since I was twelve years old. So that means quite a few decades.

Mother thought i should be a member of the Vegetarian Society. I don’t know why I resisted, maybe she was expecting me to stump up my own membership fees out of my meagre pocket money. I think that must have been it, or otherwise she would have just signed me up anyway. But whatever the reason, I never joined.

I had a look at their site a while ago and thought it looked quite good, but couldn’t see any advantage in becoming a member. That changed on Saturday evening. I’d been working in Westminster and at the end of the day I was in Parliament Square. So were lots of other people. There had been a demonstration that ended in a rally. Corbynistas, anti-austerity protesters, anti-Theresa May protesters, and probably people who regard themselves as affiliated to other causes and groups were, by the time I was there, singing and dancing along to Bob Marley songs. Good for them. It all seemed very good natured and well behaved. I am all in favour of peaceful protest, of people taking to the streets to express their views. Had I not been working, who knows, I might have been there with them.