Experiments in Living

Gnocci served with broccoli and home made red pesto (and a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds)

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Tags: gnocchi, pesto, vegan mofo, Wordless Wednesday

I have returned from my little trip to London, but what did I survive on down there? Pea-souper fog? No dear friends, the Victorian era is long gone.

The vegan standby in London seems to be the falafel wrap. Seriously, everywhere you go, there it is. On my first night, I found my way into Beiruit Express on the Old Brompton Road. I actually managed a nice meal for under a tenner in a posh bit of London, so I was quite impressed. Said wrap came with a mixed salad and I ordered a fresh orange juice with bits in, loads of vitamins, yeah! The only drawback was that as you sit at the counter there’s the kebab meat thing twirling round, so if you’re of a sensitive disposition, maybe not for you. There are tables, but I just sat at the counter, all alone.

Around the corner from the workshop venue was Kensington High Street. This meant no shortage of places to eat. On the first day I had some tomato and basil soup at Marks and Spencer, but on the second day, I discovered Whole Foods. There was no turning back after that! On the first floor there is a huge canteen with different counters and they have everything you could possibly want. Falafel wraps, grilled tofu, great selection of vegan meze - fabulous. My only regret is that I couldn’t possibly carry all the stuff I wanted to buy home with me,  so I just lived in there for practically every meal! I wonder if they do mail order…?

The continental breakfast served at my hotel was nothing to write home about, just toast and jam and some museli. No soya milk, but I like my museli with fresh orange juice so I wasn’t too bothered.

Sadly I didn’t take any photos as I felt kind of self conscious whipping out my camera and photographing random food in random eating places. Ho-hum!

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Tags: falafel wrap, London, vegan mofo, vegan travel

This is part of a series, read The Backstory Part 1 here.

The college years - part one

As with many middle class bright young things, I found my way to University. My alma mater is Bangor University, in North Wales. In 1996, I embarked on a degree in French Language for two completely shallow reasons, firstly, French had been a subject that I got good grades in at school, and secondly, I quite fancied the idea of living in France for a year. And why Bangor? Well, that was a shallow reason too. I quite liked the scenery of the local area.

Everybody talks about how great Fresher’s week is, and in many ways it is: you get to meet new people, go to parties, no lectures, just fun. But it was also quite overwhelming for a small town girl like myself. This is how I found myself drifting into the arms of the Christian Union. I got chatting with a girl at breakfast one morning, who invited me along to some event or other. I don’t remember the details, except that there was chocolate cake. Next thing I knew, I was in the CU. Ironic, as I wasn’t particularly religious, but feeling a little lost, I guess I was easy prey. The CU had an event for every night of the week too: Monday: Prayer meeting, Tuesday: Bible Study, Wednesday: Choir practice, Thursday: Door to door, Friday: Main meeting, Saturday: Soul winning, Sunday: Church (morning and evening). Social life, sorted, although, unsurprisingly it turned out to be quite an inbred social life.

I knew I was doing the door to door thing wrong when we knocked on the door of some lass and she said she was a Taoist and started to show us the Tao of Pooh. I actually knew more about Taoism than she did, and got into an interesting discussion with her, much to the chagrin of my door to door partner. It became more and more clear that the CU weren’t interested in you actually studying the Bible either. One thing I enjoyed was the bible study, but it seemed as if you were being led towards some kind of stock answers rather than drawing your own conclusions. I found this really hard to deal with, on the one hand, here I was, the most switched on intellectually that I was ever likely to be, yet when it came to religion, I was asked to just switch off this part of myself and “have faith”. It was just too much to ask, and after a good couple of month of trying to conform to the CU’s mission, I’d had enough.

I also discovered men, which was inconvenient for the CU mission. In retrospect I would say that the CU people made the guy I liked seem that much more attractive by their antipathy towards him. A girl even said to me that this guy was Satan trying to tempt me away from the true way. If I had any doubts that the CU was full of fundies and extremists, here was my proof. Anyway, I was sick of people who saw life in such polarised terms. So I left the CU and discovered sex and drugs and rock and roll and it was damn fun!

I lived my life very intensely during the first couple of years away at uni. Everything was such a big deal at that time, good and bad. Highs were high and lows were low, and I mean low. I met stacks of interesting people, came into contact with theories and ideas which got me excited. For the first time in my life I had a circle of real friends and we would sit up into the small hours putting the world to rights. I really loved my course, I never missed lectures as it was so stimulating and fascinating. I did strange things with my hair and got bits of myself pierced. I was quite a fierce creature, very passionate about social justice and doing the right thing. I went on lots of protests and waved banners and did the things that students did. In many ways I was having a fine old time, but in others I wasn’t. Intensity has two sides, and you can come crashing down just as easily.

When I was nineteen, I was diagnosed with depression, and made my first foray into the world of anti-depressant drugs, with Cipramil. I suspect there was a bipolar element to it also, although that was never confirmed. Since I was also drinking pretty heavily at the time, and had developed a 20 a day smoking habit, that probably didn’t help. My depressive episodes were usually short-lived, lasting a couple of months at most. Short, but scary to the point where I thought I was going out of my mind. The period where I actually went to seek help was triggered after my relationship with the Satan guy went horribly wrong. To be honest, it hadn’t gone horribly wrong, we just broke up, as teenagers do, but inside my head it became something it really shouldn’t have, and for months I couldn’t move on, and of course blamed this guy for the way I was feeling. It all looks pretty pathetic looking back, but I have forgiven myself and realise that the feelings I had were very real, but I just didn’t know how to go about handling them, which was pretty scary.

The good thing was that I also learned that you can come out of the other end and every subsequent depressive episode I’ve ever had (there have been a few) at least I have known that I can get over it. As I finished my second year at University, I felt much more together and happy, but there was always the blind spot when it came to men. I didn’t know what I wanted or expected from a relationship, and this was the one area where my low self esteem from my early teens still persisted, even though I was self-sufficient in practically every other way.

I was actually quite relieved to get away from some of the bad scenes I’d got involved with at Uni and since I would be away for the third year of my degree, I would get the chance to start again (again).

Don’t miss part three: A year in France

Tags: depression, fundementalism, religion, university

A few weeks ago I went crazy and bought my first vegan cookbook - Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Of all the vegan cookbooks, this one seemed to have a happy band of followers, recipes for all occasions and had the word “cheap” mentioned somewhere on the cover.

So far I have tried a couple of recipes, namely the carrot and raisin muffins and the red pesto with gnocchi. There are many more recipes that I would like to make and try out on my entourage, but they are a little wary of this strange vegan food. They seem to think that all vegan food tastes like unflavoured TVP, so a bit of a hard sell there. It’s World Vegan Day on 1st November, so maybe that could be my day to treat them to a real vegan feast!

I like the upbeat tone of the book and Isa’s asides which include a bit of New York punk folklore here and there. The only teeny tiny thing that I don’t like is the liberal use of maple syrup in the recipes - that stuff ain’t cheap on this side of the Atlantic, that’s if you can find it! Obviously that’s not Isa’s fault…

Does anyone have any alternatives to maple syrup? Or do I just have to miss those recipes out?

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Tags: cookbooks, vegan, vegan mofo, vegan with a vengeance

Tonight I cooked quinoa for the first time in ages. I had forgotten how good it tastes. Apparently quinoa isn’t a grain at all but seeds of a pseudocereal. No I didn’t make that up, it’s in Wikipedia, so it must be true! The origins and history of this little seed are quite fascinating, it’s a damn shame our Spanish text book didn’t go into this detail when we were looking at indigenous peoples of South America.

I didn’t get a pic for you (my folks already think this vegan thing is getting out of hand, I just cannot be bothered with the aggravation if they see me taking photos of my dinner!). You will just have to believe me that I cooked my quinoa with green raisins and pumpkin seeds, and it complemented my lentil dhal beautifully. Another way I’ve had quinoa is as a salad with dried mango. Yum!

Note to self: must make an effort to eat this fabulous food more often, it’s just as easy to cook as rice and couscous.

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Tags: quinoa, vegan, vegan mofo, vegetarian