We are enjoying the gentle magic and mystery of The Near Witch. And hot chocolate. And the spring sunshine.
Then there’s beautiful bowls and easy meals. Goodfella’s have a new vegan pizza:
But, our best place to be? Or one of them 🙂 The wild and wonderful woods…
White chocolate coins, £1 from Asda. And beside them on the coffee table, bringing social justice to Pride and Prejudice: Longbourn.
From the Co-op 🙂
We’re eating lots of carrot soup and reading The Telling.
And enjoying the beautiful low winter sun as it lights the trees…
Oh the products! Hardly a day goes by without us hearing of a new one or two or twenty-six 🙂
Above is the Morrison’s Red Velvet Cupcake (they have chocolate ones too). Lebkuchen hearts and tarts from Aldi in the background.
Let’s all remember to eat some vegetables too.
And read books. Currently enjoying The Child
Also: Great Crowns of Stone.
And seriously: remember, remember, the broccoli of November!
It’s summer! Well, summery… sometimes. Along with the start of barefoot beach walks this means The Last Bus Canteen (totally vegan café near New Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire) is open again at weekends:
Also of interest to local people: The Davron Hotel in Rosehearty has a new extensive vegan menu which boasts starters, mains and various puddings.
Book-wise we’ve been enjoying:
Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen and Deliciously Ella with Friends, a plant based cook book with lots of full colour photos.
And rainbows, we’ve been enjoying rainbows…
First up we have Fat Gay Vegan: Eat, Drink and Live Like You Give a Sh!t by Sean O’Callaghan of the well known Fat Gay Vegan blog.
We LOVE this book. It’s political but it’s also deeply personal, containing many stories from the lives of Sean and other contributors. The book is about how to be vegan, but it’s more about how to be a better vegan, and really it’s about how to be a better person. And we can all work on that.
It’s refreshing to read a vegan book that tackles how minorities and traditionally oppressed voices are treated, even within the vegan community. We have experienced and witnessed shocking able-ism and racism in our 21 years as vegans, and yes, sadly, sometimes from vegans. It weakens the movement. It weakens the world. It needs to end.
And we can all check our privilege. We can all watch our language. Some in this house have, upon occasion, described various unfortunate things as ‘crazy’. Not good, Vegan Family House, not good.
So it’s a challenging book, a personally challenging book, but it’s in no way downbeat or depressing. Although forthright, it’s written with a compassionate sense of humour. It’s empowering. Why should we shut up and put up about our veganism to please or appease non-vegan friends and relatives? At the end of each chapter there are little refuelling stops with delicious and simple recipes and food suggestions. And in the final chapter Sean predicts a world that continues to become more vegan, and perhaps more importantly, more kind.
Here it is on Amazon (out tomorrow Jan 4th).
And now, for a practical guide from Veganuary!
For those who don’t know, Veganuary is a charity that encourages people to go vegan for January and the rest of the year. And this is their compelling guide. It’s so persuasive that apparently the proof-reader went vegan!
The book has sections on why you should be vegan, with warnings of graphic content that you can choose to read or not, and then being vegan at home, when out, visiting friends, answering questions, and everyday foods you maybe didn’t know were vegan. It’s a very good starting point for anyone who is thinking of going vegan and wondering how to go about it and how hard/easy it will be.
Enjoy your vegan reading!
Winter sunrises.
And reading (review soon).
And hot chocolate (ginger and orange and on sale).
That’s us just now.
Eating: a simple trifle made of bananas in vegan jelly, topped with thick custard and this rather nice provamel cream (we were lucky enough to find a few of these cheaply on Approved Food recently). There’s a more detailed trifle recipe on the Vegan Christmas page.
Reading: Manda Scott’s Boudica series.
Looking at: wintry sunsets.
Eating: porridge with Moo Free Baking drops. So like milk chocolate those wee drops! Amazon and Goodness Direct both have them.
Was not expecting to find vegan recipes in this extremely informative title, in fact did not know it would contain recipes at all and bought it to learn about slavery, but African Soul Fried Rice sounds good! A great mix of autobiography and history.
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