Week Four, Monday.

Yep, I'm feeling about as flat as that title, but that has nothing to do with my wonderful new lifestyle choice :-) It's nearly a month, see, and female readers will read between the lines. Even vegans get PMT, it seems :-)

Anyway, I'm well into the swing of DELTA assignments - did I already mention, 18 assignments in 17 weeks? Oh, and it isn't just "write something, hand it in and wait for feedback..." It is "write something, hand it in, read what everyone else has written, give feedback, wait for feedback on both what you've written, and the feedback you gave..." I'm loving it, really :-) Trying to absorb all the terminology so that I can fling it down on the page on June 1, and sound knowledgeably concise ... My 40 year old brain just about wants to tell me what I can do with the DELTA.

Anyway, today's menu. Chaos. I just wanted to mention again, because I haven't for quite some time, my vegan breakfast of choice: Overnight Oatmeal. The wonderful and very tasty cereal I've been eating for years (oh, how I miss the freeze-dried red fruit pieces!) was riddled with dairy, so it had to go! Now I roll my oats before I go to bed, mix them with sunflower seeds, linseeds, sultanas and cinnamon, and pour soy milk over. Put it in the fridge, covered, and in the morning, I give it a stir and add some agave, or maple, or malt syrup for sweetness. That's it. Delicious, and it really keeps me going until lunch time.

Lunch today was a really thick and creamy mushroom noodle soup, of which I ate MUCH more than I should have done! Fruit then followed, of course (I have stopped mentioning the fruit, but am eating at least 5 pieces a day!).

Dinner was hurried - daughter had dance, and it is my week to take the girls. I made a soup from barley, buckwheat and yellow lentils, flavoured with spring onions, grated carrots and a little celery, and a potato. By the time we got home, it was more of a grainy stew than a soup, but it was delicious, and there is enough for hubby's lunch tomorrow, and probably mine, too, so BONUS!

Okay, off to do more work/study...

Work always expands to fill all available time...I officially have NO more available time, but more work keeps on arriving. At some point very soon, the balance is going to tip, and I am going to run screaming mad ...

or else I'm just going to keep on getting everything done, keep on smiling, and on June 2, sit down quietly in the theatre in Viterbo to watch my daughter's ballet recital, happy in the knowledge that, whatever the result, I did the best on the exam that I knew how to do at the time.

I vote for option two :-)

Vegan Baking (which nearly rhymes when said in my accent...)

Very quick post today. 

Made some chocolate apricot almond cookies which were wonderful (better warm than cold though.)

I then made pineapple and carrot muffins (again...can't remember if I've already posted a pic of them, so forgive me if this is a repeat!). 

And I turned out the vegan "cheese" and took it along to the lovely afternoon tea at my dear friend's house.

It is really only "cheese" in the fact that you can cut it and stick it on crackers. Otherwise, I would say it tastes more like the old Kiwi favourite dip, made of Nestles Reduced Cream and a packet of Maggi Onion Soup, with a dash of vinegar - solidified....

If I ever make it again, I wouldn't put in the onion - I would put in a selection of fresh herbs instead. I think that would raise it from "ho-hum" to "give me more" status. 

As for other food today, lunch was the standard wholemeal spaghetti with Puttanesca Sauce (without the anchovies, naturally), and leftover tapioca pudding (very starchy meal!), and I didn't bother with dinner. Bonus, because that means what was meant for dinner tonight will be dinner tomorrow night! It will have to be...otherwise it would need to be tossed, and I am not going to start wasting food like that! Actually, am now thinking it might be my lunch, and I will make something else for dinner...

On to the weekly menu planning now! 

The Offensive Vegan

The menu for today wasn't mine. And I think I offended my mother-in-law, but I really didn't mean to do it! I've mentioned before that Saturday lunch is the meal we all share as an extended family every week, and M-I-L cooks. She had been going to make her wonderful spinach risotto, but when she checked, she found that she'd thawed out Chicory instead of Spinach (she's having her cataract operation on the 14th of next month...). Chicory is too bitter for risotto and I'm mildly allergic to it anyway, so we decided on pasta and tomato sauce, followed by vegetables. Fine.
Only today she did something she has NEVER DONE BEFORE!!! She mixed parmesan cheese through the pasta before pouring the sauce over it. Why??? Only yesterday I'd managed to slip into the conversation the fact that I'm currently not eating cheese, in such a way as not to elicit any unwanted comments (I congratulated myself on that one...obviously too soon!).
So I sat down to my big plate of pasta...and then had to push it away. I wanted to tip it back into the bowl, but she was watching :-) So I had to say "I'm sorry, but I'm not eating cheese right now...", and of course, she shot back, "How ridiculous. It is only a little bit. Just eat it. You SHOULD have told me."
Two options at that point. One - shrug, think "Well, it's only 30 days anyway, what's a little parmesan going to do? I'm not REALLY a vegan." and eat the darned pasta. Or TWO - stick to my principles, smile sweetly, say "You're right, I'm sorry, I should have told you. I'll just eat the vegetables."

I went for Option Two! And she slammed a few pot lids around, dropped one on the floor, SWORE (jeez, she NEVER swears....all for a little parmesan?)... So I apologised again, said that I hoped she wasn't offended, but that this was a choice I've made and that I thought I'd told her yesterday, put the pasta from my plate in my hubby's plate, and dished a plate of all the wonderful vegies she'd prepared. I mean, come on! Her main worry, of course, was that without the pasta, I wouldn't have enough to eat! HAH! She'd made cardi, roast pumpkin, roast potatoes, AND a big bowl of silverbeet. What more could a vegan want, I ask you?

And after that lunch, who would want dinner? My daughter is out on a dinner date at her friend's house. My son just wanted tapioca and fruit (easy!), hubby just wanted to lie on the couch in peace, and I just wanted to finish the leftover silverbeet and pumpkin from lunch :-)

I used what would have been my dinner cooking time to prepare tomorrow's dinner, because we have a special afternoon tea to go to in the afternoon. I also experimented with a vegan cheese recipe, and if it works, I'll post the link to the recipe tomorrow.

Now I'm off to work on DELTA Task Three, which right now, is making my brain hurt...

Mexican Vegan or Vegan Mexican....and peanut butter

When does a "day off" not mean a "day off"? When you're doing the DELTA and learning to be a vegan at the same time, that's when! Today was supposed to be a study day. So far today, I have read half a chapter of "Beyond The Sentence" (Scott Thornbury), scribbled some notes on the print-out of Assignment Two, tried to figure out how I'm going to write this with the teacher in my group, done the shopping, weathered a trip into the depths of the spaghetti bureaucracy that is the Italian Health System (and come away screaming, wailing and gnashing my teeth, facing ANOTHER trip to the same place tomorrow, to try and sort out what went wrong today)...

Lunch on the run - the last wholemeal bread roll with the last black bean burger, plus lots of fruit...

and because I had a spare five minutes, I made peanut butter!

I used this recipe, which is hardly a recipe at all, considering I bought roasted, salted peanuts :-) 300gr packet, 1.5 tbsps of our good olive oil, in the food processor for about five minutes. It's never going to have that store-bought consistency, but then...it ISN'T store bought, and I know exactly what is in it - there is no hydrogenated vegetable fat here, folk, nor sugar, and next time, I'm going to rinse off the salt, too.

Inspired by the kidney beans in the cupboard, I decided we'd have a Mexican Vegan night. I have a great recipe for low-fat guacamole, made from peas (500gr frozen petit pois, thawed out, 2 cloves crushed garlic, 2 tbsp lemon juice, or 1 of lemon, 1 of lime, chopped fresh parsley and chopped fresh coriander (cilantro), which I didn't have, so I used the spice, which gives a different flavour, but is still good. A little salt, and I added some cannellini beans, just for extra protein and creaminess. Whizzed it all in the food processor and there you go! Low fat guacamole! 

I still wanted to use those kidney beans, but we had refried beans just yesterday. Thinking along the lines of "salsa", I chopped up some black olives and sun-dried tomatoes, mixed them with the beans, then drizzled over some lemon juice, and let that sit for a bit.

And of course, completed the meal with our favourite carrot salad. I thought the plate looked very colourful and inviting, and the kids were very happy. There wasn't a single "yuck" from my son tonight.

Here endth (food-wise), day Nineteen! 

For my LICEO BIOLOGICO STUDENTS!

Thanks for stopping by. Here is a link to YOUR class wikispace, where you will find a copy of the important language from today's lesson, to help you with the homework task.

http://sticherydell.wikispaces.com/Liceo+Biological+PET+Class

See you next Thursday :-)

PUDDING!!! VEGAN PUDDING!

But I forgot to take a photo.

As I write, I feel like a well-wrung-out floor rag. Not the fault of the diet though, that's for sure! VERY busy Thursday (as they all are), compounded by the fact that I carried my laptop and projector all over Viterbo :-)

Menu: Lunch, standard wholemeal pasta with carrots and broccoli (I was at work, after all).

Dinner: Total panic on way home - next time I say "I'm going to do this week without a menu plan and see what happens" could someone please remind me of today's post?

I called my mother-in-law from Viterbo, and asked her to put a big pot of water on to boil. Then I planned the meal around that ;-) It was boiling when I arrived. A quick glance at the five (FIVE!!!!???!!!!!) different kinds of brown/wholegrain rice we have in the cupboard showed me that the GANGES River Brown was going to cook the fastest (35 minutes as opposed to 45 or even 55 for one type!), so I rinsed 300gr of it and threw it into the pot with a bit of salt. After 20 minutes I added two handfuls of frozen peas, then after another five minutes, two chopped carrots.

In a pan, I sautéed a small red onion, a couple of garlic cloves (not chopped, so that I could find them and make sure they didn't end up on the children's plates), then some ground cumin, ground corriander, garam masala, and ground cardamom (thanks, Heather Mc!), toasted that, added half a cup of red wine (remember, I was just grabbing wildly for anything I had...), then threw in some borlotti beans. Probably not the best type of bean for Indian spices, but we had black beans last night, and cannellini a few days ago, and I want to use chickpeas tomorrow (yes, I DO have a plan for tomorrow!). I just let them simmer away, and they got all mushy and toasty and spicy and surprisingly, very, very tasty.

And because, my female readers will understand, it is a time which requires, no, DEMANDS chocolate, I invented Vegan Chocolate Custard! 2 spoons potato flour, 1 spoon cocoa powder, 100ml agave syrup, some cinnamon and nutmeg, a pinch of salt, a little vanilla essence, and 2 cups of (homemade) soy milk. Whisked it all up, then stirred it over low heat. It was pudding, all right! Next time, I think I'd use less potato flour, as it was a stick-to-your-ribs kind of density. If you wanted more of a pouring custard, you'd need either less flour or more milk. And you could use cornflour instead of potato flour, but I don't have any right now. So a gluten-free, low-fat, vegan dessert, which everyone really enjoyed!

I've just noticed that this is a post which seemingly requires many, many exclamation marks. I'll put that down to the fact that I've been non-stop busy-bee since my feet hit the ground at 6 a.m. this morning...and I can't stop yet.

Now I'm off to create a Wikispace for my high school students to check in to for a copy of today's Mimio lesson. Embracing the teaching technology....

Day Eighteen - Oh so busy...

On days where there is just SO much to do, I just get SO much done :-) I love that!

I wanted to try making bread with my new grain (so far I've only used it for muffins). It was great! Wholemeal flour though - perhaps I needed a little more yeast? Or a little more rising time? It was a bit too chewy for our tastes - heavy, not light bread (but then...it IS wholemeal...). It was also a little too sweet for me - I used agave syrup instead of honey (of course - honey is not vegan friendly), and I probably should have halved the dose. However, hubby ate two rolls, and the kids loved theirs!

I thought they looked pretty cute and wholesome :-)

Another thing on my to-do list for today was making more soy milk. I'm still using the recipe from the aforementioned "Meals Without Meat" (yay, Ms Holst!), but I might just try another one next time - one where you soak the beans for a bit longer. However, it turned out much better this time - and I didn't bother adding any flavourings - not even cane sugar. I want to be able to use it in cooking, and it is better if there is no sugar in it. There was more, but one of the bottles exploded - the soy milk was too hot, and I poured it in too quickly. I think I lost about a cup and a half.

Lunch was the leftover couscous from last night, which I turned into a kind of cold pilaf, with chopped sun-dried tomatoes, capers, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and some walnut pieces. I also had a plate of steamed broccoli :-) And some kiwifruit. And some mandarins. (and I wonder why the pounds are not just melting away!).

Dinner was a different kind of burger - they were supposed to be sausages, but didn't want to form sausage shapes. Then I realised we had two meals practically the same in the space of a week - which is a reminder of WHY I should/must do weekly menu plans!! So a black-bean burger (15oz can black beans, drained, a cup of finely chopped fresh mushrooms, half cup of flour (I used a mix of oat and potato), some tomato paste, some garlic, some dried herbs, a tsp of miso, and some nutritional yeast - mix all of that together, and form sausages or patties, cook in a little oil), salad, carrot sticks, and a bread roll.

I did have ambitions of making proper burgers, but ran out of time and energy! It still looked lovely plated! (if not almost identical to one day last week!)