I think my cooking skills must be improving as tonight, the tea making responsibility is all mine. Mwah Ha Ha...

Actually, I'm going to attempt to make chana massala (my favourite of all the curries I have tasted so far) and am going on an internet hunt for a good recipe next. I've been living off beans all week, having not bothered to buy food for two weeks. It kind of defeats the object of learning to cook. But I shall be making up for all that now with cooking for more than myself.

I am also planning to make a tea cake as well, but this will involve going on a mission to find some vegan margarine and soya milk in Tottenham. Not an easy feat.

The service station is not a vegan's friend. We were late setting off on our road trip so I couldn't stop off in London for journey munchies, and so lived off of some peanut butter on toast and a packet of crisps all day Friday. I was famished by the time we reached Worcester and also in need of a beer.

Everyone wanted to go to Wetherspoon's as it was the closest and I had a very unsatisfactory jacket potato and beans. I have never been to a chain pub like Wetherspoons and not had a potato which wasn't hard or containing black bits. Plus my salad was drowned in mayonnaise which meant I couldn't even pick at that.

So, come 2.30am it caused much amusement to everyone else when I went in search of food. I already know from previous post-midnight searches in Worcester that the place has never even heard of felafel, so I went for the all-time back up - cheeseless pizza. I slightly resent paying the same price for a pizza without it's main ingredient but the nice pizza guy stuffed it with extra toppings for me. And I got to look smug at finding something I could eat infront of all the naysayers.

It's back to normal today though as the husband is making a tasty nut roast right now. I cannot wait. Om nom nom...

Tonight I made peanut sausages. A name which seemed to amuse my husband. It amused him more to watch me shell a load of peanuts and then scare the cats when it came to blitzing them. It seemed like a lot of effort for what became a very quick and simple tea.

My main complaint about tonight's menu was that the book didn't forewarn me it was not a complete meal but part of a meal which needed additional trimmings. I need warnings, in big bold letters, which say MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SOME SALAD IN. I did not.

My sausages were lovely, if a little burnt and mis-shaped. It had to be the soya sauce and marjoram which did it. My salad, however, was another story. I had already made up my sausage mix by the time I got the the bottom of the page, which said: "serve with a side salad". The only salad related products in the fridge was some limp celery, a carrot and squishy tomatoes that were meant to be used for meals earlier in the week.

So I had to make do with fried tomatoes, grated carrot and more soya sauce. It look laughable, so again no photo because I am too embarrassed to display my culinary wares tonight. The sausages were lovely though. They just looked a little like they are going to do on the way out.

I think I will top up my peanut night with peanut butter on rice crackers later on.

I am away for the weekend so will be hunting for vegan products in Worcester. I feel a curry coming on.

Beans and Rice

Tonight's food was so lovely that I ate it all and forgot to take a photo. Again, I thought it was going to be a bit studentified; beans and rice. It was super cheap, with a tin of aduki beans, rice, mixed in the remains of the tinned tomatoes (again, none of that boiling, peeling and chopping malarky tonight), then mixed with soya sauce and cider vinegar.

I was meant to put in tabasco sauce, but forgot to buy some so I substituted with chilli powder. It was lovely regardless and I heartily recommend it. Even the husband thought it was flavoursome.

It could have done with a smaller portion, I now feel stuffed and I should have eaten a little slower.

Tuesday Tea

My evening's food this week (or tea, if you will), has been taken from a cook book which neatly sets out its recipes in a day-by-day style diary. It even gives you a shopping list to do at the start of the week. All the effort taken out. I like it.

So my meal for Tuesday was Italian olive spaghetti. Easy enough. I'd bought the olives and had everything else in so was all set. There was some manner of pouring boiling water over tomatoes and skin peeling and chopping involved. Only after a late finish at work and a long natter to my friend, I exchanged the boiling, peeling and chopping for tin opening and pouring.

Then I realised I didn't have enough spaghetti so had to use the pasta in the cupboard. It was easy enough, fry garlic and olives add tomatoes and herbs, put on pasta. I worked out afterwards that the olives would have gone further had I bothered to chop them, plus I'd promise half the tub to the husband.

It turned out looking like a a student meal. In fact, if I knew a 18p can of tomatoes, some oil and herbs would have made tasty pasta then I might have cooked more when I was at university and not lived off take away. Regardless, it was a nice but basic tea and I discovered that this is what I eat everytime I go to an Italian restaurant, except they have a fancy pants name for it.

Coleslaw

My first solo concoction was a tub of coleslaw made on Monday afternoon. I found a week old cabbage in the fridge and had half a tub a Mayola that I wanted to use up. So putting the two together and adding carrot, red cabbage, red onion and mustard seemed the perfect option. Rather ingenious, I thought.

The reason I wanted to rid my fridge of the Mayola is because Mayola has lost the mayonnaise wars in the vegan world. There are two makes of mayonnaise which I have found so far, Mayola and Soyannaise. Soyannaise is made from flax seed oil, comes in garlic and normal flavour and is very tasty. Mayola is not untasty but once you've had Soyannaise you just can't go back.

But I'd seen this tub of eggless mayonnaise in a local shop and I thought I should help support local business, especially when they were investing in the needs of the eggless. So I bought it. It is just too sharp for nice salads and sandwiches, so I made the coleslaw and the mustard touch works very nicely. The after taste which can sometimes be found in vegan products wasn't there.

I have a nice photo of what is left after being picked at by myself and my husband. I'll polish it off with an un-microwaved jacket spud later this week.

I can't cook. I can't bake, boil, roast or anything else without disaster striking. I once set fire to a microwave at work with a jacket potato.

My husband cooks all my meals. I am a vegan, he is not, so it's either a juggle of two meals or he just eats vegan. My contribution to this process until recently was washing up afterwards and bringing home the bits that make the meals happen. Recently, my contribution is bringing home the bits to make it happen, loading the dishwasher then sitting down with a bottle of wine.

Now, due to a change in circumstance (my husband has started a degree in his spare time so no longer has time to cook two meals) I am forced into the world of cook books, weights, measures and beans on toast.

When I first became vegan, (as opposed to vegetarian, which I have been since I was about 8 years old), I decided that it was time I threw off my cheese dependent ways and learned how to eat like a healthy person so invested in lots of vegan cook books. These books, it has to be noted, had lots of nice looking blueberry muffins and chocolate cakes on the front, so maybe health wasn't my primary objective but I was going to try.

Last weekend, I finally brushed off the dust and opened one of the books to venture past lentil dhal (it's cheap and seemed easy to make) and chilli. Having had a weeks of nothing but felafal and beans on toast also became a driving force in this but I am now going to learn how to cook proper meals, that taste nice. And to prove it I have taken photographs of all but one of my efforts so far to document my cooking abilities. I just don't know how to upload the pictures from my phone to this blog at the moment so they may be added at a later date.