Exciting new soya milk

I went to Tesco last week and in the UHT milk section there was an array of new soya milks I’d never seen before. And they were on offer too – £1 each.

I got the cappuccino one and tried it last night.

Oh my. This was delicious. I poured it into a mug and tried a bit, before putting it in the microwave (just incase it was gross – it would have been a shame to warm it, wait for it to be cool enough to drink, only to find it was undrinkable), and I’m sure it would be lovely cold in the summer with some ice. It’s very sweet, but such a delicious taste! I warmed it for 2 mins and then drank it. Yum.

The main differences I can see between vive soy and alpro soya are that alpro adds B12 (which I like – it’s good to know that gets topped up if I’ve not had marmite), but vive soy has a vastly higher percentage of soya beans in the milk (around 13% compared to alpro’s 6.5%).

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Hope Street Skincare

My wonderfully kind friend Laura got me a Hope Street gift set for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and since I’d never heard of them before, I thought it might be useful to mention them here in case it’s new to anyone else.

Hope Street is 100% vegan, and also uses no:

• petrochemicals or mineral oils
• parabens
• sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS or SLES)
• artificial colours
• artificial fragrances

Here’s what arrived through my door:

Lemongrass and May Chang body wash, body milk and hand cream

I love this stuff! It smells great, and I really like that it’s ingredients are nice and natural.
Click here to have a look at the Hope Street website

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Seedy Apple Crumble

One of our lovely neighbours recently popped over and gave me some cooking apples. I’ve been meaning to make crumble for a while so tonight I did just that…

• Preheat oven to 190 oC

• 400g cooking apples
• 30g raisins
• 1 tbsp water
• 50g demerara sugar

• 35g oats
• 35g wholemeal flour
• 35g margarine (I used pure)
• 20g demerara sugar
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 1 tbsp poppy seeds
• 1 tbsp sunflower seeds
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds
• 1 tbsp pumpkin seeds

1. Peel and core the apples, and cut into small chunks (about an inch square)
2. Put the apples in a pan with the water, raisins and 50g sugar, and cook on a low heat for about 5-10 minutes, and then put into a small oven dish
3. In a large bowl, mix together the oats and flour
4. Add the margarine and mix with fingertips until you have a crumb-like texture
5. Mix in the sugar, spice and seeds
6. Cover the fruit with the crumble mixture
7. Bake for around 20-25 mins, until nicely browning on top

This is what mine looked like after it had been in the oven:

I ate some crumble with custard. Did you know Bird’s custard powder is vegan? True story!

The crumble was really nice – the seeds gave it lots of texture and interesting flavours, and the warm apple was delicious. I’m rather pleased with myself! Think I’ll be repeating this recipe as the weather gets colder.

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Goody Good Stuff

I won some sweets! Hooray for blog giveaways, and thankyou to Hef’s Kitchen for my stash 🙂

Goody Good Stuff make vegetarian and vegan sweets in the UK and I was lucky enough to receive a hamper of the vegan varieties through Heather’s blog. They even arrived in a basket, with a ribbon on the top – now that is a hamper!

I’ve now tried them all (of course), and my favourites are the sour mix and match and the cola bottles – I was always a fan of fizzy/sour sweets so it’s nice to have found vegan versions of them! And they have a great chewable texture – by that I mean they don’t just bounce around your mouth like I seem to remember things like jelly teddy bears doing!

They are pretty widely available, and I’ve seen them in places like Holland and Barrett.

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Sojade yogurts

These are the best vegan yogurts ever. That’s all I wanted to say really.

I bought some of these from Wholefoods in London, some from Infinity Foods in Brighton, and some from my local (and very wonderful) health food shop. They are organic, and come in loads of awesome flavours (lemon is my favourite). And they are quite thin, so don’t have the slightly weird texture alpro yogurts can have.

You can buy them online at places like goodness direct.

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Original Source

I usually use Lush shower gel, but after my last purchase there cost me a packet (£16.75 actually) I thought it might be wise to alternate between Lush shower gels and less expensive ones.

I’d heard some Original Source stuff was vegan hadn’t thought to buy it for ages, and it turns out they work with the Vegan Society and many of their products are marked as vegan.

At first I was a bit confused, because they have the vegan society logo in the bottom left corner of the website at all times, which made me think all their products were vegan, until I saw they used honey in some (so I wasn’t sure if this meant other ones had other non-vegan ingredients in). So I got in touch with them and they informed me that all their products except the ones with honey in are vegan.

Not bad at all! But just ditch the honey, Original Source! Leave the bees alone.

from the Original Source website

I love refreshing shower gels and this lime one was great. Really zingy and fresh, and quite reasonably priced (£2.15 from Boots).

It smells almost exactly like green jelly babies

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Redwoods fruit desserts

I picked these up at the London Vegan Festival and thought I’d share my thoughts…

These desserts  are “ambient” products which means you can store them in the cupboard before putting them in the fridge to chill when you want to eat them. That means that the use by date is ages away (the ones I bought say mid-November), which can be handy. They are also soya-free, which is handy if you’re allergic or trying to avoid overdoing it on the soya. The desserts are also available in plain or black cherry flavours.

The Redwoods website says these desserts cost 59p, and you can buy them online, or from various shops – click here to see info on the Redwoods website.

Peach and apricot:

This was the first one I tried, and I’m not sure what I was expecting! It’s definitely more of a dessert texture than a yogurt one – the same kind of texture as alpro soya desserts. And as you can see, the colour is somewhat frightening – very bright! It’s pretty sweet and fruity, I think I would have it again if I happened to see it for sale, but I would necessarily hunt it out or order it online.

Raspberry:

I MUCH preferred this flavour. For a start, the colour is much more normal, and it had a nice raspberry flavour. And in comparison to the peach and apricot flavour, it had a lovely amount of sweetness (the other one was a little too sweet I think).

Conclusion: Nice for a change, but not as refreshing as yogurt (such as alpro or sojade) or as indulgent as soya desserts (alpro soya desserts). I think these desserts are something of an aquired taste – I can imagine some people will love them and others will hate them. Not particularly helpful is it, this review!? Sorry!

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Shoes and boots – the transition to veganism

In my pre-vegan (pregan?) days I wore lots of Doc Martens. Leather ones. Even though I was a vegetarian, somewhere along the line what I ate, what I called myself became disconnected from what I actually believed.

So when I decided to become a vegan, part of that was having a shoe purge. To start with I thought I might keep wearing the leather shoes until they wore out, but then I just couldn’t wear them without feeling a bit ill. And I realised that as long as I was wearing them, not only was I saying to the world that it was acceptable to wear leather shoes, but I was also giving people a reason to question my vegan life. You see, quite often people’s response to finding out I am vegan is to say “are your shoes leather?” – sometimes this is because they want to catch me out (they’re hoping they are leather, and therefore my lifestyle is flawed or inconsistent), and sometimes it’s because they want to hear that it is impossible to be vegan. That it’s too hard to find non-cruel footwear which is comfy and awesome at the same time. That really, leather is the correct material for shoes to be made of. Therefore they are right, and vegans are wrong.

But of course, vegans aren’t wrong. We are AWESOME, and leather is unnecessary.

So the shoes had to go. That meant getting rid of LOTS of pairs of shoes I’d paid lots of money for and liked, and also spending a fair bit to replenish my shoe collection. But it was fine – I found lots of friends and family who wanted my shoes, and a few pairs went to charity. And I found a few great places to buy vegan shoes from.

Bourgeois Boheme and Vegetarian Shoes are my favourites.

And these are my favourite of all of my shoes:

Airseal Boulder Boots from Vegetarian Shoes (photo stolen from their website)

This is the view I generally have of them:

You wouldn’t believe how comfy these are! I always remember Doc Martens taking years to wear in to a point where they didn’t rip your feet to shreds. But these are brilliant, they have never hurt my feet and are awesomely cool at the same time.

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Linda McCartney – vegan products

The Linda McCartney range of foods is a mixture of vegetarian and vegan-friendly products. I’m a BIG fan of Linda McCartney sausage rolls, and sausages. I thought I’d have a look on the website to see which other things in the range are suitable for vegans.

It’s a shame that the website isn’t super clear about what is vegan – in the products range section it isn’t obvious which are ok. But I had a bit of a hunt about on the site, and under the FAQs section, I found this:

I had no idea they had pies which were vegan, I’m definitely going to try and find some next time I’m at the supermarket!

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Sheesy pizza

As I said in my previous post, I bought quite a few different types of Sheese recently. I haven’t bothered with vegan “cheese” type stuff much at all since going vegan 18 months ago. I love making mac and cheese with noochy sauce, and when I was in San Francisco in May I had a wonderful vegan pizza with cheese, but that’s about it really. So when we tried samples at the London Vegan Festival and found them to be really tasty, I thought I’d try a few out.

First try – sheese mozzarella style:

I made mini-pizzas, using ready made pizza bases, tomato paste, capers, mushrooms and sheese.

It was pretty good! I found the preparation pretty weird though – it felt so strange to be grating something very cheese-like, and then putting it on pizza! The pizza was nice though, and went down well with J too (he’s a vegetarian) – and now I’m looking forward to trying out the other varieties I bought!

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