Ten years of awesome!

This month I have celebrated a fantastic milestone - ten years of being a vegan! It has been an amazing decade since. I've posted somewhere on here about my journey to vegan, but here is the short version: I became a vegetarian in high school, but after a couple of years the ramifications of supporting dairy and egg industries became too important to ignore. I have to admit I had a couple of false starts. But one day in September 2000 I had to go away for two weeks on prac work, so I packed the soy milk (I was determined to learn to love it) and that was it, I was a vegan. I don't have an exact date or moment, but just sometime this September I went from thinking 'I've been a vegan for almost ten years' to 'I've been a vegan for ten years!'.

It has been a fantastic ten years. When I started I was not the food obsessed girl you find before you today. But going vegan lead to me to start my cookbook collection, and eventually I started to cook from them, and then I started taking photos of the things I cooked, and then I got more cookbooks, and took more photos, and got more cookbooks, and so on. And on the way I started this blog, made some great friends and have been loving the benefits of being a vegan. I could never imagine not being a vegan now!

I didn't have an 'official' celebration or anything. But around the time I did have some friends over for dinner, so I thought I would share that with you - because I did make something exciting! All the recipes below were made from 1000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson.


I started with Lemon and Garlic Marinated Mushrooms, which was great as I had to work the morning of the dinner so I could make these on my day off the day before and leave them to marinate in the fridge overnight. It makes a fairly small amount, so I also served them with tomato-stuffed green olives and balsamic and rosemary kalamata olives that I bought from our awesome local deli.


Sicilian Penne with Tomatoes and Eggplant is a great, simple but delicious dish. I had forgotten my serving size brain and actually did use a whole 500g packet of penne (the recipe calls for a pound) and it was enough to serve at least eight people, not the four the recipe claims to make! But it worked out OK because I had lots of leftovers. Next time I would make it with just half the amount of pasta though. I also added a tin of chickpeas for some protein.


Now, here is the exciting part! I made Vegan Tiramisu, which was actually the first tiramisu of any persuasion that I have ever made. First you make the Vegan Pound Cake (which I found needed an extra 15 to 20 minutes of baking to cook through) and then cut it up and make layers of cake, coffee and the cream. The delicious cream! This serves 6 people, however it is very rich!


Here's the inside shot. The longer this sits the better it gets, I was eating leftovers in tiny amounts for a week. The recipe says to make it extra decadent you can top with vegan whipped cream, but to be honest I think this would be overkill. I did take them up on the suggestion of topping it with chocolate curls as well as cocoa, which was just delicious!

I'd also like to send a big thanks to River over at Wing It Vegan, for choosing this blog for her first ever weekly Blog Love column! It was lovely, especially given the timing with my veganniversary. If you haven't already seen River's blog, get there at once! It is full of delicious recipes, adorable themed food (and with Halloween around the corner, I can't wait) and quirky fun.

I'd like to thank everyone who has been part of my vegan journey so far - here's to the next ten years, and the years after that. :)

(1000 Vegan Recipes blogged: 3.8%)

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post


Behold the amazing sight... Gizmo and Dim Sim are sitting on the same cushion... and they aren't trying to fight each other! Normally these two are at it like cats and other cats who don't like the first cats. Dim Sim has never gotten over the disruption of her only cat existence. Perhaps there was a bird outside the window?