Midweek Munchies

Hello friends! I had some life stuff, see below for more details, so even though it is Sunday I felt like doing an easy blog post by hitting you all up with another midweek munchies!

Veef, beloved creator of some of the best vegan burger patties, has expanded their range. They brought out their chicken burgers, which are the best chicken burger, and they also brought out some bacon bits. I was excited to try them! They are not the most practical though, being all frozen together in a lump. You cannot really just use them a little bit at a time. They are the sort that you need to thaw and then fry up. The taste is great though. I used half of the packed for a mac and cheese recipe (posted about here), and the other half to make the Veggie Fried Rice recipe off the Veef website. I used jasmine rice for my rice, and changed up the veggies a bit. Of course I nixed the capsicum, and used celery. I also didn't use any onion, but I sauteed my scallions with the garlic because my tummy doesn't like them raw. I added some baby spinach and fresh coriander as well. This was a tasty recipe! Though it is cute that it says four serves, because it was two serves.





A while ago I heard about Alg, an Australian seaweed company, that was launching seaweed chocolate. You know I like silly things, so I had to preorder some! It was flat rate shipping, so I also got some of their seaweed snack bars and seaweed seasonings.



I'll post more about each product as I try it, but I of course had to crack into the raspberry seaweed chocolate immediately. And you know what?? IT WAS GREAT!!! I am very glad I got two blocks of it, as well as a block of the regular seaweed one. Stay tuned for future reviews!



As the supermarkets try and create more and more of their own vegan products, there will be some hits and some misses. Coles Nature's Kitchen Cheddar Slices are a huge miss. These are like shitty vegan cheeses of ye oldy times. They are tastely, plastic, and rubbery. They don't really melt properly (instead just turn more rubbery), and they go mouldy super fast. Do not recommend.



The first thing I did was make a toasted sandwich with Tofurky Ham slices. Oh, terrible cheese, you hurt me. This is making me even sadder looking at this photo now, as I have just learned that Tofuky is no longer shipping to Australia due to their own local COVID shortage issues. So this precious ham was dishonoured by being paired with a truly tragic cheese.



Onto some better days, with these fun Natural Confectionary Co Vegan Fruity Flavoured Jellies! I am not a big lolly person, but I am partial to a fruity gummy treat every now and then. These came in five flavours (raspberry, apple, peach, grape, and pineapple) and they were really good! Plus available in almost all supermarkets, so very accessible. They are frequently on half price sale as well.



I am not too proud to say that sometimes I just need the convenience of a package of microwave rice. Even with a rice cooker, sometimes I just need something that will take 90 seconds. Lately, there have been more and more flavoured microwave rice options available. This Brown Rice Pilau was so easy and had a lovely flavour, I would definitely buy it again. I used it in combination with another recipe, which you can see here.



Finally, some jerky! KM Foods makes some pretty tasty jerky. I love their Teriyaki one! This new Fake NBacon flavour is also pretty great. It has a lovely savoury smoky flavour to it. This is a local company (in fact, they regularly have stalls at vegan markets in QLD), so it is great to see such a great product being made so close to me!



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



What was that life stuff I mentioned? That life stuff was Boo! Last week I took Boo in for a check up and some bloods, and it was noticed that she'd lost some weight. Her bloods came back with high calcium. High calcium on regular bloods isn't all that specific, it needs to be followed up with another test for ionised calcium. If that is high, then that can be caused by all kinds of things! The most common cause in cats is idiopathic (cat's love to be weird for no discernable reason), but you have to rule out all the other stuff first. Her ionised calcium was also high, so on Tuesday afternoon she had some fancy blood tests taken (that take a few weeks to get results back from), chest x-rays, and an abdominal ultrasound. Her ultrasound showed she had some significantly thickened intestines, so on Thursday she had a exploratory laparotomy to have a look around and take biopsies... results of those should be back tomorrow. She came home yesterday, but Boo related thoughts and things have been taking up a lot of my time! This is a photo of her not long after waking up from surgery, wearing a very big cone because she had previously chomped her way through her IV line so we were making sure to keep her teethies away from her current IV line and her stitches!