A New Year

I am not a New Year's person. I don't do resolutions. I don't really get excited that a change in the year is going to bring all sorts of new changes and excitement. Especially not this year, which was the first time waking up in a new year without any of my girls. I do still have a few food traditions though, because why not. So here they are.

Pumpkin Pizza from Cooking With Kindness: I always make pizza for dinner on New Year's Eve. This year I picked a simple pumpkin and feta pizza from one of my cookbooks (that I haven't really spoken about yet, but eventually will get its own post). Store-bought pizza dough (as opposed to pre-cooked pizza bases) has recently become available here, so I tried out one of them (which I will picture below). I wouldn't use this brand again. Even following the instructions, the dough didn't rise and it was so sticky and hard to spread out that I almost thought I was going to have to abort the whole thing. But, onto the pizza itself. I used some Leggo's Pizza Sauce to spread on (rather than just some crushed tinned tomatoes). It is topped with roasted butternut, sliced shallots, kalamata olives, Sheese Feta, and some leftover mozzarella sauce I had in the freezer from another cookbook. It was a wonderful mix of salty and sweet, and the feta and the cheese sauce melted into a wonderful stretchy mess.
Rating: :)





Normally we follow up our pizza with some pie for dessert. I rarely make pies, they are effort, and this is one time of year I will make something fun. But this year, there was no energy or excitement for it. So I just went the easy route by heating up some individual Nanna's Vegan Apple and Rhubarb pies in the oven, and serving with some ice cream from my freezer stash.



Marmalade Pancakes from Chloe's Vegan Italian Kitchen: New Year's Day is pancakes for breakfast day. And I am glad that I found the energy to make these as they were really nice. These had marmalade and dark chocolate chips gentle mixed through the batter. I got six regular sized pancakes and two bitty pancakes out of this. The recipe suggests serving dusted with powdered sugar, but that was a step too far for me for breakfast, so we went with maple syrup. Also served with some grapes. My brother lives in Spain with his partner and near her family, and apparently at midnight on New Years it is traditional in Spain to eat green grapes. I certainly was not up at midnight, but these were a nice fresh addition to our breakfast table.
Rating: :)



Black-Eyed Peas from Vegan Diner: After pizza and pie and pancakes, I like my New Year's Day dinner to get back to basics with beans and greens and grains. I often will make something involving black-eyed peas, as these are traditionally served in parts of the US. Aside from brief moment in time, we can't get tinned black-eyed peas here, so it involves having some home cooked in the freezer, which I did not have. But I did have some dried one, and this recipe blessedly calls for those. I had soaked them over night before cooking. I made a half recipe of this, which gave three serves over rice. I left out the capsicum, but also added some chopped tomato and a lot of baby spinach (this recipe on its own doesn't have greens in it).
Rating: :)



It is Easter Monday as I write this, and I am still waiting for my COVID test result. I don't have any food traditions with Easter except for a lot of hot cross buns, which I achieved. I also had bought a few vegan Easter eggs I was looking forward to trying yesterday, but because I have been sick my appetite is a bit wonky so I will save them for another time.

Christmas 2020

It's the easter weekend, so seems like a good time to show you what I ate for Christmas last year. I was not feeling the Christmas spirit... Christmas day itself was exactly four weeks since Dim Sim passed away. Left to my own devices, I would have had a quiet day of doing nothing. But as I was not on my own, I had a quiet day of lunch with my parents.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, everyone was scrabbling around to get the Coles special Christmas products, which included some vegan gravy, a vegan roast, and a vegan vanilla pudding with chocolate sauce. I managed to score all three of them. (Though we didn't eat the gravy until after Christmas, so keep an eye out for that in a future post.)



For lunch, we kept it simple. One of the new very easy things I tried was Maple Glazed Carrots from one of my newer cookbooks, the Kindness Community Vegan Cookbook. These had a nice citrus kick from orange juice, and had thyme and garlic and bay leaves as well. Rather than usual cute Dutch carrots with the tops still on, I could only get regular big carrots so I just cut them on a diagonal.
Rating: :)



Served these on a platter with some cranberry sauce from a jar, and some green beans that were steamed in their packet in the microwave. As I said, keeping it easy.



The Coles Christmas Roast was delicious! I was sad I only got one of them, if they bring them back next year I will get a couple. It was not too heavy or too dry, and had a really nice savoury flavour. It came with some chutney in the box, which is served gently heated.



And we made the Potato Squashers from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan, which we make every year for Christmas.



My mum made this Feta, Watermelon, and Cucumber salad that we got out of the Coles Christmas magazine. We used Sheese Feta in it. It also had olives and mint, and I used celerey for some crunch in place of raw red onion. This was really lovely, sweet and salty and fresh.



A plate full of food.



For dessert, we had some Christmas pudding from Coles, which happened to be vegan. I served mine with some Alpro custard.



We had the Vegan vanilla sponge pudding the following day. It is just heated up in the microwave. I was a little suspicious as there was some coconut cream in the chocolate sauce. But while I could taste a hint of coconut, it was in such a small quantity that a serve didn't have any ill effect on me. This pudding is great! Again, wish I could have bought more than one. They should really have it year round, as there is nothing particularly Christmas-y about vanilla with chocolate sauce.



As for presents, I got two new cookbooks that I was really excited for! Also a Buffy colouring book and the DVD of Cats. I love that movie and I don't care what anyone thinks! I also love listening to podcasts where they trash talk that movie. It is just a gift that never stops giving. I saw it two times in the movies, back in those blissful pre-COVID days.





My mum also ordered me some goodies from this place she saw on a FB advertisment. Sometimes advertising does pay! Some salted caramel and spiced maple covered nuts, ginger cookies, chocolate fudge cookies, and some rose berry and orange ginger truffles. My friends, these were all legit delicious! I'd never heard of this brand, but they were ah-may-zing.





In the following days, I of course made some sandwiches with leftover roast and chutney. I also added some baby spinach and some mayo. Very good.



Anyway, three and a bit months after the fact, but there you go. It was a sad day, though it was nice to spend it doing some traditional things. But a lot less effort than I normally go to. Sometimes taking it easy is the way to go. I am also taking this Easter Sunday easy, as I am sick and had to go get a COVID test this morning. So lots of resting today.

Midweek Munchies

Random random random round-up of things I bought and ate in times past.

I'm not a big popcorn fan, but these were on sale for 99c each and I thought the flavours sounded fun. The Chicken Seasoning one was just OK, the flavour wasn't very strong. But the Raspberry Apple one was amazing, so much flavour!! Plus, probiotics. Do you need probiotics in popcorn? Do they even do anything? I don't know, but I was amused. Not pictured is the banana flavour, which I bought for my friend who wanted to try it and it was just as gross as you think it would be.



A random sandwich I made with some cashew cheese spread, Made With Plants bacon, and pickles. It might sound strange, but it was great.



A more traditional sandwich, the trusty BLAT. Made With Plants bacon, avocado, tomato, spinach, and mayo. I love any variation on a BLT.



Continental released a range of silly packets of soup called 'Nutrish', several of which were vegan. This is the green one, 'Peas Be Mine', which has peas, broccoli, spirulina (okay), and chicory root fibre (sure....). It was... fine. A perfectly fine green soup.



I found a packet of this pudding mix lurking around in my cupboard, so I made it. It is meant to be 'instant', though I chilled it a bit. Made with oat milk, it was pretty thin. Unfortunately, the reason that it is sugar free is because it has stevia in it, so it had that gross stevia after taste that I don't like. I mixed a buch of strawberry jam in it after the photo, which helped.



Woolworths released their own vegan cookie under their Plantitude brand. They are Granola Chocolate Chip, and are really nice. Chewy, and not too sweet.





Final for this post, this Strawberry Mallow Out Bar. It's good! It is basically a thin chocolate coating around a bar of strawberry marshmallow.

Midweek Munchies: Supermarket things

A photo dump of some new vegan things I have seen in supermarkets over the last several months! Some of these things I have tried, so look for them in upcoming posts.

First up is a whole bunch of things from Coles.

























And finally a few things from Woolworths!

Midweek Munchies

Thank you everyone for the kind messages on my last post. Life without Dim Sim, without my girls, has been hard. Those who follow me on IG know that there is another cat in my house, and she is very sweet. Though obviously she will never be like my girls. She is herself, and we are forging our own relationship. Opening up to her in the face of overwhelming grief has been hard.

Going forward I feel like my blogging is probably going to be a bit more sporadic, and probably a lot of easier posts like these Midweek Munchies ones. The recipe round-ups take the most effort, so I may take a break from them for a bit... at least for a while. I'm also going to just put a pause of the cute kitty of the post photo... I know this is shocking, my whole thing is cats. But just for a bit. Anyway, here is a Midweek Munchies post... even though it is Sunday today, so definitely not the midweek. But whatever. Enjoy some random things. I have so many more to share.

Plantitude is a vegan brand available through Woolworths (I am pretty sure it is one of their in-house vegan lines), and they recently brought out a whole range of these ready meals. Almost all of them have chili, and I have heard from people that they are really spicy. This is one of the few that didn't, but it did have capsicum that I had to pick out. It comes with rice in one packet and tofu and sauce in the other, and is designed so that you can use the box as the eating vessel. It also came with a plastic wrapped plastic fork, which was really annoying when you are eating at home as very wasteful. But handy if you are on the go and don't have a fork but do have a microwave? Anyway, it was not good. There was very little tofu, the sauce was oddly sweet, it was not very filling.



My friend Leigh, who is a genius with food, made a bunch of different flavours of oyster mushroom jerky, and she sent me a selection! Savoury snacks that are not chips are hard to come by, so these were very welcome.



I bought these seed crackers on sale in some supermarket, I can't remember where. I was suspicious that they were going to be dry and tasteless, but they were super yum. Good enough to eat on their own as a snack even. Would buy again, if I could remember where I got them.



Sanitarium Up and Go have been around since before I went vegan. The premise is two weetbix and milk, mushed up into a popper on the go breakfast drink. It has taken over 20 years, but they have finally made a vegan version. This was the vanille one, but there is also a chocolate one. I remember Up and Go as really being chunky, like you can tell there are weetbix in there. But these are much smoother, kind of like a thick and not very exciting vanilla milk. But not bad, and good to have on hand. Certainly not enough to replace breakfast though!



I saw this brand and a similar flavour of crisp over on Hilary's blog. So when I saw them on the shelf at a fancy vegan store, I had to grab them. They are packaged differently from the one that she had on her blog, but were every bit as delicious as she promised. I'd definitely get these again.



I got this tin of vegan meatballs in sauce in a Cruelty Free Shop Vegan Mystery Box ages ago, so I finally pulled it out to use. I made a meatball sub with it. The meatballs are kind of dry and the sauce is a bit flat, but with a bit of doctoring up it works out OK.

Dim Sim

I've been away for a while... I haven't been ready to post this, and I'm not really ready now. But here we go.

Though those of you who follow me on social media already know.

On the 27th of November 2020, I had to say goodbye to Dim Sim. I don't really know how to explain the way my heart utterly shattered as I said goodbye to her, the last of my soulmates, my whole world and my whole life.

I know for her sisters I wrote long emotional posts, but I just am not emotionally in a place where I can do that right now. Because if I let it out, I collapse again. And as I apparently have to keep on existing in this world, I have to keep things close inside. I was not able to run away to Seattle like I had always planned because of the pandemic, so I am back and work and trying my best to keep going one step after the other.

Dim Sim, you were my love and my light and my reason. We were together over 20 years, and I will never not be missing you and loving you.