This vegan pancake with sour cream and avocado is a really easy lunch with one of my favourite herbs, turmeric! I had mine with fried potatoes, avocado and salad, but you can change up the toppings – the secret is the gram flour which is brilliant for making pancakes and omelettes.
Ingredients 150 gram (chickpea) flour 225g plant milk Teaspoon turmeric Teaspoon salt Crushed or minced garlic clove 1 avocado, sliced 5 small potatoes, parboiled and cut into small cubes 150g cashews, soaked for at least two hours in water 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon nutrititional yeast 1 teaspoon salt
Method First make the sour cream. Place the cashews, mustard, lemon juice, nutritional yeast and salt in a blender and pulse till you achieve a smooth cream.
Then make the turmeric pancake batter by combining the flour, milk, turmeric and salt till they form a smooth batter. Next, heat a little olive oil and gently fry the garlic for a couple of minutes, then add to the pancake batter. Pour the batter into the frying pan and let it cook for two or three minutes till the top seems firm, then flip over.
At the same time, heat a little olive oil in a separate pan and gently fry the potato cubes till golden.
Serve the pancake topped with the potatoes, sour cream, sliced avocado and salad.
First combine the olive oil, cider vinegar, brown sugar, sesame oil, lemon juice, garlic and ginger to make the dressing. Mix well together and season with salt and pepper.
Heat a tbsp of sesame oil in a wok and fry the mushrooms over a medium heat for three-five minutes till browned. Add the grains and the pak choi and cookd for another five minutes over a medium heat.
Serve with the dressing mixed through the grain, pak choi and mushroom mix, and topped with grated carrot and a sprinkling of sesame seeds.
Turmeric is a brilliant herb to try to incorporate in your diet. Its health benefits include the potential to prevent heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer, and its anti-inflammatory properties can also help with arthritis. It adds an earthy taste and beautiful golden colour to food. This vegan turmeric pasta is really easy to make using jarred turmeric, though you can use fresh too if you can get hold of it.
Vegan turmeric pasta – sunshine in a bowl.
Ingredients
250g pak choi, or 2 pak choi heads and bulbs
I white onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
5 tbsp nutritional yeast
100g cashew nuts, soaked overnight or for a few hours in a bowl of water
220 ml plant milk
2 teaspoons ground turmeric or grated fresh turmeric
Salt and pepper to season
300g pasta of your choice – makes 4 small bowls or two large bowls
Method
Cook the pasta to your taste, drain and leave to the side.
Add some olive oil to a pan. Fry the onions and garlic over a medium heat until soft.
Remove the onions and garlic from the pan and replace with the chopped pak choi, again frying over a medium heat.
Add the cashews to the onion and garlic in a blender, along with the nutritional yeast, plant milk, turmeric, salt and pepper. Blend to a creamy sauce.
Add the pasta and sauce to a large wok or pan and combine over a medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add the pak choi and serve!
It’s early January 2021, and here in the UK new restrictions are in place. For many of us this means being plunged back into a world of home schooling, juggling work, or worse, not having any work at all and all of the worries that that includes.
A good night’s sleep doesn’t solve any of these things, but good sleep is really important for our mental and physical wellbeing. So I’ve put together this guide to a good sleep, incorporating many of the things that I find useful in my sleep routine, that I hope are helpful to you. And for those of us who have sleepless babies or toddlers or even older children, or other responsibilities or health conditions that make a full night’s sleep impossible, I hope you can use at least some of these suggestions to make the sleep you do get better and more restful and restorative.
Limit naps during the day. I am the world’s biggest fan of naps, but they can be really detrimental to a good night’s sleep if you’re taking long ones in the afternoon. And I often find that a two hour nap can make me feel groggy, irritable and the opposite of rested. If you need a nap in the afternoon, set an alarm for between half an hour and 60 minutes. It’s often all that you need to feel refreshed, and it won’t affect your being able to sleep at bedtime.
Spend more time outside in the daylight. That’s not always easy in the winter, but where you can, try to take a walk outside every day, perhaps at lunchtime. If you walk your dog, do that during the day as well as at night. The exercise benefits will help you to fall asleep at night, too – even light exercise, like a short lunchtime walk, will have benefits for your sleep.
No screen rule. I put this in place last year after waking up at 2am one morning and automatically opening my phone and checking my emails, finding something that made me feel stressed, and realising that no one should be on their phone at that time in the morning when they should be sleeping. By bringing your phone into your bedroom, you are inviting the whole world into your bed with you. Since then I’ve stuck to it, leaving my phone in the hall or living room, and am amazed by how effective it’s been in meaning that I wake up less in the night. My one exception to the no screen rule is my Kindle, which I open up when I find myself unable to get back to sleep.
A good bedtime yoga routine is a great precursor to a restful night’s sleep. You don’t need to pull out your yoga mat – just some gentle stretching by the side of your bed works. I love this one with the wonderful Yoga with Adriene, but I also have my own shorter five minute version that I know off by heart too. It’s a good idea to create your own yoga routines, not just for sleep but for waking too, so that you’re not always dependent on a screen to practice.
Podcasts can be a great way to help you drop off to sleep at night. You might have to break your no screen rule to listen to one, so try to place your phone somewhere in the bedroom where you can’t easily reach for it if you wake up in the night. I really like Nothing Much Happens, a story podcast. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed awake until the end of the story. The Deep Energy podcast plays sounds from nature if you prefer that to the sound of another voice. Or, you could try a mindfulness meditation – there are some great ones on Headspace.
Image – Immaculate Vegan
A sleep mask is a great investment as a way of blocking out the light, as well as dust particles and other irritants, and can help you fall asleep faster. The darker your bedroom, the better your sleep is likely to be, as our brains are hard-wired to need darkness for sleep. I’m a big fan of this Billy Sleeps sleep mask made from fabric cut-offs. Scenting your mask with a little lavender oil on the outside can help you drop off, too (check with your doctor about using this if you are pregnant).
A good strategy for chasing night time worries away is key to a good night’s sleep. Mindfulness techniques can come in really useful here, when it’s 2am and you’re wide awake and worrying about your MOT bill, what your colleague meant at that meeting yesterday, and whether that pain in your back is something more serious. Remember that you don’t have to engage with unhelpful thoughts. You don’t have to find solutions to all of these problems lying in your bed in the wee small hours. Imagine yourself sitting by the side of a waterfall, where the waterfall represents your thoughts as they pass through your mind. Acknowledge them as they rush by. It can often help to name them – here is anxiety, here is anger, here is sadness – and let the torrent pass as you watch your thoughts tumble through the waterfall from your comfortable place at the side.
Image : Pixabay
And finally, make sure that your bedroom is the right temperature. The Sleep Council recommend a temperature of 16-18 C in your bedroom, as if you’re too hot or cold you won’t sleep well.
After trying Nora and Nama’s vegan baklava in Camden Market a while back, I’ve been obsessed with this sticky delicious Turkish pudding! Here’s my vegan version.
Ingredients
200g agave nectar
200 g caster or granulated sugar
150g walnuts
150g pistachios
150g almonds
Juice of 1 lemon
24 sheets filo pastry – about one pack.
6 tbsp coconut oil or dairy free butter.
100g brown sugar.
180g plant milk
Tsp salt
Method
Put the milk, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, salt and brown sugar in the blender to make a gritty paste with 3 tbsp warm water.
Melt 6 tbsp butter or coconut oil in the microwave or on the hob.
Spread out eight sheets of filo pastry in a baking tray, lining the base with the melted butter or oil, and lining every two sheets lightly with the oil or butter. Spread the eighth sheet with the pistachio, almond and walnut paste.
Repeat with eight more sheets, topping with the paste and then eight more sheets. Spread the oil or butter on the top sheet and score it in a diamond shape with a knife – see picture above.
Bake for 40 minutes at 180 C.
While the baklava is baking, 10 minutes before taking it out of the oven melt the granulated sugar, lemon juice, plant milk and agave nectar over a low heat and simmer.
Pour this mixture over the baklava once it’s out of the oven, and serve in squares with tea or hot chocolate!
