This vegan potato and spinach pakora sandwich definitely isn’t the healthiest vegan meal out there, though it does contain spinach which is a great source of a number of vitamins, magnesium and iron. I made this after a bike ride in the freezing January Edinburgh winter, and it was exactly what I needed to warm me up. It’s a bit of a messy fiddly sandwich to make as it’s battered, but worth the effort.
Ingredients
Batter
250g chickpea (gram) flour
1/2 tsp red chilli powder
175 ml plant milk
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp fresh coriander
Tsp salt
Pinch bicarbonate of soda
Filling
300g new potatoes, peeled, boiled and riced or grated
1/2 tsp red chilli powder
1/2 tsp cumin
3 tbsp chopped spinach
2 tbsp chopped mint
1 tsp salt
1 lime
Plus 6 slices of white bread.
And handful of spring onions to serve.
Method
First make the filling by combining the potatoes, chilli, cumin, spinach, mint ,salt and lime.
Next ,make the batter by putting all of the batter ingredients into a food processor. You can mix by hand in a bowl too, but a food processor ensures a better distribution of the ingredients. The batter should be the consistency of runny cream – add more water if it isn’t.
Heat some oil on a medium heat in frying pan. Dip one slice of white bread in the batter, covering both sides, and drop in the pan.
Fry on both sides till golden, then press filling onto one side of the bread.
Repeat with another slice of bread – cover in batter, fry on both sides, then add filling.
Press the two slices of bread, topped with filling, into a sandwich, and fry for a further two minutes.
Cut in half and eat with spring onions on the side!
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!
I’m not even going to try to write something deep and meaningful about what 2020 has meant to us. I wouldn’t know where to start. I look back at my January 2020 self – I’m sure we all do this with our fresh faced, innocent, January 2020 selves – and think about how she had no idea what was about to hit her.
It’s been a year like no other for all of us, full of loss, change, new ways of doing things, and for some of us, hopefully, growth and learning. Here are some of our lessons from 2020, some of which we know we wouldn’t have learned had this year turned out differently.
Starting with a less serious one – never cook bacon, vegan or otherwise, in your camper van. Just don’t do it. The smell will live on FOREVER. This is one of a few camping tips I’ve picked up in 2020- more here!
What all the fuss about mindfulness is about. I’d tried to do mindfulness before, and failed as I just didn’t really know where to start. A guided five week course through work proved to be life changing, and with daily guided exercises and homework it really did transform the way I approach life, stress and unhelpful thoughts. I love the idea, for example, that it’s OK for a worry (and god knows we’ve all had enough of those in 2020!) to enter your head – and for you to acknowledge it – but to then let it drift through your head and out the other side – like watching a car drive past, and choosing not to get in it. Here are some starter mindfulness exercises if it’s something you’d like to try in 2021.
How to make sourdough bread, and other types of bread too. Such a cliche…. but prompted by the yeast shortage of early 2020, I decided to make a sourdough starter, which has led to a 2020 filled with fresh bread and far too much eating of poppy seed rolls slathered with Naturli vegan butter.
That losing something can be a gateway to something exciting and new. Like lots of people this year, Colin was made redundant from his main job at a small Edinburgh charity. We had a tough few weeks when we knew this was in the offing, with meetings and negotiations for Colin, and then the reality of knowing that from October, he’d no longer have a steady income. His dream – and part of our bigger dream – has been to teach people to swim and spend every day in the sea, but giving up his job to focus solely on that seemed a huge step. With the decision made for him, he put everything into growing Scottish Swimmer, his coaching business – and hasn’t looked back. To date, he’s swum 120k in the sea this year teaching some 200 people from beginners to elite swimmers, and has even bigger plans for 2021.
How much of a lifeline books can be. I’ve always been a very avid reader – I love the way books transport you to another world, especially when you need it most. And with no option to actually go very far in 2020, books took on an even bigger role in my life. Here are some of my favourites from 2020 –
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World – C.A Fletcher – set in a post apocalyptic world, the book traces a young boy’s journey from the Outer Hebrides to southern England to find his stolen dog. Hopeful and engrossing with an unexpected twist.
Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas – one of those books that I have always meant to read but never got round to. I’m only sorry I left it so late. The scene between Captain Cat and Rosie Probert is beautifully heart-rending.
Finally, 2020 has taught me to take one day at a time as, now more than ever, we have no idea what tomorrow might bring. I’ve never been great at this, and often find myself looking forward to the next thing – a holiday, a work trip away, the weekend – and forgetting about the here and now. All we actually have is today, and this moment – yesterday is gone, and tomorrow isn’t real yet. So I’m learning to be better at existing just in the moment, and this has been a good strategy for me in 2020. As I write this, I have no idea what the next few weeks or months might hold – potentially school closures, further restrictions, certainly more time at home. The only thing I do know is that today my family and I are safe and well, and that nothing else really matters beyond that.
Happy 2021, everyone – here’s to a year that hopefully brings us peace, health and happiness.
Spread half the puff pastry sheet thinly with the mustard. Sprinkle over the grated cheese.
Fold the over half of the sheet over the spread half and cut into squares or shapes with the cookie cutters (I used Christmas trees and bells). Add some more grated cheese.
If you feel like doing a bit of baking over the Christmas holidays, here are three easy vegan Christmas baking recipes that I make every year – hope you enjoy!
Orange cookies
Ingredients
150g caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla
150 dairy free butter, melted or very soft
280 g flour
Juice and zest of one orange
Method
Combine the sugar, vanilla and butter.
Add the flour and the orange juice and zest. The mixture will be crumbly and sticky so be gentle with it and add a little more juice or water to make it less so.
Form a large ball with the mixture and wrap it tightly in a large tea towel, flouring it a little so it’s not too sticky, then refrigerate for half an hour.
Flatten the mixture through the tea towel if that’s easier, then form into balls or flat discs. I used this cookie cutter from Bakerlogy on Etsy.
Bake at 175 till golden.
Top with icing sugar and try not to eat all at once.
Festive Granola
Ingredients
200 g oats
2 oranges
8 tbsp maple syrup or agave nectar
Handful cranberries
Handful pistachios
Handful chopped glace cherries
Handful slivered almonds
Method
Toss the oats in the juice of the oranges and the maple syrup/agave nectar till they are all damp.
Spread the oats in a baking tray and top with the slivered almonds.
Bake at 175 degrees for 20 minutes then turn, baking for a further 20 minutes until crispy and golden.
Top with the cherries, cranberries and pistachios and serve with plant milk or yoghurt.
This makes about four servings so can be kept in an airtight container for up to to two weeks.
Mince pie traybake
What’s even better than mince pies? Mince pies mixed up with fruit and chocolate and cut into slices, that’s what.
Ingredients
4 vegan mince pies – make your own or use store bought (I used Oggs)
100 g butter
125 g coconut oil
2 tbsp vegan cocoa
Handful cranberries
Handful pistachios
Handful glace cherries
200g bar dark chocolate
Method
Start by melting the butter, coconut oil, broken up chocolate and cocoa over a low heat in a large pan.
Meanwhile, in a large bowl bash up the mince pies till they’re in small chunks.
Add the pistachios, cranberries and cherries, keeping a few back for the topping.
Pour the melted butter, coconut oil, chocolate and cocoa into the bowl and combine with the mince pies, pistachios, cranberries and cherries, adding a few of the pistachios, cranberries and cherries to the top of the traybake.
Pour into a baking tray and leave to set in the fridge for up to two hours. Cut into slices and enjoy!
The mince pie traybake squares are best kept in the fridge.
When do you start your Christmas shopping? I start mine in October, and Colin starts the shopping he has to do usually about two weeks before Christmas!
I always love reading gift guides for inspiration – so here’s our 2020 Christmas gift guide.
I receivedthis beautiful book about treesfor my birthday, written by our friends Anna Deacon and Vicky Allan. All about humans who love trees, it’s a joy to read – full of love letters to trees from people from across the world. Their other book dedicated to the joy of wild swimming, Taking The Plunge, is very special too – I defy anyone not to want to throw themselves in the sea after finishing it!
Photo credit Anna Deacon
These mindfulness cards are full of creative mindfulness exercises to do every day that can be completed in 10 minutes. Having taken a course in mindfulness this year, I know how big a difference to your day that 10 minutes of mindfulness practice can make, and these cards are perfect for giving you inspiration and ideas.
Mindfulness cards
If you’re based in or around Edinburgh, for the swimmer in your life, or the person who’s been talking about trying outdoor swimming for ages but has never taken the plunge – how about some lesson vouchers? You can buy some here from Colinaka Scottish Swimmer.
Scottish swimmer gift vouchers
A gift voucher for Mindful Chef, the recipe box service. We are big fans of Mindful Chef’s recipe boxes. We’ve been using them for a couple of years now, with monthly boxes containing everything you need to make three delicious vegan meals for two, and haven’t had a single meal yet that we haven’t liked. There’s no food waste, as portions are measured out beforehand, and it’s great to discover new recipes you might not usually try. They’re working hard to minimise waste in their packaging, too.
Mindful Chef sticky tamarind and ginger tofu with mangetout
These yoga diceare a fun present for any yogis in your life. They’re aimed at yogis of all levels with a variety of poses and are great for someone new to yoga who wants inspiration to develop their own practice, or more experienced yogis who want to mix it up a little.
Yoga dice
A Cool Camping voucher. 2020 was the year that many people discovered the joys of UK holidays through camping. I booked most of our camping holidays this year through Cool Camping, including this one – their site has thousands of suggestions, from the very basic and wild to glamping and yurts. A voucher is a great way of giving someone a holiday to look forward to through the grey days of January and February, with the hope that holidays will be more possible in 2021.
Sigh…how perfect does this look?
Some swimming art. We love this printfrom Sea and Stream, which would look beautiful on the wall of the swimmer or sea lover in your life.
Stargazing Mermaid from Sea and Stream.
A monthly Vegan Kind subscription. With boxes from £8 per month filled with vegan products from around the world, this is a great gift for anyone – whether they’re vegan or not – from this Glasgow based vegan start up who have grown to become a serious player in the online vegan marketplace. The boxes, which are either lifestyle boxes or beauty boxes, are always brilliant value for money and often contain new to the market items or things that aren’t widely available in the UK. And each month, they make a donation to an animal charity from the proceeds of each box.
Gift a tree. With a wide range of trees, and something to suit most budgets, Treedom gives you the opportunity to buy a tree. A farmer will then plant the tree in their own country and can use it as a food resource or to support their family, and the tree will help the environment, too.
Gift someone a tree for Christmas
The best things in life are free. For those of us who are feeling the financial effects of lockdown and who aren’t in a position to buy a gift for someone this year, a gift that costs nothing could mean the world to its recipient. Here are some ideas –
A babysitting voucher for when things open up again
Gift a baking subscription from you, by promising to deliver bread, cookies or cake to the recipient once a month.
A personalised playlist. Make a Spotify playlist for someone, with songs that mean something to you both.
A memory book. Take an old notebook that hasn’t been used, and fill it with writing that will make the recipient smile with everything from jokes you know they’ll laugh at, favourite song lyrics, recipes you know they love, to memories of a holiday shared together.
A mystery nature walk. Read up on a nature walk near to your gift recipient. Find out about the points of interest on the walk – wildlife, trees and flowers, as well as points of historical interest – then act as their guide on the day – they only need to turn up at the right time and place!
