Graze Box Review

I was sat in work last week, bored and hungry- a dangerous combination!

I'd heard of Graze boxes before after a friend raved about them and I thought they would prevent me grazing on more unhealthy treats in the office (as I write this, I'm eating a stawberry and cream lolly!).  So after finding a promotional code for a free box I decided to give it a go.

Firstly, you have to create an account and put in payment details, this assumes that after the free box you will continue and buy a box on a weekly basis for a cost of £3.89, although you can apparently cancel anytime and you can put in holidays so a box isn't delivered when you're away.  You are also asked to choose a day for your box to be delivered, the default is one box a week but you can have more than one.  Boxes are sent out via Royal Mail and the delivery cost is included in the price of the box and are small enough to fit through a standard letter box so there is no need to wait in or have to collect it from a post office.  Plus you can get it sent to either your home or a work address.

Once this bit is done, then comes the fun part- you can then browse through their ranges and click on things you love, like, would like or try or 'bin' and you will get a selection of things minus the 'binned' items to try each week. 

I put my delivery date as a Monday, and requested for the delivery to come to my home address as my work's post room can sometimes get a bit funny about personal post (the odd order from amazon is fine, but they may get a little suspicious with weekly deliveries!).  At the weekend, I got an email to tell me the contents of my box and to let me know it had been despatched:

- Olives with garlic and chilli
- the herb garden (oregano rice crackers, crispy peanuts and baked herb bites)
- My thai (baked soy bites with sweet chilli sauce)
- Yin and Yang (Belgian dark chocolate, almonds, jumbo raisins and cherries)

The box was delivered on Monday as promised and did fit through the letter box easily.  Which was a relief, our postman has an irritating habit of putting parcels too big to go through the letter box in the outside bins.  Not too bad if it's the paper bin, but when he chooses the green food bin (which also happens to be the one FURTHEST away from the front door!) it gets a bit messy, plus you have to turn the bin on it's side and fish the parcel out with a mop handle and given the weather in Bolton recently, I did NOT fancy doing that! Anyway I was restrained enough not to open it straight away and waited until I brought it into work today:

I'm trying not to eat them all on one day, so I had the olives today- I love olives (apart from when they leave the stones in, I don't care if it preserves more flavour, I'm too bloody impatient to be nibbling around a stone!) so they couldn't do much wrong there.  Now the question is, what will be tomorrows choice? Decisions, decisions!

Free Graze Box!!!
If you fancy giving Graze a go, follow this link http://www.graze.com/p/PJGPZP4.to claim your first box free!

Special Egg Fried Rice

This is an adaptation of a recipe from September's Cook Vegetarian, it was for low fat special fried rice, using low fat cooking spray.  I heard low fat cooking spray tastes rank so I used sesame oil and  made other adjustments.

Ingredients (Serves 2)
-About 1/2 pints of long grain rice (I used brown rice)- seems an odd method of weighing out rice, but it works.  You want 1/4 pint of rice per person (I use a measuring jug to measure, it also equates to 1/2 of a ordinary mug) and you need to cook it in 1/2 pint of water to every 1/4 pint of rice.  Therefore for this recipe, I cooked the rice in 1 pint of water.
-Sesame oil
-2 free range eggs, beaten
-1 pepper de-seeded and finely sliced, I use frozen multi-coloured peppers
- other vegetables of your choice, as much as you desire- I used frozen peas, and I have a bag of frozen Thai vegetable I got from ASDA (they're really good!) sliced finely where necessary!
-1/2 cm of ginger peeled and grated
-1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce

1. Cook the rice, leave to cool
2. Pour some sesame oil in a frying pan and heat up. add the beaten egg and spread evenly over the base of the pan. Cook for 8-10 minutes until you get something that resembles an omelette (without the milk!)
3. Remove egg from pan and cut into strips.
4. Add more oil if necessary and bring back up to heat. Add the all the vegetables, ginger and garlic and cook on a medium to high heat for 5 minutes or until done.
5. Add rice, egg strips and soy sauce and heat through for 1-2 minutes.
6. Serve

Carrot and Ginger Soup

In May this year, I volunteered at The Vegetarian's Society's Meat Free in Manchester event which kicks off National Vegetarian week and was delighted when I was allocated to help out in the cookery theatre.

I spent most of my time backstage helping to wash up all the dishes used during demonstrations ready for the next act.  One of the demonstrators who I got the privilege of meeting was 'Queen of Vegetarian Cooking', Rose Elliot who was a delight to talk to, and I got a little bit star struck!

Rose was also promoting the new edition of her best selling cookbook 'New Complete Vegetarian' and was doing book signings after demonstrating a Thai bean cakes, Thai curry (with red and green Thai paste) and chocolate avocado mousse. And I'm proud to say I now own a signed copy of the book- it is also the first signed thing I have ever owned!

Anyway, one of the recipes in the book (which is HUGE!) is carrot and ginger soup.  Before making this soup, I had never made soup before, but this soup is so easy (you don't even need to have pre-prepared vegetable stock) and is very tasty.  I now own a Thermos flask so decided to make a batch this weekend for work lunches.

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The recipe also says to season to taste with salt and black pepper (which I always forget, in general I'm quite bad at remembering to season food) and suggests garnishing with parsley, again something I don't bother with.

This is a really nice alternative to the traditional carrot and coriander soup, especially if like me you're not too keen on coriander, plus it's quite easy to make and is also quite low calorie and healthy.

Veggie "Sins"

It's been 5 months (ish) since I fully committed to vegetarianism, and I'm quite proud of how well I've done, I've not really had any slip ups, or moments of lack of will power and I can safely say that apart from the occassional craving for smoked samon and steak canadian (which is a total surprise, if anything I thought I'd miss chicken!) I've not missed meat.  And I think that is due to it being a gradual process, in the early days I never ruled out ordering meat at a restaurant, and eventually I didn't even think about it.

However...I have do have a few "sins"...

Rose Wine
Oh how I love a nice glass of rose.  But due to manufacturers putting crap like fish bladders etc (often to bring down production costs), and the methods by which wine is refined means unless it says it is vegetarian on the label, it often isn't.  Which is annoying, why the hell would you expect/want animal products to be in a drink? It's not like I've looked at a fish's swim bladder and thought "well, that would make a nice tipple"!

I've managed to find a wine in ASDA (ASDA's own brand Lambrusco Rose) which is vegetarian- is £2.28, 3 units per bottle (so if you wanted you could drink the whole bottle without guilt/hangover plus it's probably low calorie) and actually tastes quite nice- it's quite light and quite 'pop-like'. BUT whenever I go out, I just can't resist a glass of rose, even if in the back of my mind I know that it's probably not veggie, but it taste sooo good!

Shoes
OK, so I own leather shoes from my meat-eating days- I'm NOT getting rid of them the way I see it is that they have already been bought and to get rid of them would be wasteful. But I am trying to make sure that any new shoes I buy aren't made of leather.

HOWEVER, a few months ago, I was looking for some new sandals to take on holiday, now I did spot some on the Vegetarian Shoes website but I spent so long dithering on whether to buy them (they're not cheap, and then there is the added postage cost) that they sold out.  I couldn't find anything else I liked (why are vegan shoes SO ugly?) and when I did find any I liked they were always too expensive (I'm going to wear them for about one week a year!).  Then I saw some Regatta sandals that were nice, not too expensive and looked comfy AND it said they were made out of Nuback NOT leather, so I ordered them.  By the time I had googled what exactely Nuback was, it was too late and I couldn't figure out on the website how to cancel the order! But OMG they are comfy!

Thai Curries
I love curry, and I find it frustrating having to check for the presence of fish sauce in Thai curry pastes.  However, when The Boy discovered that ASDA now do a Thai Massaman paste (I had it once at Rice, it was AMAZEBALLS but it's impossible to find a pre-made paste, never mind a veggie one) that has fish sauce in, I chose to IGNORE this fact and eat the otherwise veggie curry anyway!

Also there was the Thai red curry I ate at a pub, it seemed like the kind of place that the chef would be unaware that Thai curry pastes contain fish sauce. Despite thinking this, I decided that the pub claiming the curry was veggie was enough- so I ate it and it was amazing!

To be honest, I don't feel too guilty about these "sins", I'm good the rest of the time, and so what if there a few things in life I'm finding hard to give up? I see vegetarianism as a belief, people have that belief for different reasons, just like religious beliefs people have different interpretations.  Some Christians choose not to have sex before marriage, some do- they still class themselves as Christians.  I'm vegetarian, sometimes I eat the odd bit of fish product that's hidden within an otherwise vegetarian product, or I accidently buy non-vegan shoes, lifes too short to get hung up about little things.  If anything, I'm not worried about being judged by vegetarians about these things, more by non-vegetarians who use things like this to point out that it's "impossible" to be vegetarian and so, why bother? 

It would be interesting to hear what "sins" other vegetarian readers have committed, and do you feel guilty about them?

Review: QZine, Clitheroe

Wow, I'm finding it so hard to get back into the habit of blogging, but hopefully the tips I picked up on a recent Time Management course should help matters (using the idea of 'Power Hours' I've already managed to blitz a load of house hold chores, including starting cleaning my fridge freezer, something I've been putting off for ages!). Plus, a trip to Clitheroe provided me with inspiration...

After wandering through Clitheroe, around 2pm after not having any breakfast or lunch, I was starved, and seeing signs for steak Canadian- the only time I use to eat steak by choice, was starting to make me regret my choice to go veggie (that and my occasional craving for smoked salmon!).

Then we came across QZine (holding page atm), which is tucked away inside Swan Court, towards Clitheroe castle. Granted, it wasn't an entirely vegetarian menu, but the vegetarian options were plentiful- even The Boy ended up choosing a veggie meal!  The veggie food mainly centred around middle eastern cuisine, but there was a veggie lasagne, and maybe others- I wasn't looking, as soon as I saw the word falafel I became blind to anything else.  I opted for a falafel wrap with a smoke BBQ sauce, and the boy for a meze dish. Unfortunately, the batteries on my camera ran out (or at least thats what I'm hoping the probem is!) so no photos :-(

I would say that the prices are reasonable, for my meal plus chips, The Boys and a glass of rose, pint of beer it was £20, so not dirt cheap but the food was good, and The Boy's meal (the most expensive of the two) was huge! And the staff are really friendly, plus when you've stuffed your face with gorgeous food you can burn off the calories with a walk/run up to the castle, which is just down the road :-)