Kitchen Tour: Part 2

I took a load of pictures for part 1 of my tour, which I felt would have made the post a bit too long if I had put them in, so here is part 2, which delves into my cupboards.

Please note, The Boy is an omni, and I tried my best to remove non vegan things (but vegetarian, he rarely buys meat to keep in the kitchen), but if you spot the odd non-vegan item in this post I apologise!

The first cupboard on the left is where we keep sweet treats, hot chocolates (The Whittards Tiramisu hot chocolate in the picture is actually vegan), Christmas mugs and the pestle and mortar which is on the top shelf. Please note, the Cadbury's tin is in fact the biscuit tin and no longer contains mini fingers (which of course are not vegan)- I just can't let a good tin go to waste! You may also just about see some vegan chocolate Halva from Lidl which is hiding in the bottom right hand corner, it is delicious but addictive!

Next stop is the cupboard where we keep savoury items, being 5ft 2 and a half means I have to think carefully about how I arrange my cupboards as I can't reach the top shelf without a stool. Given this, you might find it strange that grains, lentils and nuts are on the top shelf, so only accessible by stool. However, in most cases, these items are often the first thing you start to cook, so it's easier to get the stool (front the living room) at the start.

The next cupboard is above the cooker. This cupboard holds stuff that we don't use often- spare spices and other random items. I tend to keep glass jars after we've finished with them and use them to store stuff in.

This is our baking cupboard, on the right hand side of the cooker. It's a bit rammed!!

This is where we keep cereals, linseeds, tupperware and our kitchen scales. I have an obsession with tupperware and The Boy has to drag me away from the tupperware sections at supermarkets. However, I think I wouldn't be so obsessed if after The Boy had used the tupperware for lunch at work he brought it back and not just leave it in the car, which makes me think we haven't got enough!

The last (interesting) cupboard is our glasses cupboard. As you can see nothing matches, which I think is far more interesting. On the top you can see various Nestle mugs from easter eggs that I acquired over the years before going vegan. I've decided I don't want them anymore and at some point will be going to a charity shop.

Coming up in Part 3- things in the kitchen I love.

Kitchen Tour: Part 1

I was so obsessed with reading everyone's Vegan MoFo posts last year that when I finished reading all the 2013 ones I moved onto 2012's Vegan MoFo posts and noticed a couple of bloggers had done Kitchen Tours. Now, I can be really nosey especially when it comes to people's houses so this was right up my street.

I had put off doing my own kitchen tour for so long, because I thought I would do one we finally got the kitchen decorated. However, I've now accepted that's not going to happen so here is my kitchen tour!

Starting from the doorway, here is the left hand side of the kitchen,

You can see no storage space in this kitchen is wasted- we even use the tops of the cupboards to store stuff we don't use often, in this picture, the box for the food processor and the sharp knives my Dad gave me that I'm too scared to use.

On the far left near the back door is where I keep my cake stand. I used to store my cake stand away when not in use, but then I saw and ingenious idea on Caroline's kitchen tour on her blog Tea and Sympatico and have used it as a fruit "bowl" ever since. This week we have lemon, lime, avocado (a weekly staple) and apples from our apple tree.

Moving round you come to the sink, which is directly under the kitchen window which looks out into the back garden.

Next is the area where I do most of my food preparation. On the far left is an old plant pot we use for food waste- Bolton council does provide small food bins, but I've not got round to ordering one yet. Also in this picture is our four slice toaster, food processor and a small spice rack which is attached to the wall- I try to keep my most used spices in this spice rack. Underneath the spice rack is some cupcake salt and pepper pots which are empty because they are so badly designed (but cute)- to fill them up you have to hold them upside down, take the bottom off and put in the salt/pepper. As the holes are at the top you can imagine what happens to whatever you're putting in!

The cooker has gas hobs and an electric oven. I'm torn between liking the hobs and hating them- they are a faff to light at times and are more expensive to run.  However I do find them more effective than electric hobs.  I keep some of my pans on top of the stove for ease of use and also to free up a bit of cupboard space. The huge stock pot type pan I acquired from my Dad and is getting rather worn. The red ones are from Ecocook.

On the left of the cooker are the cooking oils I use the most, as well as a bottle of rice wine vinegar and a bottle of balsamic vinegar I couldn't fit in the cupboards. The tin of utensils on the right at the back is a new addition to the kitchen- I love to collect tins and I acquired this tin at Christmas and it has pictures of the twelve days of Christmas on it. It's been sat on the windowsill for nearly nine months until this morning when I was cleaning the kitchen before taking these pictures, I suddenly had lightbulb moment and decided to use it to store my utensils.

Moving round to the right hand side of the kitchen.

Again, stored on top of the cupboards is a tagine and a deep fat fryer, which have never been used,  a cupcake carrier, and some strange wine glasses which don't have a stand a bottom. To put them down, you have to put them in the vase that comes with it.  They have been used once when The Boy passed his Medical Finals and we had champagne. On top of the fridge is my 'Shop Local' lunch bag from Unicorn Grocery in Chorlton and empty boxes for vegetable box schemes we don't buy anymore, I've still not got round to contacting them to ask them to take their stuff back.

On the right of the cooker, is a magnetic strip that is attached to the wall which I use to store some of our metal utensils. I think it's meant for knives but the thought of putting knives on there makes me uneasy.  Plus I only really use one knife.  We don't have a bread bin, so bread and tortillas get stored here along with ready made pizza bases (The Boy makes homemade pizza dough but he was working last time we had pizza)  The Elvis chopping board was a gift, I use it to put hot pans on so they don't damage the worktop.

Apart from the red Ecocook pans, these red tins are the only other effort I've made to create any kind of colour scheme. The little stand that holds some Costa coffee syrups in that I got for Christmas use to have mini jams in (another Christmas gift!).  Although I try to eat a balanced diet, I try to take multivitamins as a back-up, I'm really bad for remembering to take them so I've started to put them on the top of the coffee as I always have a coffee in the mornings so it acts as a reminder. So far it seems to work.  The Red Bush isn't mine, I can't even stand normal tea, however my best friend loves the stuff so I bought her a box for when she visits, because I'm awesome like that.

I'm going to miss out the little section where we keep the microwave, kettle and the slow cooker, mainly because I forgot to take a picture but also because it's pretty dull.  However, that is the area I choose to do any baking preparation, despite the lack of space.This is because my baking cupboard is on the right hand side of the kitchen.

The next section is our fridge- freezer, we've started to collect magnets from different places we've visited- so far we have ones from Paris (the black cat one), Liverpool (the one with veg in season in spring- WWII dig for victory campaign) New York (the 6 and S magnets- routes on the NYC subway), Turkey (never been, it was a gift), Glasgow (cow with bagpipes!), Florence (the purple one- think it's the symbol of Florence?), Switzerland (the little Swiss house), Mallorca, Santa Ponsa (in Mallorca) and Calpe (Spain).  I also have some Innocent fridge magnets with letters on, I've always wanted alphabet magnets but never found any. These magnets get arranged to spell out rude words when certain friends visit...

The postcards are mainly from Edinburgh (except the Calpe one) and were a gift from The Boy's twin brother when he visited Edinburgh. I took a picture of my favorite one below:

Around the other side of the fridge is where I store my aprons, which everyone buys me as gifts but I never use. I hang them up using a magnet I got from a shop in York. The magnet is of a cat, but the legs and tail are bendy and you bend them out to make them into hooks- which I think is awesome,

And finally, here is the back wall of the kitchen, near the doorway to complete the tour.

From this angle you can see the doorway to the rest of the house, the cat calendar and our shelf with random things on it, including a HUGE bottle that did hold Weston's Scrumpy cider and a gingerbread house kit, which is an unused Christmas gift.  We did have a second shelve below the top one, when I first moved and was unpacking I decided to store all my cookbooks on it. Suddenly I heard a massive crash and the shelve had come off. It was never put back up, and now the cookbooks are stored in the living room.

I did take some pictures of inside of my cupboards and of some of my favorite things in the kitchen, but this has turned into quite a long blog post.  However I do still want to share the rest of my photos because my kitchen is my favorite place so join me for Kitchen Tour Part 2 tomorrow.

Barcelona Friday: Packing and Preparing

Last night I did my packing for going to Barcelona tomorrow. We're flying with Monarch (I refuse to fly Ryanair) and we can only take hand luggage, unless we pay extra for hold luggage of course.

We fly in the morning, and will have to get up at stupid o'clock. Therefore I've bought some snacks for the journey.

The 9 Bars were 2 for £1 at ASDA and they've replaced the honey in their peanut bars with golden syrup meaning that there are now two vegan options. I'll probably have one on the way there and the other on the way home. The nakd bars were 60p, again at ASDA which is pretty cheap. The dairy free buttons I got from Alternative Stores to top up an order so I could meet the minimum spend amount.  I got some cute strawberry fruit hearts from Home Bargains, which are marked vegetarian and from the ingredients they look vegan too. To make this a bit healthier, I'll be cutting up some carrots into batons to take with me nearer the time.

The Boy insists on getting factor 50 sunscreen whenever we go away, and it can be difficult to find a sunscreen past factor 30 that is vegan.  However it was Superdrug to the rescue again, when I found this spray that was vegan- although I had to peel the security stickers off various bottles because some bright spark had stuck them right over the section that tells you if they are vegan!

We bought two bottles for when we went to Costa Blanca in July and it's lovely, not at all sticky and smells quite nice. In fact, everyone kept stealing it rather than using their own.

Obviously, this is too big to take in hand baggage so I got a little spray bottle from Superdrug and poured some in there, we're only there for four days so that should be enough.

Preparation

I learnt from my last trip to Costa Blanca that you can't just leave things to chance when your a vegan, so this time I was prepared.

To be fair, Barcelona is much more vegan friendly and if you look on Happy Cow you'll see there is plenty of choice and the challenge is narrowing it down!

The two blogs I used to help me narrow down the choices were Vegan in Brighton and Keepin' it Kind.

Once I'd narrowed down my choices I used Google maps to create some bespoke maps- one of the places I want to visit, which are clumped together in the centre and the other of the location of our hotel. As I have a gmail account and can save them under my places and print out a marked up map. I then used Happy Cow to make notes of the opening times of each place where possible.

Hopefully the bit of extra preparation will make this trip a lot smoother than the last one!

Apple Thursday: Some of my favorite apple recipes.

Today’s apple recipe was a disaster- I tried to make apple and cinnamon porridge but I was being lazy and decided I couldn't be bothered grating the apples and then having to wash the grater so I decided to just try and finely chop the apple.

Unfortunately it was horrid, and I ended up throwing it in the bin and having crumpets instead.

So I'm just going to list my favourite ways to use up apples. All the recipes come from one of my favourite blogs- We Don’t EatAnything With A Face, although this is a vegetarian blog a lot of the recipes are vegan or can be easily adapted to make vegan.

Chocolate Orange Cupcakes: this is my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe and produces great results every time.  The grated apple acts as a binder and I love the idea of using marmalade to give the cupcakes their orange flavour, however I’m sure that you could leave this out to make a basic chocolate cupcake. These cakes are rich and extremely moist and will dismiss myths of dry vegan cake. 

Apple Cake: I make this the most as it uses up the most apples! This cake again is super moist and I love adding copious amounts of mixed spice to give it a great smell. I took this into work a lot last year and my colleagues loved it.

Mincemeat: I avoided mincemeat and mince pies until about two years ago, don’t get me wrong, I knew it didn't actually contain meat but I was put off by the name. But then I finally tried a mince pie, and although I'm not as obsessed with them as my Dad, I do like the occasional one near Christmas.  As well as using the mincemeat to make your own mince pies, this also makes a great homemade Christmas gift which I like to give to our neighbours and friend’s parents.  Plus it uses a LOT of apples!

You can also view my collection of apple recipes on Pinterest.

One thing I would like to try this year is making my own apple sauce as I’ve seen it used a lot in American recipes, however here in the UK you can only get it in small jars and it is used more as a condiment.  I’d love to know if any American readers have a basic apple sauce recipe I could try?

Wrap it Wednesday- Southwestern Veggie Wraps

Tonight's Wrap it Wednesday was Southwestern Veggie Wraps, made using this recipe.

I love the fact that you can make the sweet potatoes and even the black beans ahead of time and just heat up on the day, and for this reason, this is a favorite in our house.

I served the wraps with baby spinach, homemade guacamole (if you can call mashed up guacamole with lime juice guacamole!), salsa and alpro yogurt (which I use instead of sour cream).

And there is plenty let for lunch tomorrow :-)

What I ate Tuesday

The idea behind this theme is simple, I will just photograph what I eat on Tuesdays!

OK, so I get up at 6am and set off for work at 6:30, so I tend to just grab a coffee and take something to work to eat later.

Oops, the picture is a little blurry- well it was 6:15 in the morning.

I found replacing cow's milk in my coffee the hardest part of my transition towards being vegan.  So despite being a bit pricey, I use almond milk- it doesn't curdle and I find the taste more neutral than other types. I like Blue Diamond unsweetened almond milk the best, but if I find Alpro's on offer I can be swayed.

Breakfast was Alpro plain yogurt, with nutty muesli, milled linseeds, raisins and dried cranberries with a drizzle of maple syrup.

The muesli and linseeds were both from Lidl. Both are marked vegan and there are quite a few different flavours of the linseeds.

Lunch was leftovers from yesterday's tea- roasted vegetable thai curry (I added both red and green food paste) with a pot of micro rice and some leftover chilli naan bread- yes I know naan bread doesn't really go with thai curries!

Curry includes roast cauliflower, carrots broccoli and brussel sprouts. I've put it in a larger container so that I can pour the cooked rice in and cut down on the dishes!

We like our curry sauces quite thick, and usually indulge with thai curries by using coconut cream. However this time I used coconut milk and thickened it up with a bit of cornflour.

ASDA do these great individual pots of micro rice in packs of two for £1. They're great for taking to work.

The naans I get are made by a company called The Clay Oven Bakery and are marked as vegan.  I get them from a stall on Bolton market- £1.69 for pack of three HUGE naan breads- and when I say huge, one will serve 2 people so a pack is the equivalent of six servings. They come in plain, garlic and coriander and chilli flavour. the picture below is a torn off section of one.

ASDA are selling Nakd bars at 60p at the moment, so I bought a load for work snacks, I really love them- I get my chocolate fix along with a bit of fruit! Today was chocolate orange.

For tea we had mushroom risotto, I just roughly followed the instructions on the back of the risotto rice from ASDA. I added red onions from our garden and your average button mushrooms. Instead of vegetable stock, I mixed in a bit of Hendersons Relish into water.

I also added roasted pine nuts, nooch and some mushroom bruschetta spread from Francas in Bolton, which I mentioned in this post.

For dessert, I had some of the wine that I used for making the risotto and a few blocks of the dark belgian chocolate, hazelnut and orange bar from Chocolate Magic.

Cheers x

Monday Bakes: Accidentally Low Fat Red Velvet Cupcakes

For my first Monday Bakes for MoFo, I decided to keep it simple by making Red Velvet Cupcakes from the Ms Cupcake book, The Naughtiest Vegan Cakes in Town. It's basically a chocolate cake with red food colouring but there has always been something I like about red velvet cakes and I've been wanting to try this recipe for a while.

I was trying my best to be organised by gathering and measuring the ingredients before making it, however I soon discovered that I'd wrongly assumed I had two ingredients- bicarbonate of soda and vanilla extract. Both are common ingredients I usually have in, but I'd forgot to replace them when they had run out. It wasn't a big issue, as I was using self raising flour and just doubled the amount of baking powder the recipe asks for.  As for the vanilla I just skipped it.

So, I made the cakes, popped them in the oven and was washing up when I thought:

"Did I add the oil??"

And the answer to that question, was no. I'd measured it out but had accidentally hidden it behind my cook book stand.

Normally in this situation I would have either cried or threw a wobbler. When I watched last week's bake off when Iain throws his baked alaska in the bin and storms out, I totally understood.  That is what I would have done. But something amazing happened, I felt a sense of inner calm wash over me and I decided to see how they turned out.

They weren't a complete disaster, a little dry but they held together. They did sink in the middle, but that's a problem I have with all chocolate cakes except this chocolate orange cupcake recipe.

In the Ms Cupcake book it suggests topping them with a cream cheese butter cream, however I didn't want to waste money on a tub of cream cheese for one recipe.  The original plan was to make a basic vanilla butter cream but obviously, without vanilla extract that was out of the question so I made a chocolate fudge icing using this recipe.

I added quite a bit of the icing to hide the fact they had sunk in the middle!

I actually made these on Sunday night and The Boy is working nights so I let him take them to work to share with his colleagues.  When I came this afternoon, he told me they had gone down well and that two of his colleagues had said how lovely and moist they were- so much for me thinking they were dry!

I'll be in Barcelona for next Monday, so I now have plenty of time to make sure I have ALL the ingredients for the next bake. And I'll remember to add the oil too!