Just another dent in the damage…

My house is full of vegans – bar Bella, she eats fish with her Amicat – and it means there are a lot of cook books. I make it sound like there are a lot of people in my house but in fact there’s just the two of us and our cat, Bella. And I guess the reason we have so many cook books is due to Max’s obsession with recipe clippings, he has a whole lever arch file full! Being vegan is not difficult, it just means you have to think more about your food, plan your meals, your pack lunches for work and check menus before you agree to a night out. But to make veganism really work for you at home you’ve got to learn some darn cooking skills, make your food exciting and never settle for just a hummus sandwich or a dreadlock burger or that god awful sos mix. Veganism is better than that! But I hate cooking – I hate waiting for things to cook – anything that takes longer than 20 minutes makes my stomach hurt and I end up eating most of it out of the pan before it even hits my plate. Max calls me a picker, I can’t help it! Say you’re cooking with a pepper and you’ve got it nicely chopped up ready, for every piece the pan gets my mouth gets the other. It’s just the way it goes.

Max caught on to my dislike of cooking early on and figured the way to my heart would definitely be through my stomach. It worked. Five years on I eat like royalty… every day. Even if there’s absolutely nothing in he never fails to cook up a feast of feasts. Leave it to me and we’d be eating chilli and wedges every day, not that there is anything wrong with that either though.

So just as I was getting used to letting Max own the kitchen, except on my occasional baking days when I crack out super tasty cookies or cupcakes, in walks Vegan Yum Yum and turns my culinary failings into something more at home on Masterchef. I’ve turned a corner, I get excited about coating my tofu with a corn flour batter, whizzing up a tahini paste for my steamed broccoli and turning tomato ketchup into an incredibly mouth watering sweet and sour sauce. I’ve followed Lauren’s amazing blog for a while and always been insanely jealous of these rather special cupcakes from the Martha Stewart show but I never really thought I (the world’s most reluctant cook) could make any of this incredible food myself. Then I get a copy of the cook book and how wrong I was.

What makes the book so special for me and what makes me rate this more highly than any other book on our shelves are the beautifully shot images of the finished meal. Pictures of the food is something a great deal of our cook books lack and by being so anal about following craft patterns to the T I’m one of these that literally follows every instruction within the recipe and I like my food to look like the picture. Without pictures how can you really make your recipe appealing? Really? I like to decide what I want to eat by seeing how tasty it looks. And there are many many tasty things to choose from in this.

The added bonus of planning my every meal around the Lauren Ulm Bible is being able to take her recipes everywhere I go via my phone! Yes, she has an iPhone app [iTunes link] too that includes many of the recipes from the book and updates as and when she updates the blog. And again, as well as a handy ‘tick’ function to mark off your ingredients, there’s pictures!! Don’t just relay on making your food sound good… make it look good! Have a look at some of these master pieces from my very own kitchen:

Broccoli Almond Sweet and Sour Tofu

Nearly Raw Tahini Noodles

Spicy Tomato and Chickpea Soup (pp. 180) with a pepper, onion and avocado salsa topping

Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread (pp. 13)

Creamy Broccoli Dal (pp. 173) with homemade roti

And tonight we ate Hurry Up Alfredo (sorry about the poor image quality on this one):

We added black olives on top for a little extra bite, and it was wicked! This cook book is amazing… seriously. It’s probably the best cook book in the world. When Lauren says ‘decadent (BUT DOABLE) animal-free recipes for entertaining and every day’ she actually means it! They are the most doable recipes I’ve ever read and some of the most yummy food I’ve ever tasted.

Last week saw the return of Sheffield’s FREE vegan food fair. We had a great time making up soups, chillis, curries, pizzas, vol au vonts, dips, cakes, cookies, displaying fresh fruit and serving up jo-public. Although essentially the fair was 100% free, donations were welcomed and ended up covering the entire cost of the venue and extras. What a result! We welcomed the homeless and the Big Issue sellers – sending them on their ways with full tummies and take outs. Take a look at some of these!

This weekend we made 103 flat breads… 12 spiced loafs and a million cookies. We called it bread club:

We gobbled up all these bad boys pretty quickly:

Why did we do this? Well, it was all for this:

Good times had by all… The BBQ went down a treat (I don’t have any photos of this yet but I’ll try and get some), the bands were all awesome, costs got covered (which is always a huge relief) but I still just gotta ask: Why was this place not packed out? Where have all the UK hardcore kids gone?

If you ever needed any more proof that Propagandhi are the best band in the entire world. look no further. March 10th sees the release of their new record Supporting Caste, but if you can’t wait that long (I can’t) you can download two exclusive tracks from their website, providing you donate to one of three organisations:

• Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organisation);
• Partners in Health (provides a preferential option for the poor in health care);
• Peta 2 (the youth division of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).

Needless to say my donation goes to the Sea Shepherds and I think YOURS SHOULD TOO (although all are seriously worth while)! These guys need more money to succeed in shutting down the illegal slaughter of whales. Help them out!

I’ve always kinda liked Blink 182 but it was mainly because I thought Travis Barker was hot. The guy is a complete DUDE. He gives kids free drum lessons and everything. So when I heard he’d been in a plane crash I was pretty cut up about it. But then the thing that upsets me more is after being a vegetarian for 25 years (!!!!!!!) hes decided to start eating meat again to ’speed up the recovery process’ saying that he needs more protein than that he gets from his protein supplements. Can you believe this?? I think he suffered a seriously bad bump to the head if he thinks protein is only available to vegetarians in supplement form. I’m one of those ‘extreme’ vegetarians… you know, one of those ‘Vegans’ and I quite happily get more than enough protein from my ’strict’ diet of leafy greens, beans, tofu and those amazing little chunks of TVP (that’s textured vegetable protein). 

I need protein from food rather than just protein supplements. I changed my diet. I would do anything I possibly could if they said like “There’s a possibility you might heal faster if you do eat meat or just change your eating habits” so I did. I don’t regret it at all.

Oh Travis please do some research before you believe everything you’re told.

I have a treat in store for all you Sheffield peeps!! My friend Donna and I are organising a showing of Rob Stewart’s Shark Water (click image for details). It’s going to be a great evening of entertainment. For those coming expect a short talk from Giles Lane (ex-SSCS crew member), vegan fish and chips (electricity permitting) and plenty of cakes, a little craft and lots of fun! All money raised will go directly to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to continue in our struggle to protect the seas.

For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a beautiful and dangerous life journey into the balance of life on earth.

Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes and media depictions of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas.

Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.

The best thing about living in Sheffield is that there’s always cool stuff happening! This past weekend I managed to visit the Hurtful Essences bunch, watch the use of wacky bikes at the eco/mobility fest (a mini festival to encourage people to use bikes/public transport instead of their cars) and pat pigs at the Nether Edge village fair. Brilliant.

The one thing I’m really liking about Uncaged’s latest campaign is how good it all looks. The Hurtful Essences demo on Fargate involved a giant inflatable shampoo bottle and campaigners dressed as rats. The leaflets are a far cry from the usual shocking images animal rights groups use, simply because they’re still in-keeping with the whole orgasmic Herbal Essences advertising. Look a little closer though and you just might see some little lab ratties in those bubbles. I like it because it quite literally exposes all the bad s**t behind the ‘pleasurable’ experience of washing your hair.

Saying yes to Herbal Essences means saying yes to the ugly reality of animal testing.

And quite frankly I think it is time to ’start saying no’. Please visit the website, sign the petitions and learn more about Procter and Gamble. You can also get yourself a nice 10% off at Lush… but make sure you get yourself a Shark Fin Soap while you’re at it.

Please please please support the Sea Shepherds by buying some delicious fin soap from Lush.

When [sharks] are caught they are pulled from the water, their fins are sliced off, and they are kicked back into the ocean, so they sink to the bottom and suffer a slow death. Fins are the most lucrative part of the shark, which explains the massive escalation in the numbers of sharks killed in the last few years.

Sharks are being killed at a shocking rate of a hundred million a year, partly to sell on as ingredients for Shark Fin Soup. That’s disgusting… and stupidly expensive too! Why bother? BUY SOME SOAP INSTEAD.

The one thing above all else that makes me shake with anger is crap like this printed by my beloved Independent! As if justifying veganism to the ignorant isn’t hard enough!! This stuff is complete crap. I know of NOT ONE malnourished vegan and for all those ‘ex-vegans’ that claim veganism made them ill, they are also talking complete crap. If you need your vitamin D get out in the sun a bit more for god sake! Eat kale, eat plenty of pulses, eat tofu (lots of, it’s totally delicious), put soya milk on your god damn cereal. The problem with this 12 year old vegan, like the illustrious anonymous ’spokesman’ says, is not her vegan diet but rather her parents! Read up yo!

A wise man once said to me, ‘veganism celebrates the culture of life’ and you know what I think he was dead right!! He also said that there are two types of people in this world… those with compassion and everyone else.  

Iran as a Nation of Nose-jobs is another one of those repetitive cliches that, putting it politely, really gets on my nerves. Since beginning my research into Iranian blogging I have collected a mass of editorials that, like Hitchens, although seemingly attempt to depict ‘Iran’s Other Face‘ or ‘Lift the Veil‘ do little more than mislead its readers into thinking that the only aspirations of young Iranians is western simulation – to listen to western music, to dress in western fashion, to experience western romance (like you find in the movies) or simply to up sticks and seek new opportunities in the west.

Often such editorials only scratch the surface of Iran’s rich cultural heritage, offering us typical accounts of ‘when I told my friends and family I was going to Tehran, they looked at me as if I were taking a short break in Mordor’ and ‘nothing quite prepared me for the dust, noise and being swathed in fabric head to toe’. Don’t get me wrong, when I told my friends and family I was off to Iran for two weeks I, obviously like many others, was confronted with dumb-founded expressions and grew tired of comforting their fears that I might be taken hostage and paraded on Al Jazeera. However I don’t think I was unprepared to be ’swathed in fabric’ – I think that’s just ignorant. I lost count of the number of times I had to explain to people that wearing hejab is the law in Iran and of course I would need to wear hejab to abide by the law. The only way I felt I could describe this to others, with little knowledge about Iran, was by making a poor comparison between state law in the US. For example whilst the legal age of consuming alcohol may be 18 in one state it is quite possible that it may be 21 in another and just because you are old enough to drink in your home state it doesn’t mean you’re old enough to drink it in another state and must therefore stick to soft drinks unless willing to break the law. Tenuous or what!! but you get the point.

I thought that after visiting Iran I might write up my own experiences of life in a ‘closed society’ but to be honest every attempt I made followed a similar route – ‘it’s not what you’d think’, ‘that’s not what it’s like’, ‘it’s so different to how you imagine’. But the final nail in the coffin came as I read Rachel Cooke’s poor ‘Persian Pilgrim’ in the Observer (which I can’t seem to find an online link to). I think just about every third sentence riled me in some way and consequently I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how sincere you try to be in writing about your experience in Iran as a westerner usually you just end up sounding like a complete moron.

I haven’t seen a woman’s forearms, or even a wrist, for so long that my vision has adjusted; it’s like getting used to a black and white television, after colour all over again.

Repeating stereotypical notions of ‘chador-clad Islamists’ or ‘Down with America Friday prayers’ is something I wanted to move away from but in attempting to depict a ‘truer picture of Iran’ these always seem to end up being the starting point of conversation. In attempts to educate people about Iran it seems that we always need to address the media’s misrepresentation of Iranian culture and exaggerated stereotypes, which shape the public image of Iran in people’s mindsets. If I felt like being harsh I’d say that mostly people here are ignorant but that isn’t true. We are just bombarded by terrorist theories and images of brutality to instill fear and subsequently justify supposed preemptive strikes against Iran. In my opinion an attack on Iran is highly unlikely’ it’s just too infeasible. For a start there’s too many paykans in the way, but that’s another story’.

My time in Iran was spent making some wonderful friends, re-acquainting myself with an ex-colleague and inspirational information studies researcher, hunting down traditional Persian cuisine for the less traditional (i.e. veganised chelo kebabs, tadique and khoreshes), frequenting coffee shops, shopping in the bazaars and generally having the time of my life, rather than fantasising about ‘orange blossom and the sound of the muezzin dancing faintly on the breeze’ or ‘camels padding elegantly across sand, crowded but authentic bazaars, and caravanserai with vaulted ceilings and twirling grilles over their windows’. And I certainly didn’t spend as much time as this Cooke woman moaning about my ‘wretched scarf’.