Tea and Sympatico

I've just been writing a shopping list for this week's meals. There's gnocchi, lasagne, burger and chips on there. We're having pizza for tea tonight too. I crave comfort foods at this time of year. I'm trying to counter the carb overload by taking up a new exercise regime. I've recently dropped some hours at work and can't afford a gym membership so it exists of a stack of Davina McCall DVDs bought cheap off eBay and Amazon and two tins of baked beans for weights! Here's a little look at what I've been cooking recently. This Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese was something I made on our recent holiday to Suffolk. I'll be blogging about the places we found to eat soon. It's this recipe from Oh She Glows pimped up with some cubed Vegandeli chorizo . I've been sampling some of the Vegandeli slicing sausage range for an upcoming Can I Eat It? review and this was a great way to use it. I love a good roast dinner and we've been

Did you manage to get hold of a copy of the first issue of new magazine Vegan Life ? We were inspired by the article on a vegan wine and cheese evening and took advantage of an offer that Marks and Spencer's had on for 25% off 6 or more bottles of wine. It brought the price of this lot down to a fiver a bottle and we enjoyed trying them. My favourite was the third from the left, the PX. This was a crisp Chilean white. PX which is short for Pedro Ximenez is a grape usually associated with Spain and amazing sticky, sweet almost treacle toffee flavoured sherry. It was interesting to try it in a different style. M and S do a great job of labeling their wines as vegan and seeing as there is an M and S food at the end of our road we've been enjoying trying the range. Issue 2 of Vegan Life is out now. You can see a preview of it here . I read my copy cover to cover yesterday evening. It took me over 3 hours, there's so much in it. There's a really great range of featu

Matt's new job has taken him to the town of Ashton Under Lyne. After spending the last couple of years working in Manchester's Northern Quarter which caters brilliantly for vegans, he was a little worried about lunch options. Ashton however caters surprisingly well for non meat eaters. I joined him over there for lunch one Friday afternoon. Our choice of cafe was Topaz . Topaz is on the ground floor of a centre run by mental health charity, Mind. All of the food is vegetarian and most of it is either vegan or veganisable. They also use veg which they grow on their own allotment. Matt went for kolrabi fritters with a gorgeous sweet pepper dish. I had tagliatelle with homemade pesto, olives, broad beans and rocket. Both dishes were delicious and really fresh tasting. We managed to squeeze in some dessert too.  This chocolate cake was pretty good but the real star was this apple crumble and custard. We had a quick chat with the head chef Kevin before