Tea and Sympatico

We've just had a little visit to London and were lucky enough to be able to house sit for some friends whilst they were off to a wedding in Vegas. We were based in Hackney and had the fab co-operatively run Black Cat Cafe within walking distance. Seeing as we arrived on a Thursday evening and Thursday is pizza night at Black Cat it would have been wrong not to sample some. Pizza is available by the slice or as in my case you can order a whole one to yourself. It was fantastic vegan pizza with chargrilled veg, pesto, tomato sauce and a generous amount of cheese. Matt went for the lasagna and declared it the best lasagna he'd ever eaten outside of his own home. I tried some and can concur, it was wonderful. In total our meal came to £21. Not pictured are two Whole Earth Colas and a big chunk of Rocky Road we took home to share. For home cooked organic food I thought that this was fantastic value, particularly for London. The following morning we headed to Borough Marke

A few weeks ago I was looking in a kitchen cupboard at my mum's house and to my surprise I found this! It's my notebook from after school cookery club at Primary school. There was also two other of my childhood books - a sweet making book and one with nursery rhymes and recipes that go with them by the Milk Marketing Board! Flicking through this little orange notebook I can remember the excitement of making the recipes they contained. It also made me laugh how many of the recipes contained lard! This was the 1970's remember. I've decided to have a go at veganising and de-larding some of the recipes and I thought I'd start with Raspberry Buns. My new version with the altered ingredients gives more of a biscuit than a bun and also more of a pronounced coconut flavour but these were oh so good and the revamped recipe is definitely a keeper. It's also like the original a nice easy one for kids to make and would be equally at home as part of an afternoon tea.

A while ago I got an email from a company in China called Teavivre asking if I would like to try some samples of their teas. Teavivre is run by a group of tea lovers from China, Canada and France and they will ship Chinese teas worldwide. They also offer free samples with each order. Lots of their teas are organic and their website is packed with information on all things tea related. My samples arrived and one rainy Sunday afternoon I assembled a team of tea tasters comprising of Matt, Ann and Rae. Although tea is in my blog title I must confess that I am no expert and apart from Lapsang Souchong I don't drink any Chinese tea at home. Luckily Rae does and brought along all the correct brewing gear as well as his tea knowledge. We got to learn all about washing leaves, optimum water temperature, brewing times etc. This special teapot has a section in the middle for the leaves which you fill with water and then when the brewing time is up you press a button to release the

A couple of weekend's ago we headed down to Dorset for the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival . It's the third year we've been and we knew that there wouldn't be too much vegan food so we filled the cool bag before we set off. I thought I'd do a little food diary of what we enjoyed over the weekend. Not pictured are several Marks and Spencers salads from the 2 for £3 range and also packets of Jamie Oliver ready cooked grain mixes. The Moroccan Apricot and Chickpea one is my favourite and makes a great picnic tea with some chopped avocado. We also had TLT bagels (BBQ tempeh, rocket and tomato) which somehow we forgot to photograph. We stopped for a service station pitstop on the way there as it's such a long drive, around 7 hours! This involved Costa Soya Lattes and a shared wholemeal pasty. We kept breakfasts simply with a home made luxury museli mix. We bought a base mix from Unicorn Grocery and added loads of nuts and dried fruits. This was topped with peaches