Tea and Sympatico

Continuing with my theme of fruit and nuts for breakfast I'm merging this with today's daily prompt which is to share a comfort food that always cheers you up. For me that would be porridge. I love that there's no end to ways to 'pimp your porridge' with allsorts of different fruit and nut combinations. Porridge does not have to be boring! It's also a great breakfast when you are on a budget as oats are cheap and there's always good prices to be found on dried fruit and nuts. I am a big, big fan of Urban Fruit. They do a lovely range of dried fruits which they advertise as 'gently baked'. Whenever they are on offer I stock up. Recently our local Co-Op delisted a lot of lines and brought in new ones so I grabbed some bags of dried strawberries and dried cherries for bargain prices. I like that you can also pick up Urban Fruit in mini bags too. I love the pineapple for snacking on. Here's what the strawberries look like out of the bag....

I'm still on a mission to create the perfect homemade pizza and I think I'm there with the base and almost there with the sauce. We're still experimenting with various vegan shop bought and home made cheeses. I've been using my pizza stone and heating it for 10 minutes before I put the pizza on it. This weekend I made pizza twice and got the thinnest, crispiest base ever. The dough recipe was the  Easy Peasy dough recipe from Julie Hasson's Vegan Pizza book. I used 00 flour and Sweet Freedom for the sweetener. This dough could not be easier. You just mix the ingredients, cover with cling film and leave it for a few hours. There is no kneading involved! You can even throw it together in the morning and leave it in the fridge all day to roll out when you get home from work. That's my kind of fast food and this works out way cheaper (and tastier) than a homemade pizza. I also made a batch of coconut bacon from the recipe on the Fettle vegan blog. I made half the re...