Tea and Sympatico

We have a 1 hour pilates class where I work at 8am on a Tuesday. Today is our last class for a while as our teacher is heading back to her native Brazil for a month. We decided to have breakfast together after the class before diving into a days work. My contribution was pumpkin muffins using this Vegan With A Vengeance recipe with a cup full of chocolate chips thrown in - it is breakfast after all!

I am so lucky to live in a town where there are good vegan food shopping options. In the city centre there are several streets of Chinese, Thai and Japanese supermarkets in the Chinatown area. On my way home from work, in the heart of student land, there is the long established Eighth Day Health food shop which is run as a co-operative and all items are vegetarian or vegan. They have a whole aisle of chocolate and are good for raw food items too. I live at the end of the Curry Mile in Rusholme so there are several great value Asian grocers in amongst the cafes and restaurants. A bus ride away in my old neighbourhood of Chorlton is the Unicorn Grocery . The Unicorn is also a co-op which has grown and grown over the years and could now be described as a vegan supermarket! They also have the best shopping bags around which you can compost after they've worn out. Parsnips on Tour is one of my favourites. The little bags are perfect for packed lunches. For several years they got cus...

I had a train ride out to Yorkshire yesterday. It was nice to gaze out of the window for an hour at the snow covered hills before I got off in Sowerby Bridge to meet my old college friend Sarah. We try to meet up several times at year at the fab completely vegan restaurant in the town – Dandelion and Burdock . We were gabbing far too much for me to remember to take a picture of the main course. Sarah had the vegetable biriyani and I had a creamy, herby roasted root vegetable penne dish. Both were fresh, colourful and flavoursome with decent sized portions. We managed to fit in desserts. I had the cranberry, orange, chocolate teabread that was stacked with vanilla ice cream and drizzled in chocolate sauce. Sarah went for the rice pudding with rum and raisins. Both were great comfort foods for a winter day. Sarah lives just up the road from the restaurant and I love going there with her. She was the person who taught me to cook 20 years ago when we were poor students living in shared hou...

Do you have a favourite cookie cutter? I got this set 2 years ago for Christmas and have only just got round to using them. I think in the back of my mind I thought they were going to be complicated to use but they weren't. The cookies were fun to cut and they came out really well. I used this simple sugar cookie recipe and chucked in a teaspoon of cinammon too. They were finished off with just a dusting of icing sugar but would be great iced too. They are from the RSPB website and they are selling them at half price at the moment.

Today was a trip to Ikea. Seeing as I went to get a cupboard that is on the website but when we got there found it has been delisted and is not available, it was a bit of a disappointment. However, the nearest Ikea to my home is in Ashton and it turns out that Topaz Social Centre is only a few streets away. I had heard good things about the vegetarian cafe there so Steve and I went for lunch. We were blown away by how good the food was. Falafel burger, sweet potato wedges, lemon pesto pate, white bean hummus, carrot cake, parkin, hot chocolate and coffee – everything was excellent quality and as it is run as a not for profit enterprise it was also extremely well priced. Friendly staff and nice cosy atmosphere too. Back home there was the usual flat pack frustration putting together the one item I was able to purchase but I ended up pleased with my little set of drawers that I'm going to use for spices and teas. There's still a few days left to enter my MoFo Tea Cosy competiton...

These are another of the things I decided to veganise for last Sunday's CLF meeting. Bakewell tarts and puddings are an English invention from the Derbyshire town of Bakewell. You can read about how they were invented here . I've never attempted them before and I was really pleased how they turned out. They were delish, miles better tasting than I remember Mr Kiplings being (too sickly sweet) and pretty easy to do. Check out this old Mr Kiplings advert which demonstrates how they're made. I cheated and used Jus Roll ready made shortcrust pastry. I rolled this out, cut circles with my biggest circular cookie cutter and then pressed the pastry down into muffins pans. After pricking the pastry with a fork it was blind baked for 10 mins at Gas 5/ 190C/ 375F. When they came out I put a layer of strawberry jam in the bottom of the pastry case. For the filling I made up half of the mixture from the Bakewell Slice recipe in The Return of the Cake Scoffer . They went back in the o...

Yesterday was a busy day. I'm off this week but I was still up at the crack of dawn to go to the pre-work pilates class we have every Tuesday. Next, I met my friend Dale for coffee a veggie breakfast before we caught a train to Liverpool to see some more of the Biennial before it finishes. We headed to the Tate first and then took in Bluecoat , Open Eye and Fact . We also managed to fit in a search of the shops for little bottles to decant my liqueurs into but didn't have any luck finding any. We stopped for a well earned tea break at Brew , an interesting independent tea bar on Bold Street, we've been meaning to try for a while and we were really impressed by it. I enjoyed a matcha, vanilla latte and Dale had a Christmas tea which had pine needles in it and smelled amazing, like a cross between Christmas trees and mince pies. In the evening we had a swift half in the Philharmonic Dinning Rooms , famous for it's lavishly decorated gents toliets! This was followed b...