Kate L Pugh - Cookery Diary

This is highly experimental. Don't be surprised if I get fed up of updating it. It's dual-purpose - first, it'll give new vegans or people thinking about becoming vegan an idea of what a real actual vegan eats day-to-day; and second, it'll encourage me to cook properly instead of living on toast.

Week Beginning Sunday 4 March 2001

Sunday

• Breakfast: Wholemeal toast with Marmite and peanut butter, orange juice, lovely fresh coffee with soya milk.
• Lunch: Hm, which bit was lunch? Probably the packet of Cauldron Foods Marinated Tofu Pieces that I ate at around 4pm.
• Supper: Basmati rice done in rice cooker, (bell) pepper and tomato curry, chickpea (garbanzo bean) and potato curry (see below).

Tesco Direct order came this afternoon, so I made up some wholemeal muffins with Marmite and peanut butter ready for next week's breakfasts, and popped them in the freezer. It's probably not too healthy to have the same breakfast every day, and I'm going to do a wheat-free week at some point (mainly so I can get an idea of how to cater for gluten-free diets), so I should think of something else similarly convenient to try instead.

I wandered down to the kitchen in the late afternoon, and there were people around watching TV, so I hung about and cooked.

• I had a couple of parboiled potatoes in the fridge left over from doing too many for last week's samosa experiment, so I cubed those and redid the samosa filling as before, except the carrots were cubed and microwaved, and I added a rinsed tin of chickpeas (garbanzo beans) instead of the frozen peas, and I sprinkled over a bit of hot chilli powder with the turmeric. Fried it lots and it made a very nice dry curry.
• Trying to get rid of more of those bloody potatoes, I made some Greek Lentil Soup for the freezer. And to go with the potato-chickpea curry, I did some rice in the rice cooker, and made Green Pepper & Tomato Curry. The green pepper curry made three small side portions, of which I fridged two, and the potato-chickpeas curry made two and a half main portions, of which I fridged 1 1/2.

Monday

Not much cooking going on today; got a sandwich from Alpha for lunch, since I'd not had one for ages. Yum.

Tuesday

• Breakfast: Wholemeal muffin as made on Sunday night, orange juice.
• Lunch: Potato and chickpea curry, tomato and green pepper curry, basmati rice, all from the cooking spree on Sunday night. Mmmmm. It really feels like a feast when you have a couple of contrasting curry dishes together.
• Supper: Decided to have a go of a mushroom stroganoff, and finally settled on Tara's Mushroom & Seitan Stroganoff. I followed that recipe pretty much, but added some white wine with the lemon juice, and left out the tarragon (I'd run out). Oh, I also let the seitan marinade in about a teaspoon of soy sauce before frying it, and I sliced the onions instead of chopping, and gave them a bit of a head start on the cooking because I don't like partly-cooked onions. It didn't look like much, but it was pretty tasty. The tahini worked quite well in place of the sour cream to thicken the sauce. Next time I make this I'll be sure to end up with lots and lots of sauce, since that's what I remember liking about the stroganoff my dad used to cook when I was little. I served this over the rest of Sunday's rice, and with some microwaved green beans. There's one portion left over, which is now in the fridge.

Wednesday - Saturday

Wasn't actually feeling too great the rest of this week, so didn't do any interesting cooking.