Home cooking

Christmas dinner seems to be one of those last remaining bastions of meat eaters. From what I can gather it's a meal a lot of people couldn't imagine without meat. This post serves to answer one of my favourite questions when people find out I'm vegan and ask in horror: "But what do you eat for Christmas dinner? How can you not eat pigs in blankets?!"

For the third year in a row my family let me cook Christmas dinner. Previous years have involved gin-infused sorrows over celeriac, raw sweet potato and trout turned an awful shade of pink thanks to some wayward beetroot. This year, I guess after cooking with so many amazing seasonal vegetables all winter, I decided to pare everything down and just focus on some great flavours, like cranberry, sprouts, apples roasted in rosemary and mashed butternut squash. There was so much more I wanted to try out, but I ended up just choosing a few recipes I'd already cooked loads over the past few months (as you can see from December's blog roll) and could handle after four of my brother's lethal mojitos.

I guess I'm pretty lucky that the rest of my family let me hijack Christmas dinner once more- and other families have a lot of traditions that won't get changed by someone being vegan. My Dad also cooked vegetarian toad in the hole for the rest of the family, and my Mum went to town on some crazy puddings that never seemed to stop coming out the oven.

This was my first Christmas as a vegan, but it wasn't hard, it was easy. Yes there were no chocolate coins or mince pies, but I also ate about five more roast potatoes each time someone else had a slice of Yule log. I think if you know eating a vegan meal alongside everything  your family holds dear for Christmas dinner is possible, it's another brain hurdle that suddenly isn't so hard to get past, and not really all that hard to imagine. I hope you all had an amazing Christmas!

Home truths: on battling temptation in Florence

A few photos from a recent teensy-tiny mini break to Florence with my best friend Rach. And now for some home truths: it was the hardest place as a vegan that I've visited so far.

Obviously I was expecting to have to navigate around towers of ice cream and fresh egg pasta, and after nearly a year of veganism it always gets easier to say no, but somehow, when everyone around you is taking their food so refreshingly seriously, it was even more frustrating when I couldn't try what I'm sure would be some of the best produce in the world.

I guess it's an unsaid fact of being vegan, especially after more than 20 years of eating otherwise- it's not an overnight change, and sometimes, when taken out of your comfort zone, those die-hard convictions get harder to locate. It's something I've rarely heard any of my other vegan friends discuss, and yet I'm sure we all have weeks or holidays or even a bad Monday morning when it would be so much easier to not be vegan.  No-one brings it up because no-one wants to admit that dramatically altering your entire lifestyle, whilst you believe it's the right thing to do, can also feel totally alienating and sometimes even isolating. When I started this blog I wanted to give an honest account of a vegan lifestyle, which is why I think it's also vital to deal with the reality of when being vegan isn't as easy as it should be.

You don't start hating cheese, eggs, or crème brûlée over night after deciding to change your diet- you just begin to stop thinking of it as the food you'll chose to consumer again. And I think it's that choice, and your reasons for making it, to keep a hold of. If you keep the facts, figures, reality, and more often than not- Ellen DeGeneres' voice in your head, you'll make it through.

So I ordered bruschetta and chamomile tea as main courses, and of course even this was done to perfection. I also chose pizza without cheese and just vegetable toppings, and a lot of olives and grapes to see me through the day. Just visiting the Mercato Centrale every morning was enough of a sensory overload- wheel barrows full of sundried tomatoes, the smell of porcini mushrooms heavy in the air. There are a few restaurants in Florence that specialise in vegan and vegetarian cooking, so if you're planning a visit soon I'd recommend giving those a try.

As for my trip? Well, I didn't get to eat my body weight in ice cream everyday like Rach, but I did get to drink a ton of out-of-this-world black coffee from every street-side kiosk I came across, and I came back more certain than ever of my convictions. And there's few things more important than that, right?