Christmas Cooking

Hello

Hope you had a nice Christmas if you celebrate it, and a lovely day anyway if you don't.

I cooked lunch for my family this Christmas and thought I'd share some pictures of what we ate.

As soon as I saw this Double Stuffed Christmas Log recipe by Mouthwatering Vegan pop up online, I knew I had to try it. It looked so good, and it was. It tasted delicious and was pretty easy to make {though I had a bit of trouble rolling it up with out making a giant mess}! The rest of my non-vegan family liked it too so I would definitely recommend this recipe. This is what mine looked like:

{Not quite as pretty as Miriam's!}

It's double stuffed with a curried lentil mix and a hazelnut/herb mix. I really liked the hazelnuts - I think they were the perfect choice.

Then for dessert I decided to try making one of Emily from This Rawsome Vegan Life's raw desserts. I chose this Chocolate Mousse Tart with Lemon Cashew Cream because it sounded delicious.  And it was. The avacado-chocolate-cashew-lemon filling was awesome.

This was my first time making a raw dessert, but I was happy with how it turned out. I had a bit of an issue with the cashew cream, I think because my blender is so old it wasn't as smooth as I wanted it to be so I strained it through I fine sieve. I also found that some of the hard skins from the dates I used didn't blend up - I'm not sure if it was the dates or my terrible blender - but next time I would soak the dates first to soften them up. I was amazed by how sweet it was without added sugar!

And finally, I also made some vegan shortbread using the non-vegan recipe from the back of the rice flour packet and substituting the butter with Nuttelex.

7 Links

I wanted to share some links I've come across this week relating to animal issues, the environment and veganism...

Tiger nearly killed in making of Life of Pi

1. A couple of days a go this article came up on my dash:

Animals Were Harmed: Hollywood's Nightmare of Death, Injury and Secretary Exposed, a detailed article in the Hollywood Reporter that reveals how many animals have been negligibly injured and killed during the filming of Hollywood films such as Life of Pi, The Hobbit, HOB's Luck and many more.

I naively thought that nowadays there would be strict regulations in place to protect the well being of animals used in movies and that filmmakers would be forbidden from deliberately killing or harming animals for live action shots - but instead we have another corrupt system to add to our long list. Since reading Thanking the Monkey years ago I have opposed the use of wild animals for entertainment and films because wild animals have to be 'trained' to perform and do as they are told and this usually involves negative reinforcement such as hitting, prodding and beating.

And of course wild animals are just that, wild animals and cannot really ever be controlled. If they want to lash out at someone, they will.

This brings me to my second link...

2. Trainer Mauled by Tiger at Australia Zoo

The stupidity of the human race and the media never fails to amaze me. I think the outcome speaks for itself here. But I will say this - training tigers to interact with people and to perform tricks is not conservation.

3. Al Gore Goes Vegan

While I am a little skeptical about this one particularly since it also talks about Bill Clinton as being vegan when apparently he is not really vegan - though I believe he may have been vegan initially while he was trying to improve his health and now consumes much less meat and animal products than he used too. The article also says Gore reportedly switched to veganism for health reasons. While it would be great if this were true, even going mostly vegan or cutting down your meat/dairy intake is a good start so good on him. I do hope that environmentalists will take note of this too because there are a lot of environmental benefits to eating a plant based diet - mainly because livestock produce so much methane, factory farms and fish farms produce toxic run off and meat production uses huge amounts of water.

4. Two guardian articles about waste:

 Marine plastic pollution: the threat pervading Australia's waters

Ever since I watched Midway I have been deeply concerned about the amount of plastic waste ending up in our oceans. We really need to do something now. We need to stop over consuming and start cleaning up after ourselves - stop dropping cigarette butts all over the ground and being litter bugs - because sea animals and birds pay the price for our pollution - and we will to eventually if our ocean ecosystems die.

5. And the second article is more about priorities - What do we really need this Christmas?

And now for a happier story...

Cyrus the rescued roo

6. Cyrus the Roo rescued from Melbourne Airport has returned to the wild by Wildlife Victoria.

Last month an injured kangaroo was found confused and distressed trapped inside a pharmacy at Melbourne Airport. Goodness knows how he got in there? (it's hard enough to find your way around Airports as a human!). It was a very dangerous situation for him because kangaroos can die of stress, and it is really quite miraculous he survived it!

7. And lastly, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia but I do like these photos of lucky turkeys taken by Jo-Anne McArthur, who have been spared the dinner table and now live out their lives at Farm Sanctuary.

Cup Day: Why horse racing sucks

 "Every dollar you spend, or don't spend, is a vote you cast for the world you want." - LN Smith

In Australia Melbourne Cup Day is one of the biggest national holidays there is, and yet it is something that I am far from proud of. I guess horse racing is still seen as a national past time. But if you think about it horse racing is actually incredibly old fashioned. As a society our morals have changed quite a bit since the 19th century (though you could say this only really applies to human rights issues given how our society still uses and abuses animals) when horse racing was a hugely popular sport. Yet the workings of the racing industry have really not changed at all - thousands of horses are still bred, raced ruthlessly, and then sent to the knackery without the blink of an eye.

It is estimated that somewhere between 15,000 and 25, 000 ex-racing horses are slaughtered in Australia annually because they are no longer profitable to race and deemed too expensive to keep. This is beyond unacceptable.

The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses are currently campaigning for a 1% levy to be placed on all betting turnover and for this to be put towards re-homing and rehabilitating all ex-race horses. This is essentially, a call for the racing industry to clean up after itself and to take responsibility for the horses it breeds. The racing industry, according to CPR, currently funds only three horse re-homing programs which together re-home about 100 horses each year. This is just not enough.

I personally think it is wrong to use animals for entertainment and to make money like this anyway. But, at the very least I just want to see these horses taken care of instead of killed.

CRP have a petition calling on the racing industry to implement this 1% levy.

Please do not attend the races or bet on horses while this cruelty continues.

*Please note I believe the 40,000 per year figure quoted is incorrect - but in reality half that amount of deaths is still so wrong.

More info :

http://www.horseracingkills.com/the-issues/wastage

http://vimeo.com/78335503

https://www.facebook.com/coalitionfortheprotectionofracehorses?fref=ts

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/they-shoot-horses-dont-they-20130923-2u8nh.html

Cashew milk

I finally got my act together and tried making cashew milk. I've been meaning to make it for years ever since I tried someone else's homemade cashew milk and was amazed by how delicious it was,  but always put it off for lack of cheesecloth. So when I discovered an open packet of raw cashews in the pantry I thought the time had finally come!

I made my milk based on these two recipes:

 http://cookieandkate.com/2013/cashew-milk-recipe/

 http://theshiksa.com/2013/06/11/how-to-make-cashew-milk/

Sadly, I think my cashew-milk-making needs a bit of refinement. Even though I followed the recipes in terms of how much water I added, my milk seemed more watery than I expected. There were also some issues with excess grain sneaking through the strainer and into my glass - I may need to get a finer strainer for next time. My blender is also incredibly old - older than me in fact - so probably not the best at grinding up those cashews. I had a lot of pulp left over - more than was shown in the recipe which freaked me out a bit - but again it's probably the blender.

Both recipes say to add a sweeter, vanilla and salt to the mix. Not being a honey eater, I added a little Stevia powder to mine which I think worked well as I did not want the milk to be really sweet anyhow. Maybe next time I will try it without the sweetener just to see what it's like. The vanilla extract on the other hand I'm not so happy with. In my opinion it gives it a really strong vanilla flavor even though I only added a few tiny drops - and to be honest I don't really want my nut milk to taste like vanilla...so next time I'll try leaving that out too.

Since I have so much pulp left over, I am curious to see if I can use it to make something else - gonna have to do some investigating. If you have any tips I'd love to hear them.

** Update ** The milk tastes way better once it's chilled & the strong vanilla flavour faded

Also - I did not use *filtered water* like the recipes said. I do not drink filtered water nor do I have a water filter. I am a bit puzzled as to why every nut milk recipe I see says to use *filtered water* ? IS it simply that the 'types' of people who tend to be interested in drinking nut milk tend to also be health freaks? Or is it that one person used it and then everyone else based their recipes on theirs which used filtered water?...

Also discovered that you can freeze the leftover nut pulp and save it to use in baking or to sprinkle over cereals. Also stumbled upon this pin board which has a few nut pulp recipe ideas. I like the look of this fudge recipe.