Tag: Vegan
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The milkman returns!
When I was a child we had milk delivered in glass bottles to our front door. The milkman would come each morning, collect the empty bottles we left out, and deliver new full bottles of milk. It was a wonderful system that sadly became unpopular when I was still little. Today, for the first time…
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Burns supper 2021
It was Robert Burns’ birthday on January 25th and Scots celebrate it with a Burns supper. This is fast becoming one of my favourite annual events, perhaps because it doesn’t have the same heavy expectations that come with Christmas. We celebrated it a bit late because the 25th fell on Monday this year and we’re…
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My awesome bike and veggie Chinese takeaway
The best thing about these dark days is how awesome my bike looks. If you’re looking for a good Christmas present for someone who likes to eat a lot of plants then I recommend The Veggie Chinese Takeaway Cookbook. Who doesn’t like Chinese takeaway? I made the hoisin sauce today then used it in one…
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Lorry queues, supermarket queues, food production, and Christmas dinner
Victoria helped me wrap some presents today. Actually, she was a right nuisance and ended up tearing the paper. I went to the shops early this morning to beat the rush but still there was a long queue outside the food court at Marks & Spencer. I decided not to go in. I’m not a…
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You have to murder to call it a burger
The Dutch comedian Arjen Lubach launched this satirical marketing video for the meat industry this week to highlight an upcoming EU parliament vote on whether to ban meat-related names for plant-based products. The marketing video starts at 2:47 so you’ll have to fast-forward to then as the first part of the video is in Dutch…
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Half my life
I’m 45 today. If I’m lucky enough to live to 90 then I have lived half my life. I hope I’m still riding my bike at 90. You’re only as old as you feel or, as Groucho Marx once said, “You’re only as old as the woman you feel”. I heard another quote recently that…
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Roots Catering, science experiments, and my crochet fox
We splashed out and ordered the three-course meal from Roots Catering on Friday night. Roots is an Aberdeen vegan food business. In normal times they sell vegan burgers by the beach. During lockdown they switched to an online purchase and delivery model for their burgers. Once a week they do a decadent three-course meal which…
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Piling on the pounds
I’ve put on a kilogram of weight over the past couple of months. I would like to say it’s extra muscle from doing Joe Wicks’s PE class every day – after all, muscle weighs more than fat – but I think that’s wishful thinking. Perhaps I just need to accept that I’m nearly 45 and…
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Chocolate almond cake recipe
I’ve had a request for my chocolate cake recipe. This is what I make with the almond pulp which is leftover from making almond milk. You can use any flour in this recipe. I have used so many different types over the past couple of months because the shops have run out of regular wheat…
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Doing nothing
I’m not very good at doing nothing. All my life I’ve dashed around in a frantic state of constant busy-ness. Work fills the weekdays, kid stuff the evenings, and weekends we ferry kids around to activities or go exploring in the highlands. Since the start of the lockdown, our weekends have changed and I’ve been…
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Eating weeds
When everyone was panic-buying in March I saw some stinging nettle springing up in our backyard and decided to leave it there rather than weed it out. Stinging nettle is a highly nutritious food. It has anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties as well as being high in calcium and iron. How do you eat it…
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Ramblings on cycling, the pandemic, and climate change
I had such a busy week this week that I haven’t had the chance to write since last weekend. It has been mostly work-related busy but also some cycling advocacy busy-ness too. We at the Aberdeen Cycle Forum published a list of ten suggestions for the city council to implement for social distancing. So far…
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The Dirty Vegan and a momentous announcement from the government today
I found a new vegan cookbook today. When I first went vegan they were hard to find but they started breeding a few years ago and now you can find them everywhere. This particular one appealed to me because the author does not exactly fill the weedy hippie vegan stereotype. Indeed, there’s nothing sexier than…
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The future of meat
Eating animals poses a major global health risk and the costs are enormous and they’re not borne only by the meat-eaters themselves nor by the animals but by everybody on the planet whether they eat meat or not. I say this because we’ve seen this over and over again that epidemics and pandemics have come…
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Testing capacity in the UK and cruciferous vegetables
The UK seems to be finally catching up to Germany in terms of testing capacity, albeit a couple of months late. I’m not 100% sure why it has taken so long but the government here says it’s because we don’t or didn’t have much of a diagnostics industry in the UK. I think there’s some…
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May you live through interesting times
There’s a Chinese curse, may you live through interesting times. On a personal level, the Christchurch earthquakes make this pandemic seem like a walk in the park because that was a much tougher period of time for us. Nevertheless, both events brought strange changes and have made me think of the Chinese curse. But there…
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There’s no escaping the trade-off
It was kind of surreal to see headlines this week like, “Prime Minister is breathing on his own” and “Prime Minster able to take short walks“. No one could ever have imagined this a couple of months ago. The latest news is that the Prime Minister appears to be recovering and has left intensive care.…
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All humans must self-isolate by order of the Daleks
I saw this on Twitter yesterday. I don’t know where it was taken but it’s obviously somewhere in the UK – the scenery, the sky, the houses, the signs, and the Dalek on the left side of the road all point to somewhere in the UK. Things are getting pretty serious. pic.twitter.com/OLc6egO9V5 — Ben (@Jamin2g)…
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Music, privilege, and virus incubators
Some music. This is Elizabeth playing The Blue Danube. I learned recently that Aberdeen has been through all this lockdown business once before. In 1964 there was a typhoid outbreak and schools were closed, there were travel bans, and people died. The source of the outbreak was a single tin of corned beef. Meat is…
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A bumblebee, extraordinary changes for the UK, and thoughts on mother’s day for the most abused of all mothers
I got stung by a bumblebee yesterday for the first time in my life. Since all our usual Saturday activities were cancelled I took the opportunity to do some gardening and as I put on my gardening gloves I felt a sharp prick. Thinking it was a spider (I’m terrified of spiders and yes I…
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