In an unprecedented fit of Being Prepared (don’t expect one again soon), I thought I might just make me a breakfast smoothie the night before.

When stopping by the supermarket after work, I noticed the cherries were marked down, and thought they’d make for a nice smoothie. Since they didn’t look like they’d last that long, I figured I’d best make that smoothie on the day of purchase. While I’m not strict about keeping breakfast foods specifically for breakfast, or even labelling certain foods as strictly “breakfast”, “lunch”, “dinner”, or “snack”, I thought the smoothie would make a better breakfast than desert/random snack.
Besides, I wasn’t particularly peckish.

Anyway, here are the ingredients:

Because cherries are so nice and red, I thought I’d better not muck that up by chucking in some spirulina tablets. I also made sure to not use too much soymilk. I did sprinkle in the probiotic powder, though.

Just after blending:

It turned a very nice pink, darker than the smoothies I make using berries.

Here’s what it looked like in the morning:

Like the previous time I used probiotic powder, the smoothie acquired a thick bubbly layer, which you can see in the picture. No pancake batter-smell, though. It didn’t taste as cherry-ish as I’d hoped and some of the pink prettiness had gone, but it was still a good smoothie. And preparing breakfast the day before is really quite convenient…
Next time I might try something cherry without the white powder, though.

Again two things.

One, my SIGG bottle seems to have reverted to it’s leaky state again, which is confusing. If I have it closed and suck out some water from the leak (yes, it’s possible. And weird. But possible. Yet weird. And kind of icky), it won’t leak while in my bag, but as soon as I open it up again the leakiness starts again.
And this time it seems to actually flow, when before, it was just this one slow drop.

I think I have a vague grasp of the basic physics behind the sometimes-leakiness, so that bit doesn’t surprise me too much, but I still don’t get why it goes from leaky to not leaky to (more selectively) leaky again.
Looks like it’s really time to get me a new one, though…

Two, I have that “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)” feature going, which seems like a nice way of stumbling across similar and possibly interesting posts.
However, the few posts I checked were either not at all related, like the Holocaust train one mentioned below, or only sort of related but not particularly interesting (though to be fair, I only clicked, like, five of them). Those kind of related ones were usually not actually any kind of similar to my post. Just a vaguely similar basic topic (smoothie, festival, vegetables) that make it so I can at least sort of get where it’s coming from with the automated generation but still don’t make it actually related.

Also, it only seems to work half the time. The post about me visiting my grandparents had a post about some Holocaust train reaching Auschwitz as a possibly related post (Yeah, I’m still confused what made the automated generator give me that, though at least after actually reading it the post’s title no longer confuses me about the times we’re living in. The only connection I can think of is that park where I hung out. Some Jews spent part of the war there and it had some monument about that. I’m pretty sure I made no mention of that in my post, though. Anyway), but when I click on that post now, I only get that link about half the time.
Strange…

Since I still occasionally think of that carob-banana smoothie, I thought I’d prepare me some sort of approximation of it since I still don’t actually have the proper ingredients.
However, I now have spirulina (tablets, not powder, but they’re no match for my trusty immersion blender), and if carob subs for cocoa, cocoa can sub for carob.

Ingredients:

This is the first time I added some kind of sweetener to a smoothie. I think I also put some good old flax seeds in it, but forgot to put them in the picture.

Smoothie:

At first the colour was a little greenish, so I added some more cocoa. It still had this slight spirulina taste, but that’s okay. The chocolate flavour wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, but it was still pretty damn good.
I still want to try me that carob one, though.

With all this smoothie talk, I’ve been wondering. When do you go from smoothie to shake? I’m not 100% sure, but it is possible I may have actually had an official MacDonalds milkshake at some point, way back when I still occasionally ate there. And what I have here? That’s the kind of thing I tend to see as a milkshake. Of course, McDo’s only had the chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla option, and anything not very, very fruity kind of feels more like that than a smoothie, but still. I’m so confused.

Today we had the Dunya festival (Dutch site) here in Rotterdam, a free festival with lots of world music. Mostly by artists I’ve not heard of before and will likely not hear much from again (though I do intend to remember Daby Touré), but that doesn’t mean it’s not good fun.

While I generally feel food at festivals is somewhat overpriced (but then I generally think that of prepared food), there is generally at least some vegan stuff on offer here and I usually end up buying some snacks even though you usually spent a lot more time waiting for your turn than actually eating the food.

This year’s loot:

Churros:

Bara:

Churros is a Spanish snack. Basically it’s fried dough with something sweet (sugar, cinnamon sugar, some kind of syrup) or possibly savoury on it. I’ve had them before, since I find random vegan snacks hard to resist at times, but I’m always vaguely disappointed. It’s nice enough, I suppose, but I don’t really have that much of a sweet tooth and after eating one or two bits, it simply becomes more bland sugary food. Which I figured out pretty quickly, but I still occasionally cave when I see a churros stand.

The bara was much more enjoyable, though. It’s a savoury snack from Suriname, also fried. And the ones you get here are properly fresh and crispy, not that soggy, dense microwaved nonsense you get at some surifood places.
Next time I see a churros stand, I’ll promise myself two baras if I can walk past it. One bag of churros is almost the same price of two baras, anyway.

As it was a free festival with a fair bit of sponsoring and ideological and governmental stands trying to educate the public about a whole bunch of very important issues, there were some people handing out free stuff and asking the public to sign petitions. I avoided the petitions (unless they specifically tell me what they intend to do with them, they always seem like a waste of paper to me) and most of the pointless freebies, but still managed to get me a zip-loc baggie containing condoms, safe sex booklets, and a lollipop from the nice people at the local GGD stand and a bag with posters from a nice woman from a local anti-discrimination foundation. (Dutch site)
Now I just have to find places to hang the posters…

For some more good news, the leak in my SIGG bottle seems to have fixed itself after all. I have no idea why it took so much longer this time, but I’m very happy about it.

ETA: Because I really did like Daby Touré, I figured I might as well share some.

A few days ago I bought some pre-cut/washed/prepare/whatever stir-fry veg which really needed eating. I kept putting it off for very important reasons I completely forgot, but in the end I made some anyway because if I hadn’t, the veg would’ve gone bad.

The veg along with all the other stuff I used:

I made sure to chuck in the seitan since I have some vague plans of trying a short-term gluten-free project in the near future. Or at least wheat-free, I might still use me some oatmeal (or is that also gluten-free?). There are no health reasons for me to do so, and I do generally quite like wheat-based things, but I would like to try going without for a while. Partly to see if it makes any kind of difference to my general well-being, and partly just because it seems like an interesting challenge.
Though if I buy any of the bread, it’d better have more flavour than the stuff they briefly had at a restaurant where I used to work years ago when they had a coeliac customer. That stuff was vile.

Anyway, back to the more current food. It’s kind of like the
bami I made some time ago except not really. Well, the method of preparation is pretty much the same (except that this time I accidentally burned bits), but the result had a very different taste due to the different veg and spices used.

Not-bami:

It was quite nice, and quite different from what I expected. As I only used half the pre-prepared veg and froze the leftover half, I might just try and make it again. Provided I still have some pepper left, at least.

Yesterday I went to visit my grandparents, something I generally quite enjoy. Apart from liking seeing my grandparents again, I always like visiting them because their train station has a lovely Israeli eatery right next to it, Mc Levi’s, which sells some pretty tasty falafel.
I got me some, of course.

Picture:

Since I was in a bit of a hurry preparing lunch before running off to catch my train (which I missed, so I needn’t have hurried quite so much), I skipped breakfast, so effectively, this was my breakfast.
I like this kind of breakfast.

After a nice visit I looked for the tourist office to see if I could get my hands on some maps for some of the local hiking routes. However, even though I consulted a map at least four times and it should’ve been just around the corner, I didn’t actually manage to find the blasted thing.
Weirdness!
I’ll admit to being a bit grouchy due to not having eaten for a while, but this should not have impaired my map-reading and orientation skills to the point where they didn’t seem to even exist, so I’m blaming some vague PTB responsible for either city planning, map-drawing, or both there for my inability to locate their precious tourist office.
Anyway, after walking through every street in the general area a few times I decided that, since it was already a bit late to start a proper hike, I’d just walk around the estate near the station (Dutch site) for a bit after finding a nice spot there for eating my packed lunch.

Containers of lunch and liquids:

Contents (solids only):

Part of the view:

I didn’t manage to eat everything I packed, but it was a very enjoyable meal even if the rice cakes had gotten a little soft.

Unfortunately, my trusty SIGG bottle has been a little leaky since the last time I dropped it. Previously, leaks would miraculously disappear within hours, but this one hasn’t managed so far, so I suspect it’s time to acquire a new one.
Shame, really. I’ve grown rather fond of this print and I don’t think it’s made anymore. Still, it’ll give me an excuse to check out various outdoor shops to see what they have on offer.

While the estate was rather landscaped, it was a nice place to amble for a while. There were many birds, and I even saw me some rodents. One I suspect may well have been a squirrel, and the other I couldn’t quite see well enough to even guess. Probably some kind of mouse, though. A capibara would be most unlikely.

After a decent walk I took a train home (well, three trains, technically). A slightly different route to the one I took to get there, but time-wise it didn’t make much of a difference. I just had to switch trains one extra time. While I normally prefer to avoid this, it did make me getting out at Utrecht CS a certainty. And since Utrecht CS has a Shakies (Dutch site), I was pretty pleased with this non-recommended alternative.

While, according to their website, Shakies still has that vegan artichoke tapenade and rucola option I got last time, it wasn’t actually available here. Then again, the site mentions some wrap thing being available in certain places, Utrecht CS among them, and there was no mention of that either (though I do think I spotted some samosas in the oven. Couldn’t get those last time), so maybe the site is in need of an update. It could certainly use some re-design to make it easier to navigate.
Still, the person behind the counter was completely unfazed by my enquiry regarding vegan toppings and simply put the pesto and sun-dried tomato from two other toppings together to make something vegan, which was very nice of her. The two rather strong flavours made it a bit too rich for me, though.
Unfortunately, the whole-meal bagels are still not vegan, and the vegan shake is still the same berry thing they’ve always had. I was seriously considering getting one of the juices for some variation, but since there are quite a few options there (well, about five…), I couldn’t choose before having to state my preference, so I went with the default.

Bagel and shake:

It was a good day.

For some non-foodie stuff, two things.

One, I made me a nifty custom header to replace the spacey one.
I loved the spacey one, and I’m all in favour of outer space photography in general (Nasa has a whole bunch of them available online, if you, too, are into that sort of thing), but it wasn’t particularly vegan-related.
So I thought I’d make my own. I like the GIMP, and I’d taken some pictures of a pretty lilac shrub in a nearby park and didn’t think putting the two together to produce something acceptable would be too difficult.
Now I know lilacs aren’t commonly eaten and don’t generally tend to make a person think of veganism, but they’re among my favourite trees. We had one in the garden of the house where we lived when I was younger, and I always loved that one.
Besides, it has twigs. That makes it sort of related to my blog, right?

A quick Google search told me that the flowers are actually edible, so I really want to find something fun to do with them now and properly associate them with vegan food. Or do something with other edible flowers. Not sure it’s advisable to eat ones from a public park, though.
The lilac is related to the olive tree, apparently. I’d never have guessed that.

Two, I have some more Nutrition Data-love.
After having some nice info about vegetarianism around Earth Day, Nutrition Data recently put up a profile of Troy Loferski, a vegan body builder, showing all the world, or at least the part of the world that reads the Nutrition Data blog, that it’s perfectly possible to be a muscle-loving athlete while being vegan.
Yay!

I already knew this, of course, but the rest of the world doesn’t seem particularly aware of all the joys of veganism, so posts like this on omni (or at least not specifically vegan) blogs make me happy.

Yesterday I stopped by the organic grocer for some fruit and veg and some breakfast things.

Among other things, I bought some of that large chard (or whatever the English word for snijbiet is), some tomatoes, the vine of which had a peculiar yellow glow that fascinated me, and some tiny daikon-like things called ijspegels (icicles), which I thought was just too adorable even though I’m not particularly fond of radish-y foods.

Look!

At the time it seemed like ingredients for a nice salad to accompany whatever soup I was planning to make in my spiffy new 5l pan, but when I got home and played with the internet for a bit, I learned that those large chard leaves can be rather bitter when eaten raw, so I thought it might be nicer stir-fried and I decided the soup could wait.
I defrosted some tempeh, made some gingery-y sauce using shoyu, random spices, and some of the passata I still had left from earlier (and actually added a tiny bit of cocoa. Totally Sinead’s fault. To be honest, it didn’t seem to do much, but I’ll keep at it), and one of the tomatoes, and chucked the whole thing into my frying pan in what I assumed would be the correct order (tempeh, leafy stuff, chopped tomato, sauce) and waited until I figured it’d be done.
Somehow I didn’t expect the darling icicles to go well with this, so I’m just randomly snacking on them.
Not more than two at the time, though. Any more will be too much radish for me.

Result:

I again neglected to prepare a proper grain base and I was too lazy to prepare the leftover pappadums, so it’s a pretty basic meal.
Nice, though.
I’m starting to really appreciate sautéed leafy greens, though I still have to figure out what sauce would be nicest to add. Probably something simpler than what I concocted.

The tempeh seems a little off, however. While it’s pleasant enough when its built-in flavour is hidden by some kind of sauce, it’s not that good on it’s own. I’m not sure if it’s this batch or whether I went wrong with storing it somewhere, but it’s a bit annoying. I have one more part of this batch (I tend to cut it in three and freeze it) and I’ll probably crumble it into some tomato-y sauce.
Might even make some pasta to go with it.
No promises, though.

Because I can’t currently think of tomatoes without thinking of a particular Fry&Laurie sketch, I thought I’d best share the fun:

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to use the word cancie-wancie in front of a patient during my future career. Or the smack-faerie…

So these were the vegetables I had other plans for. Admittedly, I didn’t actually do with them what I’d planned.
The original plan was some kind of garlic-y fried aubergine salad with chopped tomato and bell pepper, but that one required the aubergine laying around at room temperature for about an hour before eating, and I don’t tend to think ahead much.
Also, I’m not particularly fond of aubergines and don’t really know what to do with them. While I asked around for a bit and got told about the basics for the salad (the tomato and bell pepper would’ve been my own additions), I only remembered half of the instructions and only had half the ingredients available.

Since I still had the leftover beans from the soup on my mind, I thought I’d make me some chili instead. I don’t remember ever hearing about anyone eating anything chili-like with aubergines, but that doesn’t matter.

I thought I still had a jar of brown beans left, but I must’ve eaten those already. Can’t remember when, but whatever. Luckily I still had a tin of broad beans, because the amount of black beans I had left wouldn’t have made much chili.

Ingredients:

I cut the aubergine into strips and fried them with the cut-up leek and a huge clove of garlic (two down, two more to go). After a short while I added the cut-up bell pepper, then the tomato, the beans, and a bunch of random spices. Some chicken spice mix, fenugreek, cinnamon, turmeric, and pepper. Possibly nutmeg as well, but I’m not sure.
Nothing I particularly associate with chili, though the chicken spice mix may have contained some cumin.
After adding the spices I added some passata to make it more tomato-y.
Usually I add a jar of sweet corn to my chili, but I didn’t really feel like that today.

Food:

The end result was tasty and satisfying, though the aubergine strips very rather tough and chewy. Which was actually kind of nice in this dish, which was otherwise rather mushy, but it probably means I was doing it wrong somewhere.
Still, what I normally don’t really like about aubergine is the weird texture, and though this rubbery stuff wasn’t optimal, it was good. It didn’t have that odd flavour I don’t care for, either.
I was a little worried about the fenugreek, since I chucked in rather a lot (accident. Container kind of slipped), but it doesn’t seemed to have had any kind of negative impact on the flavour.
All-in-all it ended up being a tasty, easy, one-pot meal where I actually quite enjoyed the aubergine. Yay!

During a rather lazy evening filled with watching a movie and playing Spider I didn’t really feel like cooking something with the veg I had laying around. So when I was starting to feel like eating dinner, I checked out my pantry for something just-heat-up.
With me trying not to buy stuff like that too often anymore, I didn’t have much. However, I only needed a little.
And I had a little.
Yay!
Some curry thing, which, with a little bit of other stuff, could make a passable meal.

Ingredients:

So the curry and the other stuff. Rice, tempeh, and pappadums. Often I’m too lazy to make rice, but this time I thought I’d do it anyway, make it seem more like a proper meal.
On other occasions I poured the sauce over some veg and didn’t bother with the rice, but I already had other plans for my veg, so I did it this way.
The pappadums were supposed to be garlic-y, but they didn’t really taste much like garlic. They were basically just crunchy and not very good on their own.

Food:

This is what it looks like all heated up. I only used half of the pappadums. If I’d used all of them, the stack would’ve been even higher.
It was a decent filling meal, but nothing particularly special.