Daytrippers, part the first

I love to take a day trip. You get to go somewhere interesting then come home and sleep in your own bed. Well in this case, someone else’s bed--but you know what I mean.

 We arrived at the Windmill on Saturday and since we had enough food with us we could have a meal without then having to go back out and hunt down a supermarket. On Sunday we pottered into the village of Edelsbourough which was quite small and scoped out the bus stop and found a well stocked newsagent/ post office where we bought a few items like crackers (wheat ones for Spiderman , rye ones for me), hummus, a cucumber and some frozen peas and oven chips. Then we toddled on home back to the windmill and chilled out.

 Monday we took the bus into Dunstable which is where Jesus was born, according to Alice Tinker from the Vicar of Dibley. But the Vicar put her right explaining it was it a STABLE  rather in DunSTABLE. We popped into the library to use their computers to check email and then did a spot of shopping at the big supermarket for some specialty vegan stuff like soya yogurt and took the bus home and had a peaceful evening in preparing for the day trips.

 Day trip one--Whipsnade Zoo

Whipsnade was the only place we couldn’t figure out how to get to by bus. We would have to call a taxi. It wasn’t until late Monday night, however, that we realized that the windmill didn’t have a phone. And if we were normal people who had a mobile phone this would not have been an issue, but we figured we would find a way to sort the issue in the morning. Early Tuesday we hiked into town and played “hunt the payphone.” I found one and Spiderman, armed with coins and a list of local taxi numbers entered the booth elated and came out a bit dejected. Apparently payphones don’t take coins anymore. You can use your debit card, but they will charge you £1.20 to do it. After much grumbling we decided to bite the bullet and just phone. I am so glad we did because 10 minutes later we were whisked off in a comfortable cab and dropped off at the zoo--just in time for opening. Then the extra special news was that because Spiderman is a regular volunteer at the London Zoo (2 Sundays a month) we got in FREE which saved us about £40. Hoorah!

 Many vegans shun zoos as cruel to animals. I have certainly been to zoos like that in my lifetime--animals in small cages with a concrete floor and nothing to do but pace around and bite themselves out of boredom and frustration. But the London Zoo and Whipsnade are really different. They work hard to give animals as natural of a habitat as possible and work with conservation and breeding programmes to reintroduce endangered animals back into the wild. Plus Whipsnade is ENORMOUS--600 acres of land for animals to roam about. We were there for 5 hours and walked many miles. There is even a steam train you can catch but it costs £5 per person and since we got in free and brought pack lunches and were feeling strong and energetic (read that: cheap) we gave it a miss.  

 Best bits from the zoo:

Ring tailed lemurs are about as cutie-patootie as you can get. You could get really close to them as well.

They also like to sit with chin up, arms and legs outstretched (with their little nuts just out there for God and everyone to see) to sunbathe because apparently their fur is thinner on their chests.

We saw a wolverine that looked nothing like Hugh Jackman.

Here’s me comparing how wide I can stretch my mouth open compared to a hippo. And I thought I was a big mouth.

The hippo was bathing in a pool of poo filled water--they like to mark their territory with excrement--so no matter how many times they get clean water, the first thing they do is crap in it.  But it was fun to watch them submerge and then pop up to huff a bit of air and then go back down underwater with a plip…plip…plip.

 Here’s a cheetah under Cheetah’s Rock.

Look at the adorable mongooses--or is the plural of mongoose mongeese??? They were dwarf mongooses all cuddled up for a nap.

Here were the funniest, most active animals we saw--baby wild boars. Look at those soft stripy coats that help them to be camouflaged. They were rolling around pell mell, tumble bumble so much that we couldn’t help laughing.

Later we came by and they were all tuckered out and snoozing  except one naughty looking one which Spiderman christened The Poky Little Peccary (peccary being a type of wild boar and The Poky Little Puppy being a favourite book from childhood.)

Here’s me again showing off what I would look like with antlers. Quite good, I think. You could hang your washing on them or Christmas lights.

Lastly, here’s the penguins. It’s not a zoo trip without penguins. Spiderman and I have a wonderful shared memory of watching the penguins all line up in a queue for their fish at the London Zoo in 1990.

These were fed by throwing handfuls of fish into their swimming pond and then all the penguins diving in to catch them. Here’s one little guy just hoping for another fish.

Then it was time to get on back home, but we had to figure out how to phone for a taxi. There was a very nice bloke working in the ticket booth who called for us, but unfortunately when the taxi arrived we had a bit of communication problems with our driver.

Him: Address?

Us: The Windmill,  Edelsbourough

Him: Address?

Us: Edelsbourough

Him: Street?

Us: there is no street name, it’s on a private road in Edelsbourough.

Him: Address?

We finally convinced him to drive and when we saw someplace that looked familiar we asked him to stop and then just walked the rest of the way home.

It was a lovely day, but for an allergic animal lover like me, it was sadly a two hankie day. I blew my nose all day due to hay fever from the grass and the animal fur. But it was worth it. Oh I almost forgot the magnificent white lion!!! This was carved out of chalk on the hillside by the zoo and we could see it from our windmill. During WWII it had to be covered up with camouflaged nets and plants so that German planes would not see it and bomb nearby Luton and Dunstable.

Stay tuned for Daytrippers. part the second tomorrow!

What makes a holiday?

According to several people I know it is not a holiday unless:

 a) you leave the country, preferably on a cheap airline like Easyjet or Ryanair where the unbelievably low prices somehow helps you to forget the unbelievably high amount of pollution you have just generated. I mean, the plane was going to fly whether you were on it or not so why not enjoy yourself and go somewhere foreign?

 b) there are beaches and sun and sand and evenings of excessive drinking and partying. I suppose if you are the one drunk and falling all over the place it is not annoying because everyone else is as well.

 So I guess with those parameters in mind, we haven’t had a holiday.

 Spiderman and I are very conscious of our carbon footprint. Living in England there are plenty of things to do, places to go, events to attend where you need not destroy the planet (and your liver) to have a good time. Every time I tell someone we’re going on holiday their face lights up until I say what we are doing and then their faces fall and they look at me pityingly as if what we choose to do is less than what they choose to do.  Remember the week we spent in the Doctor Who themed cottage? http://spidergrrlvstheworld.blogspot.com/2011/04/our-lovely-vakshun.html  Everyone laughed at me when I told them--but we had a smashing time. That’s what we like to do, find an interesting place where we can take lots of day trips by bus and rent a place to stay for the week. That way we can save on meals as well as be sure they are all vegan since we‘ll do the cooking.

 This time we opted to stay in a WINDMILL. Seriously, a windmill!!! It wasn’t too far from where we live (another thing that seems to be part of the criteria for qualifying as a holiday is it must be far away and hard to get there. People actually sniggered when I said it was near Dunstable.) I’ve always wanted to stay in a windmill since I am a huge fan of the show Jonathan Creek. For my American peeps who don’t know this great programme Jonathan Creek is a quirky reclusive introverted genius who works designing all the special magic tricks for a conjurer but then becomes an amateur sleuth solving impossible “locked room” sort of crimes. Did I mention he lives in a windmill? It would be easy for his character to be a weird reclusive wanker, an irritating stereotype of someone on the autistic spectrum, but the writing makes him human and interesting. And did I mention he lives in a windmill????

Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek

Spiderman found this fantastic place to stay that was close enough we could take a taxi (SERIOUSLY!) so we could pack a whole suitcase full of food with us and just top up on some chiller ingredients like salad and yogurt at the shops. I plan for weeks before hand looking for meals that are cheap and easy to prepare that don’t require specialty ingredients. Then we measure any dry ingredients we need like ¾ cup lentils into ziplock bags to take with us. But I’ll do another post all about food later this week. You’re dying to see the windmill, right? Who wouldn’t be?

 Here is the glorious windmill from the outside. It’s not a working windmill as you can tell by the absence of sails, but it was cool none the less. It is an awesome way to have a space saving home as the floors go up not spread out. 

view from the front

view from the back

 Check out this cute wooden froggie on the doorstep.

there was a general frog theme to the decor here

The ground floor was the spacious kitchen which had a radio and we tuned into a local station who was playing all number one hits. We got to hear oldies like the Clash (Should I stay or should I go?) and Bon Jovi (You give love a bad name) as well as new hits by Jessie J (Domino) and Emeli Sandé (Next to me)  so now I feel I am up on pop culture and so am down wid da kidz as they say. Spiderman would like it pointed out that just the use of the phrase down wid da kidz means I am clearly not. Sigh…

the cooking bit

the eating bit

Then if you climb 11 stairs you are to the equally spacious living room. This had plenty of space to sit and relax and large screen telly so we could watch rubbish. Spiderman and I don’t have a telly as it seems ridiculous to pay a TV licence of £145.50 per year just to watch Doctor Who. Seriously, £145.50 gets you 4.5 channels (channel 5 is really fuzzy) and there is just not that much interesting to watch. But that’s what holidays are made for--slobbing about in your jim jams and watching crap telly. We stayed up and watched a dreadful horror film about a bunch of sorority girls who get picked off one by one by some crazed revenge killer after a prank went deadly wrong. That’s what happens when you accidentally let one of your sorority sisters die and then dump her body down a well and pretend nothing happened. 

Then if you climb 11 more stairs you get to the bedroom. It was a lovely room, slightly smaller as the windmill starts to narrow at the point. My only complaint was the bed was really soft and we kept rolling toward the middle and squashing each other at night. Oh and the fact that it had feather pillows! Not only unbelievably cruel (they pluck the feathers from live birds and then make then regrow the feathers and then pluck again. Horrible!) But they make me sneeze like nobody's business. Thankfully there were non animal pillows as well so I got to sleep with those whilst my sweet Spiderman took on the feathery ones.

feather pillows already moved to my side

Then if you climb the final 12 stairs (one more for good luck) you get to the bathroom. It was a lovely bathroom with a big oval tub big enough for two and what I excitedly hoped was a bidet, but turned out to be a urinal.

There was also a wee attic room outside the bathroom where you could store your empty suitcases so that was nice.

It was lovely inside and out and the grounds were just as picturesque. Here’s me next to a disused mill wheel. I love it because one of my favourite fairy tales in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Tinder Box which features three dogs--one with eyes as big as saucers, one with eyes as big as mill wheels and the third with eyes as big as the round tower of Copenhagen.

 Well that’s the windmill. Stay tuned for the tale of the day trips! 

This time last year...

...Spiderman and I became British citizens. It was a long and expensive process that included a difficult written exam which we had to swot up for ages in order to pass. But we did it. And on this day last year we were sworn in and promised to be loyal and true to Queen and country.

This is an emotional time for me, the anniversary of my father's death looms ever closer which always makes me feel sad and empty, but remembering this day and the joy it brought lifts me up.

Today Spiderman surprised me with 2 pieces original art by Skottie Young who illustrates all the Oz books for Marvel comics! What a surprise--and it genuinely was a surprise--that brought tears to my eyes.

He bought me a page from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the whole gang on the yellow brick road, but a close up of the Tin Man accidently stepping on a ladybird, which makes him cry and rusts his jaw because he was a vegan and Quaker (ok, that bit is subtext, but he was kind to all living creatures. Remember  how he wouldn't let Ojo have the left wing of a yellow butterfly, not even to save Ojo's Unk Nunkie from being a statue? Of course you don't. but I do.)

He also bought me a humourous drawing of Eureka the pink kitten sitting on the head of Jim the cab horse from Dorothy and the Wizard. We have often joked that this is who we are--me the sassy mouthed cat and Spiderman the grumpy one who carries the heavy stuff. So this is perfect for us.

I am overwhelmed with joy and warmth. We love art. We love supporting artists. We love Oz. Yes, Spiderman is really enjoying the Marvel comic versions of all my favourite books so he is now a confirmed Oz-ite.

Thank you my love. Thank you for everything.

Friendly Cookies

Everyone loves cookies, right? But they can be loaded with fats and sugars and white flour that makes us have a sugar high then a terrible crash. Just because something is vegan does not automatically mean it is healthy. This is why I love Dreena Burton’s cookbooks so much (her new one is released in the UK at the end of the month and I am doing a wee wee dance in anticipation because all my lucky US peeps have gotten theirs already!)

Anyway, her baking uses wholesome wholegrain flours and has reduced sugar. But I was looking at this recipe from her cookbook The Everyday Vegan and I saw a recipe for Bill Friendly Cookies. Bill apparently eats no refined sugar and so these are perfect for him. Also the main flour was oat four made from grinding oats in your food processor until they form a course flour. I figured this would be great for me as gluten free baking can be a bit of trial and error and I still tolerate oats really well. But I adapted it to make it more gluten free and cut back the oil by half (and it wasn’t all that much oil to begin with anyway.)

Here is my interpretation of these friendly cookies.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F

Dry ingredients:

1 cup ground oats (grind one cup of oats in your food processor until it forms a course flour)
2 TB flour (I used 1 TB quinoa and 1 TB teff flour to make it GF but feel free to use regular flour as she did)
2 TB sunflower seeds (she called for 2 TB nuts but that seemed like it would be about 4 nuts so I did seeds to fit more in)
1 TB chocolate chips
1 TB dried cranberries
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp stevia (which in my stevia is equal to 2 tsp of sugar. I might next time go wild and do ½ tsp stevia)

Liquid ingredients:

1/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup freshly squeezed orange juice (One orange for me was a scant 1/3 cup and I just topped up the measuring cup with a slosh of milk)
1 ½ TB oil (she used 3 TB I felt 1 ½ was plenty)

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and then puree the raisins and OJ in the blender until the raisins are not raisin-y anymore. Add the wet to the dry and stir. It was still a bit dry so I added a few sloshes of milk and then stirred in the oil to mix.

Drop by rounded TB on a pan lined with parchment paper and bake for 14-16 minutes.

These cookies were really good. Hardly sweet at all really. The wet dough tasted more orange-y than the cooked ones but it was still really good. Next time I might add in a few drops of orange oil to try to keep that orange flavour. I might even go wild and sub cocoa powder for the GF flour!

If you are looking to make you go into a diabetic coma then this is not what you want. If you are looking for something with wholegrain to lower your cholesterol and sweetened with fruit to make it diabetic friendly then this is your cookie.  Not being overly sweet you really notice the natural nuttiness of oats and the tang of the cranberries and the crunch of the sunflower seeds and then pop of sweet with the chocolate chips.

Sometimes less sugar can be sweet.

Somewhere that's green

Cue music:

A matchbox of our own

A fence of real chain link,
A grill out on the patio
Disposal in the sink
A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine
In a tract house that we share
Somewhere that's green.

That’s from the musical Little Shop of Horrors where Audrey dreams of her ideal suburban life. But that’s me as well as I long for a little place of our own and some pretty gardens. The problem is I can’t grow anything.  In the US they say successful gardeners have a green thumb and in the UK we say you have green fingers. Whatever you call them--I don’t have them. I can whither a plant stone dead from 50 paces just by thinking about it. But I long to be a green gardening gal like my dear old mum who has the complete opposite effect on plants. When one knows she’s in the vicinity it perks up and does a little dance. Seriously.  

 My friend Lena recently gave me the most adorable gift I have ever seen. It was a little matchbox shaped like a house. It’s tiny! You opened it up and inside were little bits you could cut out to accessorise your house.  It’s crafty!  It also had a packet of cress seeds that you could grow to give your little house a garden. It’s green!

click on this so you can see it bigger and really appreciate the lovely details of the house and garden

Look how adorable that is! I added a bicycle and a steeple to my house to personalize it. After all we do live at Church House so it needed a steeple! And look at my cress! It’s growing like mad. I was really scared it would fail to grow. Only I could fail to grow cress. Pre-schoolers everywhere grow cress because it grows so darned easy. But Pre-schoolers have better gardening skills than I have so there was a chance this might end in disaster. Thankfully, it did not.

 I spent the first several days like Toad in Arnold Lobel’s children’s classic Frog and Toad Together shouting, “Now seeds, start growing!” and pacing up and down. Then suddenly one night I noticed a few seeds had a teeny green shoot coming out and the next day over half did. Cress grows really quickly and my garden is a couple of millimetre taller every day.  This may be the first successful thing I managed to grow in my life.

Thank you Lena for the adorable house and wee garden. Growing a bit of green has made me very happy indeed.

Wipe that cheezy grin off your face

You know how you can get stuck in a food stereotype? Like the belief that some foods are meant to be sweet and other foods are meant to be savoury. For example, I always think of rice as a savoury food. It goes with gravy. But Spidergrrl, you cry, don’t you know  you can have sweet rice pudding?  Yeah, I know, I’ve never tried it so it doesn‘t count. In my mind, it’s gravy all the way. 

The first time this conundrum appeared to me was when I was a child reading a biography of  the author Louisa May Alcott who wrote the classic book Little Women. She and her sister were complaining that there was no sugar for the rice. What? SUGAR? For the RICE? The father then said there were plenty of poor people who would be happy to eat their rice sans sugar and he frogmarched them, bowls of rice steaming in their tiny hands, to a poor section of town where a widow and her small, very thin children lived. The children gobbled the rice down and were so grateful that the Alcott girls were quite subdued. They thought they lived in poverty because they had no sugar and here were children who had no rice. They vowed on the spot to give away one meal a week to this truly poor family. This lesson stayed with me for a long time, just not the bit about the sweet rice.

Oatmeal (or Goatmeal as it is referred to in my family)  is something I always think of a sweet. You put dried fruit in it or a drizzle of maple syrup. Of course it’s sweet. Was I not brought up in the south to know that grits=savoury, oatmeal=sweet? Or better still, that pie are round and cornbread are square???? But then I ran across this idea on Oh She Glows blog about a savoury, cheezy oatmeal and I wasn’t sure if I could change my perception of the role of goatmeal in life. But I tried it and I am sooooo glad I did.

Here’s her original post http://ohsheglows.com/2010/03/03/youre-so-cheezy/  and I basically did what she did but I used powdered broth not a stock cube and I made mine to be more instant rather than cooking on the stovetop cos to me goatmeal is a grab-and- go affair.

This is 3 TB oats and 3 TB Ready Brek which is basically fortified porridge oats ground up into a fine flour. It helps to make instant goatmeal creamier.

 

Then I added ½ tsp Marigold bouillon powder (I mix the regular vegan and low salt vegan together in a big jar)

Next I added 1 TB nutritional yeast flakes to give it that cheezy flavour.

Lastly a good sprinkle of something I bought from Sainsburys called Garlic Pepper--which does what it says on the tin. It is course ground pepper mixed with dried garlic granules.      

That’s it. Just add boiling water and stir and let it sit for a few minutes and Mmmmm, mmmmmm, good. This is definitely my new favourite flavour of goat. Dried fruit goatmeal is for boring people. Savoury goatmeal is where it’s at

Eat Yer Greens

I’ve  blogged before about my love of kale. Who would have ever thought I would grow up to be a vegetable loving vegan? My mother is rolling around on the floor clutching her sides as she reads this as she knows I was the pickiest eater on the planet growing up. Would not touch anything green but peas. Ate nothing but Spaghetti-o’s for years. The story goes that I came home all cross from first grade complaining that the day they served boiled-to-death mustard greens or collard greens in the cafeteria  suspiciously coincided with the day they cut the lawn. I am reported to have huffed indignantly saying, “You know what they served us today? Cooked grass.”  There was also an incident where I reported to my mother that there was “something irritable” in my salad. Probably anything but carrots. Carrots weren’t green.

But truly I love kale as it the powerhouse of the greens world. It is hugely high in absorbable calcium and tastes yum. We have a big old wodge blended up in our morning smoothie by Spiderman, but sometimes a grrl likes to taste the leaves, you dig? Now some people get kale attached to the thick fibrous stems and you have pull the leaves away from the stem to prepare it. I have never seen it like that here--ours comes already de-stemmed in a giant bag for £1 at Waitrose.

Here is my skillet piled high with green-y goodness.

All you do is throw some kale leaves into a medium hot skillet and stir/flip with tongs for a few minutes until it starts to wilt slightly and turns a brighter green. I tend to drizzle in a TB of water at this point and it really wilts down to just the right texture--not raw, but not cooked to death either.

Then take it off the heat and drizzle 1 tsp toasted sesame oil and 1 tsp maple syrup over the greens and a pinch of smoked sea salt. I know that may seem weird but it really is an amazing combination of sweet and smoky flavour. Don’t you trust your Auntie Spidergrrl?

Then scoop into a bowl and eat it all for yourself. Nom, nom, nom.