Veganuary
Geoff Kidd
3 of our Vegan Plates.
Well, February got off to a very social start with 2 different sets of friends coming out to stay with us plus a trip to visit family in Andorra. So we’re a bit late with our Veganuary Blog. Here’s some of our thoughts after our month long experience.
Firstly, we really enjoyed the experience. We didn’t find it particularly difficult to tweak our shopping and cooking plans - there is no end of hints, tips and recipes online. We chose to sign up to and follow the advice from veganuary.com - they send you a daily email with some things to think about and some recipes to help you plan throughout the whole of the month.
Vegan Aquafaba Chocolate Mousse
Most of you will already know that we follow a mainly vegetarian diet throughout the off-season, so this perhaps wasn’t as big a leap as it sounds for us. We also came to realise that there will always be things that we serve in the Villa that will be leftover. Repurposing those leftovers for ourseves instead of throwing them away will always remain a large part of what we do regardless of their origins.
In addition, we asked you all about Free Range Eggs - ones directly from friends who have a small-holding, not just supermarket ones in a box with a label. Most of you agreed with our point that this was OK, pointing out that the saving in travel miles counted for somthing too.
Real Free Range Eggs
The things we have learnt :-
Cats - shouldn’t be fed a non-meat diet. We’re really not sure what to do about this one
Less bread bloating, so maybe it’s not the bread after all.
Not as windy as we thought we’d be, particularly after the toulouse sausage casserole. maybe it’s the mix of beans and pork?
Geoff didn’t really miss cow’s milk. He was surprised that Oat milk in tea, coffee and his morning porridge worked well.
We saved money overall, meat can be expensive in France.
We felt that we had more energy overall, although this could be linked to the way bookings panned out with the business too.
We both felt that we slept better - although again this could be linked to less drinking as January is a quiet month for us.
Planned much better in terms of food - last minute snacking isn’t as easy or quick and easy food from the freezer isn’t as straight forward. This wouldn’t put us off in the future, planning for a weeks worth of meals is a good way to budget too.
The only thing that Vic missed was ‘dry’ food, alot of the meals were curry, rice or pasta based and tehy miss the crunch factor, again not really a biggie but something to be aware of when making the change.
Our Trusty Onion Bhaji Burger
We will certainly continue to consider the ethics of what we do in terms of food here at the Chalet. Let us know all of your hints and tips, and do ask if you’d like any of the recipes we tried.