Veganuary

Janet, Peter and Anne came for lunch today; we often meet up at this time of year for a New Year's lunch either in Edinburgh or here. It was a very cold day, the temperature has really dropped. A good day to sit in front of the fire and chat. Janet let me know in advance that Anne has become fully vegan this month for "Veganuary" and she had already arranged to bring her own main course (the rest of us had salmon fillets). So I double checked and altered the ingredients for our starter and dessert. The starter was carrot and orange soup, so I softened the vegetables using a vegan spread and I put in more herbs instead of a vegetable stock cube because the stock cube contained yeast. This sparked a debate between me and Alasdair over the nature of yeast - I thought that as a micro-organism it would be non-vegan, but we checked on the Internet and apparently it is classified as a fungus so it would have been ok. I had similar doubts about the bread that I was going to serve with the soup, and I chose sourdough because it was listed as vegan on a website that I checked - but Anne told me when she arrived that most breads are vegan anyway! It's only things like brioches, which contain milk, that are non-vegan.
The dessert was easy to veganise - I made cranachan using vegan sugar (which is not processed with bone char) to caramelise the oatmeal, and substituted the cream in Anne's cranachan with a soya alternative, which she said tasted good. The main course that Anne brought was tofu and spinach samosas with roasted vegetables - she offered one to me to try and it tasted delicious. I thoroughly enjoyed my foray into veganism.
It was, as ever, great to see Janet and Peter and Anne, and we chatted non stop all afternoon. When Grandma came for tea later there was some of the salmon left for her to try; Alasdair had roasted it with oil, parsley and lemon and Grandma said that he had made an excellent job of it!