VICTORIES AND FAILURES – A LOOKBACK AT VEGANUARY

I signed up to Veganuary again this year. 

It didn’t go very well.

But Ciara, surely with all your previous posts going on about this you should be fully vegan already? 

It’s definitely something that I’m trying to work towards (and I would say that, in a normal week, around 50% or what we eat is vegan and around 95% is vegetarian), but we’re not quite there yet. I have some reasonable excuses – having coeliac disease means that my diet is extremely restricted already out of something that wasn’t choice, though I know that some people manage to be both vegan and coeliac and they are amazing. Also, there’s a pandemic on and, for those outside of the UK who may not have been following, we’re currently on week 39489845 of lockdown. If an ingredient didn’t show up in our supermarket delivery there wasn’t really much we could do about it. Plus I’m as tired of this as the next person, and if getting through involved cracking open a tub of non-vegan salted caramel ice cream to go on top on my vegan mug cake, so be it.

Anyway, bearing in mind the mantra that perfection is the enemy of progress, I wanted to celebrate the achievements we made this month that we might not have managed were we not trying to be more vegan. Here are all the good things that happened during our not-so-successful Veganuary attempt:

1. My boyfriend got really good at cooking tofu. I have very little patience when I cook, but as with all things he’s much more methodical than I am and will make the effort to make marinades and leave the tofu in them for the recommended amount of time. He has mastered a range of tofu-based stir fries that are a spicy kick up the arse, and all are requested regularly.
2. I ordered Himalayan salt and made tofu scramble for the first time. I was a bit apprehensive at using something so completely new to me, but I did it and it was great and I will do it again.
3. I discovered the alchemy that happens when you mix tahini, lemon, oil, garlic and salt. How can something that be that creamy and not be dairy? We’ve been having it over roast cauliflower with mint and its *all the Chef’s kisses* (recipe here).
4. I found a fail-safe recipe for vegan pancakes that makes fluffy clouds of sweet goodness every. single. time. (it’s this BBC food one btw)
5. I found some really good vegan blogs to follow- ones where you want to pin every single recipe and where they don’t ask you to have a zillion ingredients for each one. Jessica in the Kitchen was this month’s MVP.
6. We celebrated a full year without dairy milk! This was a permanent switch we made after last year’s Veganuary, and we haven’t looked back. In fact, a couple of times this year we ended up taking home a couple of ‘normal’ milk bottles that would otherwise have gone to waste, and we were really surprised at how much our tastebuds had shifted. Same goes for mayonnaise (the Heinz vegan stuff is indistinguishable) and whipping cream (we use the solidified top of a can of coconut milk for that now- the key is to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours first). The number of permanent switches is growing!

So yes – while we may have had quite a few cheesy pasta bakes on evenings when neither of us could be bother to cook – and while the first half of the month included using up the last of the Christmas ham – we learned new things, made new switches, and edged a little bit closer to the aim. Here’s to more discoveries, to recognising that some steps in the right direction are better than no steps in the right direction, and to being a little kinder to ourselves if we don’t manage perfection.