Friday, March 30, 2007

I'm on Holidays!

Or vacation, as all the americans out there would put it. We lots of people from the US and Canada in my course, one said to me as we were leaving yesterday afternoon "By Freedom, have a nice vacation" and I almost burst out laughing. Vacation is not a common word here!
Anyway, what this means is that I can post more regularly for the next two weeks (although I do have lots of studying to do!)
So for today I have for you just a little bit of what I bought at the market last week:



Someone asked me in a comment the other day how much I spend on groceries each week. I don't know anything about exchange rates so I'm just going to tell you in Australian dollars - it's about $75 - $80 AU a week. That is spent on organic produce that I buy at an organic growers market where prices are very reasonable. What you can see in the picture above is only a small percentge of the total of everything I bought - there was also a couple of rockmelons (cantaloupe), lots of pears, several bunches of greens, plus a few veggies. Some weeks I also spend a bit more on something that I use less of, eg sheets of truly raw nori, truly raw cashews, chickpeas for sprouting etc - I always buy those things in bulk. So that's my shopping costs!

After I took that fruit photo I was goping to take a cute piccie of Casper but her wanted his dinner and wouldn't stand still so this is the best I've got:



I am going to be making some scrummy raw chocolate treats today for a pre-Easter treat to share with fellow volunteers at PAWS so I will take some pictures and post them - I also have some pictures from The Big Veg Out that I will share soon.
I just posted a yummy new recipe on my recipe blog, so check it out here.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Back Again
Oh dear I did it again didn't I... promised to post more often and then completely did the opposite. I really really want to keep my blog going but I am soo busy at university - and I figure if I only post once a fortnight I'm going to lose most of the small readership I did have. But I'll keep doing it anyway! :-) If you do stop by, please please leave a comment. It really is exciting getting them!



Okay so now I have some food for you. FIrst of all, I decided to take a photo of some of the scrumptious FREE home grown mangoes that I mentioned in my last post. As you can see, some of them are totally humungous! I honestly think that I have now eaten at least $100 worth of mangoes... I mean, these are basically organic and I would pay $3-4 each for some of these mangoes so if you added it up, that would be heaps! And they are a trillion times nicer than any organic mango i have ever bought. Oh don't get me started talking about them... *drool*



This is a salad which I find very exciting because a number of the ingredients were grown by me! You can't see the greens in this picture, because they're right at the bottom of the bowl, but they are mainly borage and dandelion greens (yum!) which I grew. Then there is some corn, which I did not grow - I did try and grow corn, but for some reason it didn't quite finish growing - the kernels stayed really small and dry and ick. But my guinea pigs liked it! :-) Next there are tomatoes, which I did grow - we had 32!! tomato plants. I was trying to keep track of how many tomatoes I've eaten but I'm not sure anymore. They are so yummy! And (like everything else in the veggie garden) they're heirloom variety. Yay! There are also some mung beans, which I didn't actually grow myself but I did sprout them so that's kinda growing... There's coconut, which obviously I didn't grow (oh how I wish I had a coconut palm!) and then grated carrot, which I did grow. My carrots have gone quite well I think, considering we don't really have the best soil for root vegetables (it's super sandy).

Tomorrow is a very exciting day for me. I volunteer at an organisation called PAWS (People and Animal Welfare Society) and they are holding their inaugural 'Big Veg Out - The Cruelty Free Lifestyle festival.' It's going to be a day full of awesome vegan food and drink, health and beauty products and cool local music... plus I am having a raw vegan stall with samples, information and uncooking demos! In a future post, I will present some pictures of the day.

Now last of all, I posted a new recipe on my recipe blog the other day, so check it out here: Mushroom Pizzas.

Have an amazing week everyone and I promise to post again in the not too distant future!

Saturday, March 03, 2007

HELLOOOOO!
Hi Everyone! I'm so sorry it's been 13 whole days since my last post! That's terrible! Nothing either terrible or particularly exciting has happened to cause my absence, except the fact that I went back to university to start my second year of veterinary science and it is already really full on. But I promise that from now on I'm going to try and post twice every week!

Not a whole lot else has been going on in my life in the two weeks since I last posted, except maybe the fact that I am rolling in the most AMAZING, INCREDIBLE, DELICIOUS, STUNNING mangoes. I have tasted a lot of mangoes in my life so far but I can tell you that until you have eaten a home grown mango, you have not had a really really good mango. Unfortunately they aren't home grown by me, but I befriended a lady who has a huge tree in her garden so I have been eating literally mounds of them. Oooh I want some now! I was going to take some pictures of them in all their yummy glory but I was too busy stuffing them in my face, lol! I will take a picture in a few days when I have some more.
Until then, you'll have to be content with these few pictures:



This is the first Shazzie recipe I've made in a while - I've been so busy eating masses of fruit that I haven't felt inclined to actually make a recipe. It is called Seaside Smoothie and while I didn't eat it by the seaside, it was delicious! The slight bluish tinge too it comes from the spirulina in it, which was a very nice addition!



Here are some little mushroom pizzas I made tonight - they would look better and be easier to eat if I could use those big field mushrooms but this was all I could get at the organic market this morning. They were amazingly stunningly delicious, I might post the recipe on my other blog sometime soon.



Lastly we have my 'dinner' from a week ago on Friday, grapes garnished with grapes, lol!! :-) My family never normally eats together but I thought it might be nice so I put a tablecloth out and my parents sat down. My dad nearly exploded with laughter when I put my dish on the table... then mum said "we don't have to sit here until you've finished eating a whole kilo of grapes do we?" (She was being humourous, of course). So we 'adjourned to the sitting room' (aka went to the lounge room and watched South Park) as soon as my parents had finished. It was nice to have dinner together.

Okay, I have to go study now. Promise I'll post again soon!!