Anthony made vegan curry! This was especially awesome of him, because he's never made curry before - his best item, so I'm told, is chicken.
He started with this recipe, then got creative. Before I got there, he cooked a (red) onion in the curry paste - which was actually Asda's chip-shop style curry sauce powder - and added the vegetable stock and chopped sweet potatoes and normal potatoes. Then he added soya milk (instead of coconut milk), and simmered.
It looked really weird at first - the soya milk separated into soy and water - but it started to come together when it had simmered for a bit. The potatoes started to break down, and the liquid reduced slightly. We added a third of a jar of Tesco's balti cooking sauce (which is yummy - we later had some with mini carrots and some corn chips), stirred it in, and added some pre-mixed Indian spices (tandoori style, if I recall correctly). Lots of pepper, to balance the sweetness of the sweet potato, and a dash of salt. Then we added the peas, and simmered a little more.
While all of this simmering was going on, we were also hunting for things to eat with it. Anthony had some frozen barm cakes (silly northern names), so we thawed them a bit in the oven till they were soft enough to cut in half, and then toasted them. It actually worked really, really well.
The curry was delicious, in the end. I added extra pepper to my portion, because I tend to find sweet potatoes overly sweet, and it was really good. And so filling! Anthony'll be eating it for a week, we got six portions out of that batch, at 300-400 calories each. Not bad.
Later, we had dark chocolate lollies from Asda's free-from range (these are so cute, in their multi-coloured tinfoil), the tortilla corn chips (25p) and mini carrots (reduced to 15p), and some garlic bread (3 huge baguettes for a £1). The tesco's own brand stuff is vegan, it turns out - they use a sunflower oil margarine, which has no milk products in it. Awesome. It's not difficult to make garlic butter and put it on a toasted English muffin, but it was nice to have a freshly baked garlic baguette warm from the oven. We ate it while watching Princess Mononoke.
(On that note, I shall have to try this with homemade ciabattas and garlic butter - I bet that would be wonderful).
Incidentally, own brand or cheaper versions of things can often be unintentionally vegan, just as an attempt to produce the product more cheaply. This is wonderful, since foods designed for vegans tend to be quite expensive.
On the way home, I got really peckish, so stopped by the 24 hour mini-market down the road. I had a baker boys coconut and cherry flapjack (you may luck out and find flapjacks made without butter - they're more common than you might expect), and a hello kitty biscuit. This last one was a mistake; I checked for eggs and milk, but totally forgot to check that it was actually vegetarian. Seriously, why on earth would someone put beef gelatin in a biscuit?
I'm not beating myself up over this; it's one biscuit, and I learned a valuable lesson about reading ingredients lists carefully even when knackered.
On a better note, Jammie Dodgers are vegan.
On a worse note, this post contains no pictures because some fuckwad stole my iPhone.
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