Delicious Vegetarian/Vegan Recipes! 🥘

At the end of my post We're Eating a Lot Less Meat I said I'd do a post on good vegetarian recipes, so here I am! I love trying new food, and becoming vegetarian really helped that. A lot of these will be vegetarian alternatives to meat. You can exchange vegetarian things like Quorn or tofu in almost every meal that has meat; however not all of them taste nice😂. For example, I haven't come across a nice alternative to bacon, however my sister says the Quorn chicken nuggets taste a lot like normal chicken nuggets. The recipes I'm giving now though are not made with ready-made meat substitutes like Quorn, although it is very efficient (but there will be tofu because tofu is just the best).

Anyway, I'll start off with the recipes now.  A lot of these I actually haven't had the meat version so I don't know how similar they are to it, but I know that they are amazing:

• Cauliflower Buffalo Wings. I've had two different recipes of this, one being vegetarian and one being vegan, and they are both so delicious. This is the recipe for the vegetarian one, and I'm afraid the vegan one was from an actual cookbook, but if you want to buy it, it's: One Pot, Pan, Planet by Anna Jones, and is really good for vegetarian recipes. (I mentioned it in my Mental Health Awareness Week blog before). 
• Tofu Katsu Curry. As I mentioned before, tofu is the best. This one is breaded, which is even better, and the sauce we do is made of carrots. Click here for the recipe, which is from the Tofoo website, and Tofoo is the brand we usually get!
• Cauliflower Steak. These are so good. You just take a whole cauliflower, take the leaves off (but still roast them, because cauliflower leaves are tasty), add any spices or seasoning and roast it. You can look online to find loads of cauliflower steak recipes. For example, we had this one and it was really good. There's another one in the One Pot, Pan, Planet recipe I mentioned before.
• Portobello Mushroom Burger. This is just one type of substitute for burgers - I had a breaded goats cheese burger at one pub and a beetroot and quinoa one at another, and they were both amazing. The same with the cauliflower steak before, just search up 'portobello mushroom burger' and you'll get loads of results to choose from.
• Butternut Squash Korma. This curry is really nice, especially if you like butternut squash, and it's a nice colour😁. It's vegan, and you can find the recipe here.

There are so many recipes, and this is just the start. I'll probably, definitely do another post - part 2 - of this. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you get to try out some of the recipes. See you next Sunday! 

Violet

          xxx

What Would Happen if the Whole World Became Vegetarian Overnight?

I had a whole lesson on this last year in Geography, and I found it really interesting, so I thought I'd make a post on it. I've mentioned many times that I'm a vegetarian, and that also just reducing your meat intake, by having 2 or 3 days vegetarian and the rest eating meat, is good.

So there are a lot of pros and cons to the whole (entire) world becoming vegetarian, or vegan overnight. Of course, any attempts for the whole world to go vegetarian would happen gradually, and definitely not overnight, but here are some reasons why anyway:

Pros	Cons
It creates a whole new range of jobs (for people who lost their jobs that were in the meat industry!) For example, dairy farmers who may lose their jobs, they could grow crops to make milk alternatives.	Many people lose jobs (millions are employed worldwide, 1 billion people spending their lives tending to livestock and lands)
It would leave a healthier and cleaner planet for future generations, reducing greenhouse gasses (14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from meat production, said in 2017)	People who use meat for religious traditions would be impacted and not be able to carry on with their traditions.
Beef produces 5 times more climate warming emissions than other animals, so it would reduce that. Food related emissions could drop about 60-70%.	We'll be left with less cheap materials to make things with (like leather). Anyone who's vegan may not want to wear or use sheep's wool is okay, but domestic sheep don't naturally shed their coats, which means in the summer they may overheat, which is cruel.
About 80% of agriculture land, and 20-30% of all ice-free land, is used for livestock, so we can turn more of that for other use. an area about the size of Africa is used for this.
Loads of crops grown are used to feed livestock, and so a lot of that would go instead to humans to stop world hunger
There are billions of cows, sheep, chickens and pigs in factories and farms world-wide, some living in terrible conditions, so this can also be a con because so many animals will have been born for the whole reason of, sadly, being killed and eaten. So there will be loads of extra animals in farms - or roaming free - with no purpose in life (not that being killed and eaten is a purpose)

Thank you for reading this week's post. I hope that you are able to cut meat out of some part of your life. See you next Sunday!

Violet

         xxx

Eco-Friendly Halloween! 🎃

Before I start, I just wanted to say this is my 100th post! Thank you so much to the people who've read my posts since the beginning, when I wrote about using better things for Wrapping Presents in newspaper or brown paper.  

Anyway...

Even though it's still two weeks until Halloween, you sometimes need a lot of time to get ready for it🙂. So, here are some ideas:

Vegan and plastic-free sweets.

• I don't want to change much about the sweets because that's the best bit for a lot of kids, however there are a lot of ways to do so. For example, finding sweets that don't come in plastic wrapping - which would be hard since almost all of them are wrapped in plastic. You could also buy vegan ones to go even further (this will take out the gelatin). All you have to do is search up vegan (and plastic-free) sweets on google and you get such a wide range. I am considering the product miles, so to reduce that you should check where the people who are selling vegan sweets are based. Instead of buying some which are in plastic, you could see if you are able to find ones in glass jars, or paper bags. Click here to see a list of some of them best vegan sweets to buy. (Just saying, I haven't eaten many so I can't say whether they are actually good or not - although I do like Candy Kittens, but those come in plastic).

Pumpkins

• When you're cutting your pumpkin, you have so many seeds left in the inside. What we always do is roast them and then you get a really yummy snack, instead of throwing them away and having food waste. Another thing you can do is, after Halloween, cut your pumpkin up and leave it out for wild animals to eat, instead of putting it in the compost.

Decorations and/or costumes

• Buying decorations that you know you could use again in either the next Halloween party or any other parties is a good thing to do. Or just look around your house and get creative! You can do the same thing with costumes, instead of buying a new one that you'll only wear once, you could buy second hand, borrow from someone, or look at you clothes at home and see what you can do with them. Once I bought a costume, and I used the same dress for loads of different costumes for years (until I grew out of them of course). 

Just remember, if you can do anything with the Rs - there's loads now so I can't just say the 3 Rs😂 -  which are: 

• refuse (don't buy if you don't need)
• reduce (don't buy as much)
• reuse (use something again)
• re-purpose (use something for a different thing)
• recycle (don't throw it into landfill if you don't have to)

Thanks for reading this post, I hope you liked it. And thanks for reading, if you did, my 99 other posts too! See you next Sunday.

Violet

         xxx

We're Eating a Lot Less Meat🥓

In a survey that 15,000 people took part in across the country, researchers found that consumption of meat had fallen by about 17g per person, per day. In the UK, the number of people eating meat daily has decreased by about 17% in the last ten years.  It's predicted to reduce by 30% in the next decade. 

If you want to contribute to reducing meat consumption, you could become vegetarian, or at least have two days a week which are meat free, which will help. I wrote about being one in this post, and in that post I mentioned how being a pescatarian was better than fully eating meat, however (as everything does) it still has its cons as well as its pros. In my post about the Fishing Industry, I showed quite a few bad things about the way fish is caught. I haven't eaten meat for about 6 years now, and I haven't eaten fish for just over a month. (I just changed from being pescatarian to vegetarian). 

Another way to help is buying meat that is locally sourced because this will reduce food miles. Watching out for labels on food saying whether things are produced in an environmentally friendly way will help.

The study asked participants what they found helpful in eating less meat and some ideas were: just making one meal instead of a whole day vegetarian; finding a new vegetarian recipe; seeing the availability of vegetarian meals on a menu. Market research in 2019 showed 40% of people who were reducing their consumption of meat were doing so for health or environmental reasons.

If you aren't already, you could consider turning two or three of your days to vegetarian days? I mean, even one day would be a start🙂. For one of my posts, I could give loads of delicious vegetarian recipes for you to try out! That would be fun, I've already got a few recipes in mind. Anyway, thank you for reading this week's blog! I hope you liked it. 

Violet

         xxx

How to be Eco-friendly in your Bedroom!🛏

This week I'm carrying on with walking around a house and saying how you can be eco-friendly in each room, and today we're in the bedroom. 

First of all - buying things second hand. I love it! It's usually really cheap and can sometimes be as good as new! I'm so used to buying books for around £1.99 from charity shops (I'm sure at least half the books on my shelf are second hand!) that when I go into a proper bookshop, the usual cost, like £6.99  or £7.99,  seems way too much. Then you can also have clear outs and donate any of your old things to your nearest charity shops and even to friends and family. 

Next, I'm going to talk about trends and fast fashion (I wrote a whole post specifically on that, and you can read it here). The clothes created for fast fashion are usually cheap and aren't made of sustainable material. They are also usually made in sweat shops, terrible places where people work below minimum wage for too many hours in poor, often illegal conditions. A lot of children also have to work in these factories. So if you are a person who follows fast fashion, try to reduce the amount you buy. Now that we're going into autumn, and we're wearing things that fit the weather instead of the things we wear in summer, if you try on all the things you wore last year and any don't fit, you can donate it!  

With the bins in your own room, you can make sure you separate the things you can recycle and the things you can't so that it's easier to separate on bin day. And you can use old paper as new things, like using the back for a shopping list, as my mum does. 

As I mentioned last week, you can also keep your thermostat down and keep windows closed to keep the heat in and save energy.  And you could put extra layers on instead of turning up the heat.  

Thank you for reading this week's post. I hope you liked it! See you next Sunday.

Violet

         xxx