Not so aquafabulous….yet!

So it’s been a while since my last post. In that time I’ve turned 41 and decided to finally go vegan. Not saying it will be easy and at the moment I’m having an inner battle trying to convince myself that I won’t really miss cheese, but I’m going to give it a good go.

One of the things that I really like about cooking is the science of it all. I would never pretend to be an expert but it always fascinates me how you combine a few ingredients together and then a little bit of magic happens in the oven/ frying pan/ slow cooker. Anyway, recently something came to my attention which was seriously mind-blowing! I’m talking about the revolutionary new vegan ingredient of aquafaba.

Aquafaba, in case anyone isn’t familiar with it, comes from the latin for bean water. In my case it was the liquid from a tin of chickpeas which I used last night to make a lovely Channa Masala! This also ties in nicely with my love of recycling wherever possible as it meant that nothing from that tin was wasted. Aquafaba is used as an egg replacement but, even though I saw plenty of evidence online, I wanted to see if it worked for myself.

The recipe I chose for my experiment can be found here and it involved whisking the bean water with lemon juice (I don’t have any cream of tartar so this was a substitute!) and icing sugar until it transforms into meringue-like peaks. Watching the liquid transform was pretty amazing and I would have said it was like magic, apart from the fact that it was a very slow process. Even with an electric whisk it took me almost an hour to get the desired consistency- thank goodness I wasn’t doing it by hand!

Once whipped, I had to bake the nests in the oven for 2 hours on a very low setting- Gas Mark 0.25! Unfortunately my oven only goes as low as 0.5 but, as I’m never convinced it’s as hot as it should be anyway, I thought I would be ok. The recipe made 12 nests so I had to use 2 baking trays to fit them all in however, the recipe stresses that you shouldn’t open the oven at all so I was a bit concerned about not being able to swap them round but I told myself it was an experiment so time would tell!

When the moment of truth finally arrived, I opened the oven to find a tale of 2 meringues! The top shelf nests were slightly brown, very crispy and tasted a little bitter whilst the bottom shelf nests were pale, chewy and stuck to the baking paper! We did try to eat them but it didn’t go too well. Not to be daunted though, I will try again but next time I will be better prepared thanks to a very helpful vegan meringue Facebook group that I am now a member of! Sadly I don’t have photographic evidence of the finished products but you can rest assured that, when I finally get this recipe to work, I will be proudly posting pictures all over the place!!

Epiphany

So today was all set to be a pretty unremarkable Sunday. All I had to do was some ironing- anything else was a bonus! This all changed over breakfast thanks to my partner. Between Christmas and New Year we stopped eating meat. The weird thing about it was that I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop, I just stopped and because I stopped, he stopped. Not really sure what the trigger was although we think it might have been the small turkey crown that we bought for Christmas dinner. As we got it out of the packaging to cook it, we both commented on how small it was- I think the exact comment was ‘it’s only a baby’. Really this has been a long time coming as I cry when I see the vans of animals off to be slaughtered (even if I didn’t know for definite that was where they were going!) but when it came it was completely out of the blue. I freely admit to having been a hypocrite for years- I wouldn’t be able to kill my own food but was happy to pick it up neatly packaged and ready for consumption. We’d already stopped drinking milk but that had been more of a decision and led to us experimenting with various plant based milks but more of that later!

Anyway, this morning I was busy scrambling eggs for breakfast when he started reading about egg production which brings up some disturbing facts about the treatment of hens/ chickens. Fast forward a few hours and we’ve been busily researching vegan egg and cheese replacements and are all set to take that next step! Any reviews of substitutes are welcome at this stage as the trial and error process can be very expensive! We learned this with the milk dilemma as I think we bought everything the supermarket had to offer before settling on drinking black tea. We recently returned to the milk experiments and have settled on Alpro’s Simply Mild Soya which has so far made some nice vegan custard, banana oat smoothies and waffles. Still drinking black tea though!