Green Thing Blog

(Image: Val's Photos)

It's National Vegetarian Week - the UK's annual awareness raising week to encourage people to enjoy a diet of less or little meat. Are you thinking about going easy on the meat and a little afraid of how you're going to feed yourself a balanced meal? Or are you a new-found but fully committed veggie looking for some recipes? Wherever you may be on your veggie path, here are five clever tools to help you eat less meat with ease.

1. Not for the easily offended , WhatthefuckshouldImakefordinner.com has some randomly selected and fairly aggressive suggestions for meals. Click on "I don't fucking eat meat" for the veggie option, and then click on the title of the dish to be taken through to a recipe.

2. If you're the proud owner of a smart phone, there are quite a few iPhone apps out there to help you lessen your culinary carbon footprint. Veggie Lovers Recipes, Vegetarian How to Cook Everything and VegOut - Vegetarian Recipe Guide are all pretty self explanatory but we particularly love Veggie Passport. It translates your vegetarian needs into 33 languages, perfect for when you're on holiday and need to explain to the waiter that no, chicken is not a vegetable.

3.  The BBC Good Food website has a huge selection of lovely veggie recipes as do Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith. But our particular favourite has to be The New Vegetarian column of the Guardian, written by Yotam Ottolenghi of top restaurant Ottolenghi, every single recipe is mouthwateringly wonderful.

4. If you just don't feel confident in the kitchen there are plenty of vegetarian cooking classes around. The Vegetarian Society approved Cordon Vert Cookery School offer residential courses as well as one or two day workshops for the entirely inexperienced to the expert. Gujarati Rasoi will teach curry fans how to make a whole meal's worth of veggie Indian food, from mains to sides to dessert (they also sell their lovely food at Borough, Broadway and Exmouth markets).

5. To swap recipes with other vegetarians (or even to meet the vegetarian love of your life) head to Vegfest in Bristol this weekend. Packed full of food demonstrations, caterers and cafés, talks, information and fashion as well as music and film. For other veggie and vegan festivals near you look at this website.

A little while ago we blogged about 5 meaty meatless meals, dishes that fill you up without doing too much damage to the earth. If you're after more advice and inspiration on how to Go Easy On The Meat go here.

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So you've gone Easy On The Meat and you're reducing your carbon footprint but sometimes the urge to munch on a bacon sandwich is just too hard to resist. But before you rush out to catch a pig, rejoice and sing Hallelujah for a miracle is upon us. The Miracle Berry is a small red fruit that switches the taste of sour for sweet. It contains a glycoprotein called miraculin that sticks to the sour taste receptors in your mouth stopping these flavors from being tasted. Your mind is then tricked into believing that you're ingesting sweet food for about an hour after you've eaten the berry.

It is being developed for famine-stricken areas to allow people to add the plentiful wild and bitter grasses into their meals to bulk them out without leaving a bad taste in their mouths. It is also useful for chemotherapy patients who experience a metallic taste when eating. Rather than switching the taste, it simply removes the metallic taste allowing them to enjoy food again and help them put on weight.

In crazy Heston Blumenthal fashion, Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche, the chefs at Moto, Chicago, created several dishes that look like one thing but taste like another - nachos that are actually desserts and a cigar that taste like a pork sandwich.

But going back to your meat craving, they created the world's first bleeding veggie burger. In an ironic twist, it's made from what cows eat rather than the actual cow. With the ingredients being corn, barley and beetroot (creating the 'bleeding'), it looks like a beefburger, it bleeds like a beefburger, it cooks like a beefburger and it tastes like a beefburger. But it's not a beefburger.

This isn't the only way to eat fake meat of course. There's Quorn which is a well-known product in the UK and Seitan which is the big Chinese fake meat made from wheat gluten. So next time you fancy a bit of meat, remember that it doesn't actually have to be meat.

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Consider Hong Kong; it's a pretty urban place by anyone's standards, to the extent that there aren't too many spaces available to lure in honey bees, either through growing flowers or keeping a hive. However, if you watch the lovely video above you'll witness a wonderful tale of triumph over adversity.

Honey bees are pretty important. They're essential for honey (obviously) but more importantly responsible for fertilising one-third of the world's crops. Without bees we'd have to resort to fertilising crops by hand, which would be fairly laborious, not to mention boring, (though arguably therapeutic).

HK Honey is a network of beekeepers and creatives in Hong Kong set up by HK resident and designer Michael Leung after he became the first urban beekeeper in the area. HK Honey is a veritable hive of activity (sorry, I had to get it in there somehow); aside from producing honey, they also design bee related products as well as collaborating with schools, cafés and other organisations. You can even visit their headquarters to have a look around or to take part in a candle-making workshop.

By keeping a beehive on his roof and encouraging others to do the same, Michael has created a network of hives in the area that not only encourages the local bee population to thrive but that also helps raise the profile of honey bees and the issue of just how important they are to humanity.

Ps- Here's another bee related article or buy a bee station for your garden to encourage your local bee population. Or go here or maybe here for more information on how you can help bees.

(Spotted on Grist)

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Oh peas. We love you. Your appearance is prettier than the most presentable peacock. You are so appealing and so easy peasy to prepare. Your repeated appearance on my plate is sure to appease my appeatite and bring me peace, even when I'm feeling peaky. And that is why we've come up with 7 outstanding reasons why we think peas are so unspeakably, appealingly, unimpeachable.

1. The puns and word play. I'll say no more.

2. They are iconically British, which is probably because we grow them right here in the UK. Thanks to Britain's east facing seaboard we have the perfect pea conditions. We grow the equivalent of 70,000 football pitches of them. That's 2 billion pea portions and no need to pile them onto an plane to propel them to your plate helping to make your plate a no fly zone.

3. If you threaded every frozen pea produced each year in the UK onto a piece of string you would need 3,900,000 kms of string, which would stretch from the earth to the moon and back more than five times! Unpealievable!

4. Run out of perfume on the night that you go to meet the man of your dreams? Don't panic, just boil up some peas, onion and cinnamon. According to the 16th Century treatise 'The Perfumed Garden', it's a highly effective aphrodisiac.

5. Just one serving of freshly frozen garden peas and petits pois contains as much vitamin C as two large apples, more fibre than a slice of wholemeal bread and more thiamine than a pint of whole milk.

6. You probably couldn't stick anymore goodness into the pea if you try. Packed into their perfect pods you have: vitamin A, vitamin C, folate, thiamine (B1), iron and phosphorus. Piles of protein, carbohydrate and fibre. And they are low in fat. What's more, no salt, sugar, water, additives or preservatives are added to keep the peas fresh. Frozen within 2 and a half hours of picking, all the goodness is stored inside the pea without anything extra added.

7. Think you know how to eat peas? Think again. The UK has a pea etiquette. No more spearing or shoveling, you must squash the peas onto the back of the fork if you wish to be invited to eat peas with the Queen.

For all the pea-related jokes, facts and recipes you could wish for, check out this pea website. We highly recommend their pea videos. Also to avoid the wrath of Ninjin make sure you check out which other vegetables are in season right now on this handy website.

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Staying Grounded just got a whole lot easier. Now, you can experience all of the delights of aeroplane food without actually being airborne.

Following a diss of pub food by chef Marcus Wareing, who declared that the meals served in our public houses are worse than airplane food, an idea was fed into the mind of artist Richard DeDomenici. He decided to open up Plane Food Cafe at the Edinburgh Festival, the first restaurant to serve genuine plane cuisine, sourced from airport factories. To complete the experience, the meal was served by air hosts and hostesses in a cafe that featured airplane style seats, blankets and 'on-board' entertainment.

Do you find aeroplane food just not appealing however high you are? Well how about this. Flying deadens your taste buds and sense of smell. The pressurised air in the cabin reduces the pleasure of your tasting and smelling experience, meaning that you could be eating the world's most delicious meal but all you're tasting is cardboard and some kind of unknown meat...or possibly a potato.. you can never be sure. Whatever it is, it will certainly taste a lot better when your feet are on solid ground.

So if you have never flown but are eager to try to delights of meals-on-wings then Stay Grounded and try your foil wrapped food from ground level.

Ps- If you're still after the fix of being in a plane, why not stay a night at this plane turned hotel.

(Spotted on Artsadmin)

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