By Louisa Moss, PRO, Vegetarian Society of Ireland

In February, the VSI held a vegan cook-off event to raise money for Focus Ireland. The turnout on the night was great, with some fantastic entries, and in total we raised €700 for Focus Ireland! Louisa caught up with the winners to talk about their vegan lifestyle (and to find out the tasty winning recipes for us!)

Deirdre Blake was born in Rush Co. Dublin and became a vegetarian at the age of 18. She married her husband Pat, who was also a vegetarian, at the age of 23. They have two sons, Kirsh and Nimai, who have both been raised as vegetarians from birth.

Louisa: How long have you been a vegan?

Deirdre: I’ve been a vegetarian for 33 years and the whole family became vegan two years ago. I regret not making that decision earlier!

Louisa: So, what kind of food do you include in your diet?

Deirdre: Our diet is very influenced by Indian cooking. We eat rice and dahl (lentil soup) and chapatis (Indian flatbread). I’ve recently converted to falafel and become a big fan! I also juice fruit and vegetables every day.

Louisa: Do you like to experiment with food and recipes or do you tend to stick to a few family favourites?

Deirdre: I tend to stick to my favourites, but every so often I try to change things up with a new recipe!

Louisa: Who is you favourite vegetarian or vegan cook?

Deirdre: I don’t really have a favourite vegan cook that I follow; I like to just take recipes from everywhere.

Louisa: What is your top tip for aspiring veggie cooks?

Deirdre: Being vegan doesn’t have to be restrictive; most recipes can be adapted. Also, being vegan doesn’t mean sacrificing taste, just the opposite in fact!

Louisa: I know I would love to recreate your winning dish and I’m sure our members would too!  Any chance we could have the recipe?

Deirdre: Of course! Here’s the recipe for the spinach, chickpea and soya curd prep.

Ingredients
1 bag of spinach
1 can of chickpeas
2 cans of tomatoes (blended)
“paneer” made from 2 litres of soya milk
1.5 tsp cumin seed
1/2 tsp Aesofetida (hing) available in Asian supermarkets
2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tablespoon of veg oil

Method
Heat oil in saucepan and add the cumin seed.
When the seeds have browned, add hing, tomatoes, salt, black pepper and cook on low heat to slightly thicken.
Drain and add chickpeas.
Cook and add spinach.
Lightly fry soya paneer and add to the sauce
Serve with rice.

Method for making Soya paneer

Bring 2 litres of soya milk to the boil.
Add 1 tsp of citric acid to curdle the milk.
Pour contents through a muslin cloth – this will catch the curd and allow the liquid to pass on through.
Squeeze the curd from excess liquid, then cut the soya curd into cubes and fry.

Let me start off by saying that I’m not really a gardener. Gardening for me doesn’t extend much beyond pushing a few seeds into the ground and giving them the odd bit of water (not through lack of interest but because 99% of my time and energy goes toward helping my two small children to grow!). If I can grow food then anyone can!

Growing your own food is much cheaper than buying. There are also environmental benefits, such as being able to produce food without the use of pesticides, and being able to get the food from your garden onto your plate without any transport emissions being involved. I also like to think that growing food brings people together. For instance, you can gift or swap produce with friends, family and neighbours. People of any age can help each other out in the garden. Getting the kids involved is really good for their physical and mental health, as well as being a great learning opportunity. There is also no nicer feeling than sharing a home cooked meal and knowing that you grew several of the ingredients. You won’t cook with fresher vegetables than the ones you have grown yourself.

Winter days are often dull, wet, cold and very short, so it’s hard to imagine that it would be possible to grow food during this time. However, if you have access to a polytunnel there are a number of things which can be grown over the winter. A benefit of growing in a polytunnel over the winter is that it is quite pleasant to be gardening in a polytunnel on even the coldest and wettest of days.

If you fancy some fresh salad in January you could sow some seeds now. Other things to try are lettuce, kohl rabi and carrots. How well these grow over the winter depends very much on how soon the very cold weather sets in. You can give your mange tout a head start by sowing them now and keeping them protected by covering them in a layer of fleece. Broad beans can also be sown now for an early crop next spring.

My personal favourite things to grow in the polytunnel over the winter are onions and garlic (just because I use so much of both!). In a mild winter you could have garlic ready to harvest as early as March. Some gardening books recommend sowing your garlic in pots in the polytunnel and then moving them outside when the weather gets milder, but last year I planted mine straight into the ground in the polytunnel. I pretty much neglected them for most of the winter, except for giving them a bit of water (I think I weeded them once!) and yet they did fantastically well. I don’t think I’ve bought any garlic at all this year as I’m still eating what I grew last winter. The same goes for onions although I do find that they need to be weeded more frequently as they don’t compete very well with weeds.

If you want more detail (from some proper gardeners!) about growing in a polytunnel over the winter then there are plenty of books on the subject. My personal favourites are The Polytunnel Book by Joyce Russell and How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel by Mark Gatter and Andy McKee. There is also plenty of information available on the internet for free!

Our foraging experience is built on traditional knowledge that has been passed on to us by our grandparents and parents in Eastern Europe.

We have been delving into the Irish landscape and green surroundings for the past month, in our mission to learn more about collaborating with nature for a better life.

So far, we have been living in an area South of Bray where we are amazed, every day, to pass by inumerable bushes of blackberries and hazelnut trees.

As a child, Adela used to have long walks with her mother in the countryside of Transylvania where, each August and September, they would find tens of kilograms of wild blackberries growing in a former quarry. Blackberries love the heat of the sun, even more so when it is enhanced by the heat storage properties of rocks. For a few weeks in a row, mother and daughter would go everyday to the quarry and handpick blackberries to latter turn into delicious home made syrup. Blackberries are also wonderful for making jam, and are amazing for breakfast, if you blend them with yogurt or milk into a wonderful smoothie. It is amazing to see how these readily available edibles, such as blackberries, have lately been replaced by hip and trendy exotic fruits imported from miles and miles away, from the other side of the Earth.

The daily contact with the blackberry bushes here in Ireland have elicited a few thoughts on our general attitude towards food, that we’d love to share with you.
First, taking our time to pick a handful of blackberries helps us downshift the speed at which we travel every day. Why rush? Why worry? It was heartwarming for us to understand that interacting with these lively bushes moulded our emotions into more considerate and careful attitudes toward the rhythm of our days.

Second, we realized, once more, that nature is thriving, abundent and truly altruistic in the way it shares with us. Nature, with all its edibles that we can grow or forage for, can help us engage in parallel – not to call them different – economic relations. It is kind and thoughtful to give or to share a jar of home made blackberry jam with your friend, instead of rushing to the supermarket to purchase a jar of industrially produced blackberry jam. In the later situation, who is it that you engage with? How meaningful is that engagement?

Third, through foraging, we can understand the extent of our needs and degrow. Our consumption habits are deeply rooted and realising that a bottle of pharmaceutically produced vitamins can be easily replaced by a handful of foraged fruits is an intimate revolution. We rarely relate to marketing slogans such as eat fresh, eat healthy, especially when we read these slogans on supermarket windows or on plastic bags that contain apples from New Zealand, but when you re-frame these slogans in the natural setting of the foot of a hill, consumption habits receive a new, enlightened dimension.
It is, then, up to us to make our daily choices. Trekking on hills is much more thoughtful than you can imagine.

Just take your time, remember how your parents and grandparents used to be connected to nature. If you cannot remember because you never knew it first hand, teach yourself, learn about the altruistic wonders of nature and use this knowledge to question who you are and what you do. And, most importantly, why you do everything that you do.

And then eat a handful of freshly picked wild blackberries. They are good for you!

Adela and Dan from Romania
Casa de Cultura Permanenta

At World Vegetarian Day 2014, €1102.78 was raised for the Vegetarian Society of Ireland. Thank you to everyone. We hope you enjoyed the day. Thanks to our sponsors: Bia Beauty, Cornucopia, The Happy Pear and Kelkin. We hope to see you all next year!

See the Programme for World Vegetarian Day 2014.

• Alliance for Animal Rights
• Art of Zen Foods
• Buttercream’s Bakery
• Cornucopia
• Delhi O’Deli
• doTERRA Essential Oils
• Dublin Cycling Campaign
• Dublin Food Co-op
• Dxn and Home Massage Beds
• Flavomax/Shivam Yoga
• National Animal Rights Association (NARA)
• Plantgoodness24.ie
• Real Healthy Lifestyle
• Sea Shepherd Ireland
• The Body Shop
• Umi Falafel
• Vegan Ireland
• Yamini Mehendi/Henna Art

• 13:00-13:30
  Maureen O’Sullivan – Vegetarian Society of Ireland

“Do Vegetarians have Human Rights?”

• 13:30-14:00
  Liz Bourke and David Scully – Vegan Ireland

“Vegetarian to Vegan: Why go vegan and how to do it”

• 14:15-14:45
  Peter Hammarstedt – Sea Shepherd Ireland

“12 Years Defending Whales in Antarctica”

• 14:45-15:15
  Frank Armstrong – Food Historian

“Livestock’s Lengthening Shadow”

• 15:30-16:15
  Discussion including Michael Nugent (Atheist Ireland) and Laura Broxson (NARA)

Welcoming Spring: Fingerfood for a traditional Greek picnic. A short course on vegetarian Greek cooking that will teach you all the basics you need to whip up some lovely tasty Greek food:

• Teach you how to prepare a traditional spring meal for a picnic to take home at the end of the class
• Give an introduction of the history of food and gastronomy in Greece
• Provide the participants with authentic vegetarian spring recipes

When: Monday May 12th 2014
Time: 7 – 9 pm
Location: The Dublin Food Co-op, 12 Newmarket Street, Dublin 8
Cost: €35 including the organic ingredients
Info and booking: Katerina Psimopoulos | katpsim@gmail.com | 01 4913009 | 086 302 5513
More: http://www.facebook.com/CookWithKaterinaPsimopoulos