This blog is a celebration of the wonderful world of vegan cooking. Enjoy!

* The title of this blog refutes the dangerous idea that veganism is a weight-loss diet and that all vegans are skinny. Conversely, being a-not-so-skinny-vegan is also not the same as being overweight or unhealthy. All food intake must be part of a balanced lifestyle.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Hello again.

Nearly two years since my last post! However, I never really took a break from most aspects of this blog: I still record and tweak favourite recipes, I still take photos of my food in hipster restaurants with a most conspicuous SLR (much to the embarrassment of friends and family) and I still try to hunt out the best vegan or vegan-friendly restaurants in all of the places I travel to whether it be Coventry or San Francisco. But I also spent the last two years teaching part-time (if you believe there's such thing as teaching part-time!), while still working full-time on my PhD, so any spare moments I've had to myself I spend sitting like a zombie in front of the television while refusing to communicate with anyone (apparently it is completely normal for teachers to do this).

There are a couple of reasons why I have started writing again. Firstly, it's summer holidays so I'm back to just working full-time on my PhD. This seems like a piece of easy vegan chocolate cake after trying to juggle it with teaching. I make progress every day (literally unheard of in the world of PhD progress) and, because I sit in my office by myself with not a single soul to disturb me (apparently the teacher voice makes other adults either scared of or very annoyed at you), I come home and actually feel like speaking to my partner or writing on my blog! (Last summer holiday I went to San Francisco to present a paper at a conference so it wasn't prime blog writing time.)

The second reason I was reunited with my blog is due to my lovely Year 10 Maths class. Call me naive, but I had no idea the extent of cyberstalking of teachers that goes on. I'm not that old, the internet was around when I was a teenager. However, I grew up in a small country town in northern NSW where the biggest event of the year is a rodeo and people actually go to line dancing classes for exercise. It is 2015 and local businesses still don't have websites. Just last week my Dad got his finger caught in a bench grinder and managed to grind most of his finger off. I thought I would buy him a cheer-up cheesecake and have it delivered to his work. Did not happen. No one in their lovely little town has a website so I could not find anyone to contact about this. So no cheer-up cheesecake for my Dad.

But back to my Year 10 class. On the last day of teaching them (I am moving to a new school in September) I made them all vegan cupcakes and choc chip cookies as a farewell gift to them for being the noisiest, most raucous but also most talented class of students I've ever taught. And their gift to me was to inform me that they had been reading my blog (!) and know basically everything about my very tiny social life(!). I'm not sure I can describe the jaw-dropping look of horror that came on to my face. Truthfully, I don't mind if they know things about me, they could have just asked. I was more surprised that they spend their free time trying to find out what their teachers do in their free time! So, if any of my former or current students are reading this, I'll tell you what I do in my spare time: marking. If you want me to have a more exciting social life that you can talk about then pay more attention in class, ask me when you don't understand something and get 100% on all of your homework and exams from now on. Simple. Also, go out and get some fresh air and exercise and stop cyberstalking your teachers!

So, thanks to my lovely Year 10 Maths class, I was reminded that people do actually come across my blog and that I should contribute to it more often. Also, I must mention, this shock was not the only gift my class gave me. They also gave me the most awesome maths clock which is currently causing a little bit of grief in the household as I think it should go in the most visible place possible and J thinks the study is more appropriate. I have confidence that I will win the argument by putting a nail in the wall when he's not here.

So expect more blog posts this summer and hopefully into the autumn!

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