My Review of Vida Bakery – An all vegan and gluten-free bakery, with cakes, cupcakes, brownies, and other goodies baked fresh every morning; soft serve ice cream, and hot drinks. Where: 139 Brick Lane, London E1 6SB Website: www.facebook.com/vidabakery Instagram: www.instagram.com/vidabakery Checked …
A big challenge in maintaining a vegan lifestyle can be finding wholesome and varied food options when travelling. As we’re nearing the end of summer, I thought I would hold onto those holiday vibes a bit longer and share some of my top tips for …
Simple one-pot vegan lentil soup using staple cupboard and freezer ingredients, packed with veggies to make up a warming and comforting meal.
Summer here in the UK has been a bit unpredictable. Mainly it’s been super hot and sunny – the first proper summer I’ve really experienced in my five years living here in London, and I’ve been loving it. We have had a few spells of colder days though, and this past week I started to feel some Autumn vibes.
This got me daydreaming about peacoats and scarves, jumpers and boots, bowls of hot stews and curries – not to get too carried away. I know this is preemptive and I want summer to last a bit longer (please London). But I do love Autumn. And as we begin to slowly transition into a new season, I have started to crave some more comfort food recipes. This lentil soup is my go-to easy warming meal – especially for when I want something quick that uses lots of staple ingredients already in my cupboard and freezer.
This is another one of those chuck-everything-in-a-pot-and-let-it-do-its-thing recipes (as are the vast majority of my recipes!).
Fast Five Reasons to Try: One-Pot Vegan Lentil Soup
If you end up trying out this recipe, let me know how you get on with it – take a photo and tag me on Instagram @bitesbybekah. I’d love to connect with you and it always makes me so happy to see your creations!
Cook on the hob/stove for about 30 mins, until lentils are cooked and veg soft. (If using an Instant Pot: cook on high pressure for 12 minutes, and when finished release the pressure naturally or carefully open the valve to quick release the pressure.)
Add the frozen spinach and peas and cook for another few minutes. (For the IP, just add these after it’s cooked and let them naturally defrost in the hot mixture).
Top/garnish with anything you’d like, serve up and enjoy!
Store leftovers in the fridge for a few days, or freeze for the future (you may want to add a bit of extra liquid after defrosting frozen soup).
A simple formula for putting together a vibrant and delicious plant-based salad bowl, filled with nourishing ingredients, varying textures, rainbow colours, and satisfying foods. Have you ever been to those salad places, where they Chipotle-style put together a bowl packed with greens and goodness, chopping …
A review of four plant-based ready meals, making for quick, easy and healthy go-to meal options for those nights you just don’t feel like cooking. Have you ever come home from a long day out at work or university and wished there was a healthy, …
A sunny bowl of turmeric porridge, sure to brighten up even the greyest of mornings with a creamy and nourishing plant-based breakfast.
You know those days when you wake up and the sky is cloudy and grey? I live in London, so I really know those days, and it’s on those mornings when a bowl of turmeric porridge is exactly what I need to brighten up my day. This is also one of the easiest ways I know how to make porridge. It takes minimal prep time, and the oats come out super fluffy every time! I almost go into auto-pilot when I enter my kitchen with this meal in mind.
Half an hour later, my oats have had the perfect amount of time to get themselves ready! They’re actually ready in about ten minutes (nice of them to be so quick), but I like to give them extra time if I can, as I find the longer I leave them the fluffier they get. I’ll usually pour some plant mylk in at the end to add an extra creaminess to the oats, and then I pretty much always stick it in the microwave for a couple of minutes to warm it up again – cloudy days leave me wanting extra warm food.
Oh! A quick but important note: if you leave your oats sitting in boiling water for ten minutes or less and they’re still slightly warm, but you want to microwave them anyways (I always want my food extra hot, so I get you), please keep an eye on them in the microwave! I have been the culprit of waaaay too many overflowing bowls of oats in my microwave. You would think after the first several times I would learn, but somehow it still happens to me all the time…and there’s nothing more upsetting than losing half your breakfast because it spilled out of your bowl (I mean, of course there are more upsetting things, but mopping up a microwave of soggy oats definitely dampens your morning). So, learn from my mistakes and keep an eye out, they’ll only need about a minute in there to heat up.
Next time you wake up craving some sunshine oats and want to do it the quick and effortless way (which is most days for me, let’s be real), I hope you try this recipe and method out! If you do, take a photo and tag me on Instagram @bitesbybekah. I’d love to connect with you and it always makes me so happy to see your creations!
My summer staple green smoothie bowl, to get in loads of green plant-based goodness first thing in the morning (or any time of day). Summertime is my favourite. I may or may not say that about every season…I genuinely love them all! But right now …
An easy Instant Pot recipe for Carrot Cake Steel Cut Oats, giving you the flavours of carrot cake in a healthy and filling plant-based breakfast bowl. The Meeting I was first introduced to steel cut oats a couple of summers ago at my aunt’s house. …
It wasn’t this blog, this blog just launched today! But it was a blog and I had high hopes for it. At the time I was embarking on one of the greatest adventures of my life – I had taken my first international flight moving to another country where I would finally get to explore the wider world (and hopefully pick up a British accent) whilst living in London, UK. It was all incredibly exciting and I wanted to document everything – mostly for myself, but also for family and friends back home. I actually just had a cheeky look back at that blog and it was so fun to walk down memory lane, so I suppose it served its purpose a little bit.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, that blog never really got off the ground. It had a few sputtering starts and restarts. I put up posts every now and then. And (to my credit) I uploaded loads of photos somewhat regularly because I’m a bit of a photographing fiend – have you seen my Instagram stories? However, exciting things just kept happening too fast (don’t you just hate it when that happens?), and a blog became too much for me to keep up with. I wonder if any of you can relate, and have your own lost blogs that live somewhere forgotten on the Internet, or in the files on your laptop?
I’ve thought quite a bit about why this happened, especially as I’ve been working on this new blog – and how long it’s taken to get off the ground. Mainly I think I got swamped with the amount of stuff I felt I had to do – the hundreds, which quickly became thousands of photos to sort through and edit (my photographing strategy has always been to take loads of photos and hope that some turn out halfway decent – usually it works, but it requires so much time to wade through). And then there was all of the writing, proofreading, formatting, and as experiences piled up it began to feel like too much to keep up with.
All of this, combined with my indecision and perfectionism, resulted in a false start. I felt like I couldn’t craft blog posts that I deemed worthy of publishing. I don’t know why I felt so much pressure given that my readers were family and a few close friends who I knew wouldn’t have judged my posts (too harshly at least). But I’ve always felt a strong degree of (self-imposed) pressure to produce things to a certain standard, and in my head I couldn’t meet the bar.
That same perfectionism and pressure has played a big part in keeping me from starting this blog.
You may (or may not) be surprised to hear that I’d been thinking about starting a food blog for over a year now, with the original intention to launch at the beginning of the new year – yes this year, 2018. I know, I know, it’s August…so you can see how that went!
Side note for my Instagram peeps who have followed along with the whole slight saga – thanks for sticking with me! Can you believe it’s finally happening?? I hardly can, it’s really been a long time coming.
I think the main thing was that I had thought the content I was sharing, and even myself as a person, needed to be at a certain point before I could start – that I had to be super healthy and fit, a whiz in the kitchen, and an organised writer who had something polished to share with the world. Over time, as I’ve struggled with balancing studies and life and Instagram, dealt with some health issues, and felt further and further from that ‘ready version’ I thought I needed to be, I kept pushing blogging further and further away. It’s been a slow and gradual process, but I’ve come to realise that I’ll never reach that polished level of expertise I’m aiming for. And now I genuinely think a lot of the value of this community and sharing a blog is to bring you along for the ride and show you the journey along the way.
This blog might (definitely) be messy.
It will likely not be as organised or as professional as I want – especially when I look at how many incredible and beautiful blogs there are out there. I have to face the realities that I am at a different stage in my health journey, my blogging journey (hello beginnings!), and in my life as a full-time doctoral student also trying to live in an expensive city abroad.
But I’ve also recognised that I don’t have to be the end product right now.
And I hope that by bringing you into my life at this moment, as I’m still working on balance and health and life, that you can find some value, inspiration, encouragement or comfort from any of it.
I want to share the process of launching and growing this little corner of the Internet. And I guess this is a space for me to muse about what that process is like. I hope it might be interesting. I hope even more so that it might be helpful. I’m not entirely sure what this series will look like, but at the moment I envision it being a place to share helpful tips and tricks that I learn and implement along my blogging journey.
So, this is the beginning of my blogging journey. Where are you on yours? Have you started a blog? Or ever wanted to? I’d love to hear any stories you might want to share (and how long it took/is taking you to launch yours? =P)