I love doing fried potato recipes. This is like patatas bravas but a little different. Instead of being fried potatoes with a separate dipping sauce, this puts everything together during the cooking process. It’s a one-pan recipe that’s quicker and easier than a “traditional” patatas bravas recipe. Oh, and it’s vegan and delicious served with Spanish chicken (or tofu)!
As you will see from the photos, it’s not very photogenic. But I strongly believe that some of the most delicious food doesn’t photograph very well, and that there are a great many beautiful looking dishes on Instagram that would be absolutely disgusting to actually eat. It’s also not very spicy (but full of flavour) making it a perfect recipe for younger children, people with dentures and fussy eaters, too! Just put it through the blender before feeding to little ones who don’t have all their teeth, yet.
Ingredients:
150g potatoes, peeled and diced
6 cherry tomatoes
A handful of fresh thyme
2 tsp paprika
1/2 onion diced
1 pinch garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
Method:
Peel and dice the potatoes and put in a pan to boil with a pinch of paprika. When the potatoes are done, drain and put aside. Wipe out the pan with some kitchen roll and use again
Chop the cherry tomatoes into quarters
Tear the thyme to release the flavour
Put the olive oil into a pan and add the onions. Fry until they turn transparent
Add the rest of the paprika, the tomatoes and the thyme
When the tomato skins are beginning to separate from the centers, add the boiled potatoes and stir well. Cook on a medium/low heat until the tomatoes are disintegrating.
Serve immediately.
I saw another recipe for patatas bravas and it was literally terrible. It involved so much salt (over a tablespoon for 2 portions of food) I think it would have made anyone very sick, and it also called for cups of olive oil! It claimed it was an authentic recipe but I think the “Chef” got it from a before-scene on Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares.
After reading that recipe, I knew I had to invent my own potato recipe and share it with you because there aren’t enough good patatas bravas recipes (and other interesting potato recipes) around.
This is a super-cheesy, super-saucy variant on the traditional potato gratin which can be served as a filling accompaniment to a variety of dishes. This follows on from yesterday’s cheesy vegetable bake recipe, as I made this a day later (once we finally had some potatoes).
What’s the difference between potato boulangere and potato gratin? A boulangere is a dish where thin slices of potato are put in an ovenproof dish, drowned in a sauce of cream and chicken stock, and baked until the potatoes at the top are crispy. A gratin, traditionally-speaking, is a boulangere with cheese on top. As you can see, the traditional version needs some big changes to make it dairy-free and vegan!
Every Sunday, and at Easter and Christmas, my aunt used to do a stunning roast dinner, and one of my favourite things on the dining table was a big bowl of potato boulangère with the delicious crispy slices of potatoes on the top and soft, saucy potato slices underneath. I loved it. When I had to cut out dairy many years ago after developing CMPA, I thought I’d never get to eat it again.
Sometime in 2012, my aunt gave me a dairy-free potato boulangere recipe and I was very happy to be able to enjoy one of my favourite dishes once again.
Since then, we’ve had four house moves across three countries (and two continents) and I have lost my potato gratin recipe. In the absence of a structured recipe, I devised this dairy-free cheesy potato bake a few days ago as a vegan side dish to go with the Lidl vegan Christmas roast they were selling very cheaply in January. It would also work well with Linda McCartney vegetarian quarter pounders, although you would need to add the quarter pounders to the oven about halfway through cooking this potato bake.
Ingredients:
5 medium-sized potatoes
Dairy-free white sauce (recipe here) or cheese sauce (recipe here). I recommend the white sauce.
100g grated cheese
You can totally cheat on the sauce and use one of plenty of options, such as Asda’s bechamel sauce (white sauce), or Sacla’s Vegan Ch**se sauce, both of which are sold in jars, or Tesco’s instant dairy free cheese sauce mix sachets (do NOT buy the ASDA cheese sauce sachets; they are NOT dairy free, only gluten free).
Method:
Peel the potatoes. Chop into thin slices. Fill a medium-sized glass dish with them.
Make up the white sauce (or cheat and open a jar of it) and cover the potatoes with it.
Cook on 150 degrees for 30-35 minutes then cover with grated cheese. Turn up the temperature of the oven to 180 and put the dish back in the oven and cook for the last 10 minutes, until the cheese has melted a bit and is starting to go crispy.
If you mess this up (as I did this one time) and put the cheese on too soon, just put the food in the oven and keep the oven at 150 for 20 more minutes.
To check if it’s ready, try sticking a fork into one of the slices of potato. If it feels hard, it’s not ready so put it back in the oven. If it’s soft, it’s ready to serve!
Being dairy-free, the thing I miss the most is cheese. When I first became a vegetarian back in 2007, I didn’t much care about cheese, but over the next twelve months, I really discovered it. Wensleydale. Stilton. Halloumi… I’d never tried such delicious things. I grew up in a house where “cheese sauce” came out of an instant Bisto tub with some hot water added. So the world of proper cheese was a huge discovery for me (and a double-edged sword, when I found out it actually makes me ill as I have non-IgE CMPA).
Despite being dairy-free, I do still try to enjoy cheese (soy or coconut cheese, these days) and I still create recipes that include it. The biggest thing you need to know about dairy-free cheese is it’s not a source of protein (unlike animal cheese) so you need to compensate for that by including protein in your daily diet.
One of my favourite foods is cauliflower cheese, and that’s what this dairy-free vegetable bake is based on (but using more veg for variety).
Thankfully, this recipe is both gluten-free and dairy-free (and vegan) so it’s perfect for anyone with those dietary requirements. It’s also low-carb.
Originally, I wanted to make something resembling a potato gratin, but I’d forgotten the recipe and couldn’t find it anywhere (it’s probably on this blog somewhere). Then it turned out we had no potatoes so I gave up on that, and did this sort of cauliflower cheese vegetable bake thing instead. It uses broccoli, cauliflower and peas, but if you only have broccoli or cauliflower you can use one instead of both.
This takes about 10-15 minutes to prep (it might be a little slower if you do the white sauce from scratch using my vegan white sauce recipe but you’ll get faster at the white sauce the more times you make it) so it’s great as an addition for a dinner party, Sunday lunch or a special occasion, or just to liven up weekday meals, if you’re doing something that takes a little longer to cook than usual, such as a nut roast. If you’re dairy-free but non-vegan, you could serve with salmon or another oily fish.
This could also be a lunchtime main if you added some chopped vegetarian sausages or a healthy sprinkling of sunflower seeds to add protein, if you’re looking for vegan recipe ideas or inspiration.
Dairy free cheesy vegetable bake recipe
Ingredients:
100g broccoli
100g cauliflower
50g peas
250ml dairy free cheese sauce or white sauce
about 100g grated cheese
This recipe is super-easy, and there are plenty of options if you want to “cheat” at making the sauce, such as Asda’s bechamel sauce (white sauce), or Sacla’s Vegan Ch**se sauce, both of which are sold in jars, or Tesco’s instant dairy free cheese sauce mix sachets (do NOT buy the ASDA cheese sauce sachets; they are NOT dairy free, only gluten free).
To make a “proper” dairy free white sauce, use my easy three-ingredient recipe available here.
Method:
First, chop any large broccoli florets and cauliflower florets in half. Now put all the veg into a large saucepan and boil for about 10-15 mins until it’s soft.
While the veg are cooking, make your dairy-free white or cheese sauce.
Drain the veg and put into a large glass oven-safe dish (such as a Pyrex one).
Pour the sauce over the top.
Cover with grated cheese and bake at 160 degrees Celsius/gas mark 5/350F for about 15 minutes until cheese is melted.
White sauce is the foundation of most milk-based sauces, including cheese sauce, peppercorn sauce, bechamel sauce, parsley sauce and soups such as clam chowder (the white one).
I know this because, when I was 11 and learning Home Economics (now called the much edgier “food technology”) at school, I spent most of my time copying pages and pages out of textbooks while my classmates were busy cooking.
At my school, the teacher would buy the ingredients for us and we just had to bring in the money (usually about 80p-£1), or we could bring in the ingredients if we preferred. My mum refused to give me the money for the ingredients OR to buy the actual ingredients, which often left me not able to participate in home economics. The teacher, thinking I was just lazy, made me copy out of textbooks as a “punishment”.
I think I learned more from this than my classmates did. In my experience of attending 13 schools and 3 colleges, home economics teachers are singularly oblivious to the social issues that prevent children from learning. They all seem to be jolly-middle-class women who think everyone has “tagliatelle” at home.
I had been cooking for the whole family since the age of 9, but because I had never eaten a fairy cake, let alone made one, I was seen as “bad at cooking”, a label I internalized and carried with me into adulthood until I finally realized, at 27, I wasn’t bad at cooking, I just didn’t know how to cook the standard middle-class British dishes of the 1970s (which people still seem to judge us on today).
That’s fine, because people like that home economics teacher who think there’s one true way to cook “properly” are usually the first people to get upset about catering for dairy free guests, on the basis that they only know how to follow a bunch of recipes they learned at school or from Delia Smith (sorry, Delia, but you have some unimaginative readers).
So I took great pleasure in subverting white sauce for the vegan agenda and I hope you enjoy the fabulous results of using this sauce as a base for all your dairy-free milky sauce dishes that Western cuisine seems so obsessed with.
This dairy-free white sauce is very customizable, because it’s the base for so many other sauces. Leave it as-is for béchamel sauce (for lasagne/lasagna), or add things to make cheese, parsley, peppercorn sauces etc. It only requires three ingredients to make the basic sauce.
Ingredients:
25g Dairy-free butter
250ml Soy milk (other milks such as almond also work)
25g Flour
This will make enough sauce to cover two servings of cauliflower cheese. As you can see, the measurements are a ratio: For every gram of butter you need one gram of flour, and 10ml of dairy-free milk (add a bit more milk for a thinner sauce). This makes a very easy-to-scale recipe and I often measure my ingredients by eye, adding one part flour to one part butter, then I add the milk slowly from a big carton until I hit the right consistency.
Method:
Put the vegan butter in a saucepan and put it onto a medium heat. Melt the butter.
As the butter turns into a puddle but before it starts to bubble, add the flour gradually, stirring constantly. You are currently making something called a roux, which is the base of most thickened dishes.
Keep stirring (it might start to feel quite dry) until the roux turns crumbly and very slightly golden yellow (don’t let it burn). The quality of the roux will determine the quality of the finished sauce. If the roux turns brown, throw it away and start again.
The flour and butter should look like this.
Gradually add the non-dairy milk, a dash at a time (about a tablespoon’s worth, or a shot, if that’s easier to eyeball), stirring continuously. Only add more when the milk starts to thicken. I usually take the pan off the heat for this part because it’s easy to burn the milk. If you add the milk too quickly, you will get a LOT of lumps (some lumps are inevitable). Squash the lumps out with your fork.
Keep stirring the mixture until it’s a nice, thick, saucy consistency.
Now you’re done! It’s time to either serve it, if you’re making this as a béchamel sauce, or to add the other ingredients such as dairy-free cheese, if you’re making cheese sauce, or peppercorns, if you’re making pepper sauce.
Has your sauce gone lumpy? Fix it!
The main way this sauce can go wrong is if you end up with lots of lumps in a fairly watery sauce. There are two ways you can fix this:
Either use a fine-meshed sieve (if you have one; the sort with holes small enough to drain rice without any grains falling through) or a hand blender.
Lump Removal Method 1: With the sieve, get the bowl ready, put the sieve over it (bowl must be wider than sieve, unless you tilt the sieve so all the sauce falls from one place, or you will have cheese sauce everywhere), pour the cheese sauce into the sieve, and wait for the sauce to drain out, then throw away the lumps that are left.
Lump Removal Method 2: With a hand blender, leave the sauce in the pan and just blend out the lumps. It usually thickens a LOT when you do this (because the lumps are the flour and butter that is also the thickener that gives the sauce its consistency). If it’s too thick, stir in more milk, a little at a time, until it reaches the right consistency.
Gordon Ramsay’s advice is that the best way to do homemade ice cream is to buy a really good vanilla ice cream then add toppings to it at home. Only, there’s no good dairy-free vanilla ice cream available here. So I decided to do my own. Also, I like the texture of chocolate chips, so I decided to add them during the churning.
This vanilla dairy-free choc-chip ice cream recipe was created out of necessity. I had dabbled at making ice cream at home before, when I lived in China, where there is no such thing as dairy-free ice cream (or even dairy-free sorbet). Every food of western origin gets milk added to the recipe over there. I think they think it makes it more authentic.
I had been a little spoilt living in America for 6 months, where a certain Mr. Ben and Mr. Jerry have created the most incredible range of dairy-free ice creams that are available in every one-horse (and thousand-horse) town I visited. I’m not proud of it but I developed a taste for American dairy-free ice cream. And in the UK, the supply of dairy-free ice cream was reasonable. Even in Malaysia I had no issue getting dairy-free ice cream.
But in Ireland, dairy-free ice cream is overpriced and there’s almost none of it available. Literally over the (non-border) in Strabane I can get 3 ASDA dairy-free imitation Magnums for £1.50 or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough dairy-free ice cream for £2.99 (on offer) or £4.50 (normal price), which I think is quite a lot to pay. But in Ireland? That same tub of cookie dough costs €7! SEVEN EUROS! Seven. Euros. Or as I like to call it, daylight robbery. If you can even find a shop that sells it.
As I am currently pregnant, and it’s summer, I need ice cream like I need air to breathe. My attempts to make ice cream in China were okay, but not great. It turns out those recipes to make ice cream without an ice cream maker are blarney. So, since I am now in a country where it’s harder and more expensive to buy electricals, I decided I needed an ice cream maker. I crunched some numbers and it cost £32 (+ free delivery) for an ice cream maker, which is 4.5 tubs of Ben and Jerry’s at Supervalu prices.
So as long as I make only 2 litres of ice cream with my ice cream maker, it’s paid for itself.
This recipe comes out a little bit less vanilla than I’d like, but it works from ingredients you can find in your local Supervalu, Centra, or most small rural Irish shops (maybe not the local chipper), so I’ve sacrificed a little bit of flavour for making this a recipe you can make ANYWHERE in Ireland.
To vanilla it up some more, you do something with vanilla pods. Good luck finding vanilla pods in the arse end of the West Coast because I couldn’t.
Vanilla choc-chip ice cream recipe
Ingredients:
1 tin coconut milk (the type for making curries)
1 tsp vanilla essence
100g honey or other sweetener (don’t use granulated sugar, it will not dissolve at this temperature)
1 packet of chocolate chips (Sainsbury’s dark chocolate chips were dairy free when I last bought them)
Method:
Refrigerate the coconut milk overnight.
If you have a cheap ice-cream maker without a compressor, freeze the ice cream maker’s bowl according to manufacturer’s instructions (I recommend leaving it in there overnight).
Put the coconut milk, honey and vanilla essence into a blender and blend for 30 seconds (don’t add the chocolate chips yet).
Take the ice cream maker’s bowl out of the freezer, assemble the ice cream maker and add the mixture. Add the chocolate chips to the mixture. Let the mixture churn, it should take 7-12 minutes depending on your ice cream maker.
When the mixture starts to thicken into a texture that’s thicker than a dough but not quite completely solid, turn off the ice cream maker and immediately transfer your mixture to a freezable bowl. I have a pottery bowl with a plastic lid which I brought back from my two years in China. Freeze the mixture for an additional hour or two (or longer) and take out of the freezer for 10 minutes before serving. Makes about 500ml (just under 1 pint) of ice cream.
The biggest mistake I’ve seen people make in the reviews of cheap ice cream makers is they leave the mixture in the machine too long, expecting the machine to freeze it completely. If the mixture gets too hard, the electrics will break. A motor turns the paddles, and it doesn’t know to stop, so even when the mixture gets too hard to mix, the motor will still try and turn the paddles, until something snaps and then your ice cream maker won’t work. So it’s better to take it out a little early and freeze it the rest of the way. Remember, you only need the ice cream maker to churn your mixture, you have a perfectly good freezer that can freeze it (if you don’t have a freezer, you can’t make ice cream this way)!
While living in rural China, one serious problem I had was that it was impossible to buy dairy-free or vegan substitutes to dairy products. There’s a good reason for this. Chinese food uses ingredients differently, and is not a dairy-based cuisine. Dairy products are now widely available in China, and dairy additives have sneaked their way into a lot of modern Chinese snack foods, but there are no vegan alternatives to these, because as far as Chinese cooking is concerned, dairy is the alternative.
A lot of the time, the Chinese approach to dairy meant I could usually eat worry-free in most of China. And it was great to try so many new foods.
Of course, being British and Irish, I like to start my day with a lovely yoghurt (if you’re American you spell it “yogurt” lol) drenched in fruit (my faves are fresh County Wexford strawberries, the best strawberries in the world, or when they’re out of season, fluffy Spanish blueberries from the supermarket). While I’m fairly open-minded, there are some days when I just crave home food from my own country. Especially when I became pregnant and suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum (extreme pregnancy sickness… I’m basically allergic to the first 3-4 months of pregnancy).
Yoghurt is also integral to some homemade curry recipes like tikka masala.
Of course, the main problem is every recipe claims to require yoghurt cultures. It is impossible to get vegan yoghurt cultures in rural China (you could get this in the cities or on Taobao but I wouldn’t know enough Mandarin to check the origin or ingredients). In the past, people didn’t need yoghurt cultures to make yoghurt, it’s a modern complication. Could you imagine the Ancient Greeks trying to buy or sell “yoghurt cultures” in the market? They instead used natural alternatives, and you can, too.
With that in mind, I found out how to make yoghurt from local ingredients. Two things which are abundant in China are tofu and chillies (hot peppers). Don’t worry, you won’t make spicy yoghurt with this recipe (weird).
Here’s what you will need (keep scrolling for substitutions/adjustments e.g. soy free):
A block of tofu (about 200g or 1 cup, but don’t get hung up on the size, it largely doesn’t matter).
1 cup of soymilk. In China, you can buy a soy milk maker (on Taobao or in a store) to make your own if you can’t get a carton (Vitasoy in the blue carton from any shop, or Silk from Epermarket are also fine, dependent on your need for organic/no additives etc).
The juice of 2 medium fresh lemons (or 1 very large one).
Half a cup (about 100ml) of boiling water.
A blender or smoothie maker.
12 chili peppers with stems attached.
Method:
Put everything in the blender except the chili peppers. Blend until you get a silky smooth texture then pour it into a flat dish like a pasta bowl or the lid of a casserole dish (not a plate).
Take the chillies and remove the stems. Place the stems into the mixture so the part that joined the chili is now slightly beneath the surface of the yoghurt. These will work in place of yoghurt cultures.
Leave the mixture to culture in a warm spot for about 8 hours (a room without air con or an oven on about 30-40 degrees celsius/90-100 Farenheit is great). If it gets too hot or cold, it won’t culture properly, so take care. If you have a yoghurt maker, that will work, too.
Remove the chillies and store your yoghurt in the fridge in a sealed container for food safety.
This makes a very plain yoghurt that works for overnight oats, tikka masala recipes or you can add honey and chopped fruit to sweeten it.
Adjustments:
If you only have silken tofu, don’t add soya milk, instead use 2 packs of tofu.
Soy allergy? You can use coconut cream (the canned stuff for curries; don’t add the water from the bottom of the tin) and cornflour/cornstarch as a thickener if needed.
If you have no lemon, try lime or apple cider vinegar. You need the acidity level to be right otherwise the good bacteria in the chillies can’t thrive to turn the tofu into yoghurt. In my experience, lack of lemon juice is the only reason this recipe has ever failed for me.
I’m having serious cafe withdrawals at the moment. I miss going out to cafes and ordering food that I can’t make at home. So today I decided to do what I used to do in China when I felt like this. I decided to bring the cafe to me.
I was craving eggs royale, which is the salmon version of eggs benedict. It requires a bread bun, cut in half, on which a poached egg and a piece of salmon are arranged, and they’re drizzled with Hollandaise sauce.
Hollandaise sauce is notoriously hard to make, and I don’t know how to poach an egg without a poacher, and I have to avoid dairy, but I decided not to let any of that stop me from achieving my dream.
First, I found out that Emma Bridgewater mugs are REALLY well made. You can put one in a pan on direct full heat on a stovetop and it poaches an egg. It does take a few minutes but it gets the job done. That was my second attempt at poaching an egg (my first attempt was a complete disaster and resulted in an egg-splosion because I tried to do a “proper” poached egg where you basically whisk boiling water into a vortex then drop an egg into it. I do NOT have the skills for that, apparently).
Then there was the problem of the Hollandaise sauce. Here’s the recipe I adapted:
1 packet of silken tofu (300g or about 9 oz)
1/8 cup of lemon juice
1/8 cup nutritional yeast
1/8 cup dairy free butter
1/2 tsp turmeric (for colour)
1/2 tsp oregano (flavour)
a good pinch of garlic (flavour)
a good pinch of pepper (flavour)
Blend the tofu until it’s a smooth liquid. Then put it in a pan with the other ingredients and heat on a medium heat until the butter is melted and the sauce starts to turn a bright yellow. Serve over eggs benedict or eggs royale.
This recipe is so much easier than making the complicated emulsion for proper hollandaise sauce. If you want something with a more traditional flavour, ditch the oregano.
The main point to note with this recipe is absolutely don’t use the firm spongy kind of tofu. It won’t blend into a liquid, it will turn into a scrambly mess. The sauce itself is vegan but I obviously poured it over things which were non-vegan.
Lastly, the taste test. I thought it was really nice when it was cooked for long enough, but when I tasted it during cooking, it kept tasting excessively lemony, so definitely simmer it for at least 5 minutes to draw out the other flavours in this sauce.
As promised, the 2016 edition of Which Easter Eggs Are Vegan (UK and USA): I went to all the supermarkets in my town to see which ones carried dairy-free vegan easter eggs, and which eggs were actually dairy free and vegan, then I checked out Amazon.com to help out my American Vegan and Dairy Free readers too, so there should be something here for most dairy-free people.
Sainsbury’s:
Sainsbury’s had an excellent selection of vegan Easter eggs for 2016:
The Moo Free Egg is 100% vegan and available in Sainsbury’s:
The Moo Free vegan Egg
This interesting new addition to the range of dairy free vegan eggs is by a brand called Celtic (did they do Scheese??) and is also available in Sainsbury’s:
I haven’t seen this Celtic vegan egg before 2016.
Longtime entry Caramel Choices Easter Egg by Choices is a very sweet, very tasty dairy free and vegan egg that’s a favourite with children. It tastes like Thornton’s Special Toffee Egg (but vegan) although the chocolate is a little softer. Available at Sainsbury’s. I have three of these ready for Easter, it’s my favourite!
Caramel Choices vegan Easter egg
The Choices dairy free vegan chocolate Easter bunny, at £1 each, comes in “milk” chocolate flavour or white chocolate flavour, but is still dairy free and vegan. Available at Sainsbury’s and Tesco:
The Choices chocolate vegan Easter bunnies.
Sainsbury’s have done their own dairy free and vegan eggs again this year. This one is fantastic (I had one last year) – it’s a vegan white chocolate egg that’s dairy and wheat and gluten free and vegan so it covers all bases. I love white chocolate eggs and there’s so few vegan ones on the market, so this is one of my favourites:
Sainsbury’s white choc vegan egg.
This is the larger of Sainsbury’s two dairy free, gluten free and vegan eggs on offer this year: This one is dark chocolate flavour and comes with little chocolate discs. If you’re a vegan dark chocolate fan this one’s for you.
Moving on to Tesco, who had a very good selection last year, we also have the following dairy free and vegan Easter eggs:
The Tesco Finest 74% Ecuadorian Egg (the one that looks exactly like this with the gold on it) is dairy free and vegan. This egg is quite luxurious and would make an excellent gift for a dairy free or vegan adult who likes dark chocolate, but a child would probably want something a little sweeter:
The Tesco Finest 74% Ecuadorian Egg is vegan.
The ingredients for the Tesco Finest 74% Ecuadorian Easter egg. That’s “cocoa butter” not “butter” (despite some companies getting these confused when they label food for some reason).
The Green and Black’s Dark 70% chocolate egg is vegan and dairy free in 2016. Green and Black’s can be very inconsistent with whether they put milk in their food or not. One minute their chocolate is reasonably vegan, then the next minute it’s full of horrible milk, as I’m sure we all know, so don’t rely on this for checking if they’re still vegan in 2017!
The Green and Black’s Dark 70% chocolate egg is vegan in 2016.
The 2016 ingredients for the Green and Black’s 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate Easter Egg.
The Green and Black’s mint chocolate egg is also dairy free and vegan this year. All the Green and Black’s say “not suitable for milk allergy” but I have an allergy and my only problem is that their chocolate doesn’t taste very nice, it’s never made me ill though:
The Green and Black’s mint chocolate egg.
The Lindt DARK chocolate bunny with the brown ribbon is vegan 2 years in a row! I am most excited about this positive move by Lindt to enable those of us who are dairy free to enjoy their chocolate. Their chocolate is so nice!
The Lindt DARK chocolate bunny is vegan.
The ingredients for the Lindt dark chocolate Easter gold bunny are here:
The ingredients.
My local Tesco’s Free From section surprised me two holiday seasons in a row – they didn’t have dairy free and vegan chocolate Advent calendars before Christmas and now they don’t have any Free From dairy free chocolate Easter eggs to choose from, good thing they make up for it with all their vegan dark chocolate egg offerings, but the only vegan Easter chocolate that Tesco sell that children would enjoy is the Lindt gold bunny and the little Choices bunnies, so if you’re shopping for vegan children or children with a milk allergy, Sainsbury’s is far and away the best place to get some proper Free From eggs. Tesco’s selection is better for adults who like dark chocolate, so do check the preferences of your vegan or milk allergy sufferer before assuming they will like something just because it’s dairy free. I think the vegan Kinnerton dairy free egg has been withdrawn this year because nowhere has it on sale and it used to be the most popular one for shops to stock (I’m sort of glad, I’m sick to death of getting that flipping egg from everyone year after year). Morrisons were the most disappointing, for the fifth year in a row, they had absolutely nothing in the vegan or dairy free Easter egg department, not even the Green and Blacks or Lindt ones, and while they’ve expanded their dairy free area of the Free From section recently to move with the times and nearly catch up with… um… every other supermarket in Britain… they still have a long way to go before I can confidently get rid of my car and just use the local Morrisons for my dairy free and vegan shopping.
The Supermarket Shelf Hall Of Shame: NOT VEGAN OR DAIRY FREE:
To follow are a list of eggs that looked like they might be dairy free or vegan but definitely aren’t. Please don’t buy these for someone who doesn’t have milk or milk products:
NOT VEGAN The After Eight Easter Egg contains milk.
NOT VEGAN: The Lindt Excellence dark chocolate 70% cocoa Easter egg contains milk.
NOT VEGAN: Did anyone really expect Nestle to come up with a dairy free egg for 2016? Well they didn’t. Again. But it looks like it might be vegan, so I included it in the hall of shame. I think Nestle might be the only chocolate company I know of who have never even tried to make a dairy free chocolate bar (even Cadbury’s trialled it with Bournville).
Cadbury’s also have nothing vegan or dairy free again this year, but I don’t mind too much because I can’t stand their chocolate. The vegan After Eight mint chocolate bunnies we saw last year (that I bought about 5 of at £1 each) also seem to have disappeared this year which is a shame because they were fabulous. If you see them please let me know where in the comments!
Dairy Free And Vegan Eggs on Amazon:
For my American readers, I’ve taken a look through Amazon and come up with a list of the best dairy free vegan Easter eggs available in 2016. There are a couple I excluded because they were too expensive to be even vaguely reasonable for what they were. I was surprised that there wasn’t the vast selection I was expecting:
Moo Free Cheeky Orange Vegan Easter Egg This one is $17.00 (plus $5.99 shipping) so comes in a little on the expensive side but I included it because it’s the only orange flavoured one. This one is dairy free and suitable for vegans.
Moo Free Bunnycomb Free From Vegan Easter Egg At $13.00 (plus $5.99 shipping) it’s a little cheaper, but the cost of shipping is quite high again. As the name implies, it’s dairy free and suitable for vegans.
Cream Veggs Milk Free, Nut Free Vegan Easter Cream Filled Eggs These are $16.95 plus $6 shipping, but you do get 6 eggs so if you’re getting something for a family of vegans, dairy and nut allergy sufferers, or if you want all the kids to have the same as each other, this is a pretty good choice and since they’re cream-filled (I’m assuming dairy free cream, otherwise this is a really stupid item with misleading labelling), it’s something a little different to the usual hollow eggs.
Montezumas Chocolate Dark Choc Bunnies 90g This is a $17.82 (plus $5.99 shipping) 90g pack of 8 mini chocolate bunnies that are dairy free, organic and vegan. Interestingly the description says these are made in West Sussex (UK) but I’ve never heard of them so I don’t think they’re a very big company – perhaps one day these will find their way onto English supermarket shelves too!
If you’re new to veganism or recently been diagnosed with a milk allergy (or recently met someone you’re buying for) you should be aware that these eggs will sell out fast! I have already (time of writing is February 2016) got my Lindt dark chocolate bunny, and am getting my Sainsbury’s eggs this week so I don’t miss out, because Easter is a very special time of year for me and my bunnies, and I totally missed out on Christmas due to being critically ill so I’m looking forward to opening my tasty eggs on Easter day which means getting them early. Please store them in a cool, dry place so they don’t go bad or melt, dairy free chocolate is still chocolate and it will melt in warm temperatures/direct sunlight!
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While these eggs are suitable for lactose intolerance, A1 casein intolerance and milk allergy sufferers, as well as most people living a milk-free life, not all of these eggs are suitable for all people whose medical conditions mean they avoid milk, not because they contain milk (they absolutely are 100% vegan except the three clearly labelled in the hall of shame) – but some people also have to avoid all of a specific type of sugar as well e.g. with a disaccharide intolerance. If you want to know more about the seven different types of milk-related allergies and intolerances, see my article here.
I haven’t talked about food for a good long while, and there’s a reason for that:
I’m not vegan any more. And I haven’t been for a while.
You may remember my New Year’s resolution was to get back to veganism again.
It didn’t really work out. Between the 9 month mixed state I’ve been in until August and the fact that I had to avoid all sugar (not just “added” but fruit sugar and some sweeteners too, as I had no mood stabilizers and was in a mixed state), I’ve had to put whatever I can into my face. And I’ve been gravitating towards specific things.
Most vegans gain a sort of sense of what their body needs. Mine’s been taking me away from veganism.
The truth is, the more I learn about food, the more I believe that a paleo type diet is actually more helpful. I’ve been eating solid pieces of meat (such as chicken, lamb and beef), along with two to three servings of vegetable, and a small amount of carbohydrate. I don’t know what type of diet that is but it’s been my best configuration.
I still avoid milk but I have now found out where I stand on the allergy/intolerance spectrum (I outlined the types of allergy/intolerance here and updated it today to add A1 casein intolerance): I have an A1 casein protein intolerance as well as lactose intolerance. This means I can tolerate something called A2 milk (available in supermarkets) without getting milk allergy symptoms, which means I can try small amounts of milk without the fear of dying or going blind (which happens if you have galactosemia and you keep having milk). When the symptoms were similar, I was not going to take the risk.
I call my current way of eating a “real food” diet – if someone from a thousand years ago (date picked at random) looked at my plate, would they recognize everything on it as actual food? Independent of food inventions and discoveries, but just going with what they know about things that can be eaten, what would their opinion be?
For example: chips are not real food. Baked potatoes are. Pasta isn’t real food. Whole boiled or steamed or raw vegetables are. Meat is (but not processed meat such as bacon).
I didn’t get this from a recipe book or diet guru, I just started eating like this. It was what my body was crying out for. And I’ve felt a lot better since I’ve been doing it. I do still eat meals that are completely vegan, but I feel that I’ve found a different way of eating that is more beneficial to myself. I have nothing bad to say about veganism and the vegan community in general, and I do believe the underlying philosophy to be more valid and worthy than that of people who have never questioned. I have simply found a different nutritional path.
I’m not sure right now where it’s taking me, but I will keep you posted. And possibly share any recipes if I have any.
This one is $17.00 (plus $5.99 shipping) so comes in a little on the expensive side but I included it because it’s the only orange flavoured one. This one is dairy free and suitable for vegans.
At $13.00 (plus $5.99 shipping) it’s a little cheaper, but the cost of shipping is quite high again. As the name implies, it’s dairy free and suitable for vegans.
These are $21 but they do qualify for free shipping AND you get a two pack for the $21 (which is a total of 36 foil wrapped eggs). They are organic dark chocolate and suitable for vegans.
These are $16.95 plus $6 shipping, but you do get 6 eggs so if you’re getting something for a family of vegans, dairy and nut allergy sufferers, or if you want all the kids to have the same as each other, this is a pretty good choice and since they’re cream-filled (I’m assuming dairy free cream, otherwise this is a really stupid item with misleading labelling), it’s something a little different to the usual hollow eggs.
This is a $17.82 (plus $5.99 shipping) 90g pack of 8 mini chocolate bunnies that are dairy free, organic and vegan. Interestingly the description says these are made in West Sussex (UK) but I’ve never heard of them so I don’t think they’re a very big company – perhaps one day these will find their way onto English supermarket shelves too!
Okay this one’s not an egg, it’s an Easter bunny, but it’s so freaking adorable and at $14.95 it’s one of the cheaper options to feed your vegan tasty dairy free chocolate at Easter!
