Eating vegan at Nandos

Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to do anymore series on my blog, this is not a series, this is not something I'll do often like I'm a student I don't eat out that much, but I know some people are interested in what vegans can actually eat besides 'rabbit food' (heck, don't get me started) so I thought if I ate out I would do a post on what I can eat, even if you're not vegan like if you want to go for the less fatty option or whatevs.

We went out for one of my housemates' birthday, she's not from the UK and her town doesn't have a Nandos so it was nice to share her first cheeky Nandos experience. So Nandos, a chicken restaurant, they don't specifically cater to vegans, it takes a bit of substitution. On this particular visit, I had to say 'no dairy' about 5 times to the server and explain what dairy was, no I'm not joking (wish I was, that was irritating), the guy serving me then asked if chilli sauce had dairy in it and I was just like bruh wyd but the message did get through and I got a veggie wrap sans yoghurt with peri peri chips which was delish. As far as I know, all of the Peri Peri sauces are vegans so you still get the peri peri sauce on the veggie wraps - I got a hot one because if you're going to Nandos, you've got to do it right, and I got Savanna Cider and water to go with it (vegan cider can be sometimes be hard to find in restaurants, so I like that Nandos do a vegan one).

Side note: all of the veggie meals in Nandos can be made vegan as long as you ask them to remove mayo/yoghurt/cheese - the key to eating vegan when you're in a restaurant is substitution.

What's your peri peri sauce of choice when you go to Nandos?

Political baking with a meme-ingful message

Recently, I helped host a little shindig for my feminist friends (a.k.a the combabes) and I decided to get a little political for the vegan treats I made.

So I made some vegan shortbread and whilst I started off just writing 'I hate men', 'girls rock', 'NB people rock' etc. I ended up with a hammer and sickle and 'kill all men' - they went down pretty well!

I didn't intend the writing to look like blood, more like a happy accident...

On the 10th January, we were blessed with a new meme and that is the phrase 'Davey Cameron is a pie', so what better way to commemorate it than with a literal Davey Cameron pie? I went for apple, even though I'm sure Cameron would've preferred pork. There's nothing more liberating than stabbing a Davey Cameron pie, as I'm sure our party guests would've agreed with.

Whilst this may not have been the most interesting post, I make myself laugh and I want as many people to know as possible than I not only bake vegan treats but I also bake vegan treats with a political message - thank you and good night.

Some BornPretty Reviews

A long time ago I received a couple of things from BornPretty to review but with the stress of University deadlines amongst other things, I haven't gotten round to it until now. As far as I know, these are cruelty free as the animal testing law in China does not apply to online shopping, but if you know any different please inform me - I wouldn't have accepted PR samples in the knowledge that the products were tested on animals.

First up, I received The Hotshop Eyeliner* which is a basic, black, liquid liner. It claims to be waterproof and long lasting, I didn't really test whether it was waterproof but it did pretty much stay put all day. I did find it flaked away a bit by the time I was ready to take it off but it had had a good 6-8 hours wear so I don't think that's too shabby. I like the nib of it as it's quite a lot like a pen so it would've been easy to apply my eyeliner flick (queue the cons of the product..) but I didn't find there was much liquid in the bottle at all, I'm not sure whether it's a bad batch, whether it wasn't sealed properly and dried up while shipping, or whether they just don't provide enough liquid in it. I kid you not, I've only been able to use this twice and it just won't cooperate because there's barely any liquid in there and some of it is quite gloopy. Furthermore, the packaging is a ripoff of a certain high street brand, which doesn't bother me much but I know some people would call the product out on its originality.. Considering it costs $5.10 (down from $7.28) which converted is £3.62 (or £5.16) I would not purchase this again just because I would not spend about a fiver on a product I could only get two uses out of.

Secondly, I received the 2 Pack Music Flower 24 Hours Long-Wear Gel Eyeliner* which comes in the shades Black and Brown. This claims to be smudge proof, long-lasting and waterproof. I'm not sure if I would agree with any of those claims. The gel is so creamy that it can slip around your face unless you set it with some black eyeshadow, however I do like how smooth it applies and the hard angled brush it comes with really helps in creating the perfect eyeliner flick. The packaging is plastic and looks quite substandard, but it is cheaper than any other gel liner I have tried so this is something I can forgive. At only $5.32 (down from $7.60) which converted is £3.77 (or £5.39) I do think this product is quite good value and it is something I have been reaching for quite often.

I actually have a discount code you can use if you want 10% off at BornPretty which is DNNH10 - happy shopping!

What eyeliners are your favourites?

Vegan banana pancakes recipe

I don't think I've ever posted a recipe on my blog before, don't get me wrong, I looove to bake, but I've never really thought I was baking anything that was interesting enough to make a post on. However, I would like to post more vegan recipes because I know a lot of people think that being vegan makes life ridiculously hard and expensive which is quite far from the truth. Furthermore, I know a lot of people have gone vegan for Veganuary so I felt it was appropriate to post this now. I adapted this recipe from this one.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO MAKE 6 PANCAKES:

• One banana 
• 1/2 cup of plain flour
• 1/2 cup of porridge oats
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1 cup of soy milk (or any dairy-free alternative of your choice, I for one am a big lover of oat drink and almond milk but soy milk tends to be cheaper)

HOW TO DO THE THING:

• Mash up the banana in a bowl until it's a lot more liquidy (the banana is basically replacing the egg so you need it to be a slightly thicker liquid than an egg)
• In a separate bowl, sieve in your flour (you don't have to do this but it means they'll be a lot lighter and fluffy), baking powder, and add your porridge oats
• Pour a cup of soy milk (or dairy-free milk alternative of your choice) into the bowl with the dry ingredients
• Stir until the dry ingredients and the milk are completely combined
• Add the mashed banana and mix until combined
• Heat a pan on a high heat and grease it or use a non-stick spray
• Put about 2 tablespoons of the batter onto the pan at a time for one pancake (this can change depending on how big or small you want your pancakes to be)
• Wait until the batter starts to bubble and slightly pull away at the sides (so you can see it solidifying at the sides basically)
• Flip the pancake and let the other side cook for about 1 minute
• Repeat this process until all the batter is finished, then have the pancakes with any topping of your choice - I sometimes have these with maple syrup but personally, I don't think they need anything else because of the banana taste

Let me know if you decide to try this recipe out, I find little need to be a militant vegan when you can lure people into veganism with tasty treats..

A week of Davids

This week has been quite surreal to me, I feel like so much happened in such a short space of time, and whilst I'd love to talk about them all, I think the events of the past week can be better summarised in 3 Davids.

DAVID CAMERON 
Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn's Twitter was hacked resulting in, what I believe to be, the first meme of 2016 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'd hate to be misinformed on the world of memes) and that is the tweet 'davey cameron is a pie', alongside a couple of other ones, one of them being a topical 'f*ck trident' and the other one saying 'here we... here we... here we f*cking go!!!'. 'Davey Cameron is a pie' has quickly become one of my favourite phrases of all time, so we started off well...

DAVID BOWIE
... That was until I woke up on Monday morning at 9:00am, all set to go to my lectures and have a productive day, and I go onto my phone to check my Whatsapp and I have a message from my friend saying 'OMG BESS DAVID BOWIE DIED!!!!' and my immediate reaction was that it was a hoax, and I refused to believe it. That was until I read the articles and heard it was true, and proceeded to stare at the ceiling blankly for 2 hours (I missed my lecture.. not good). This is the first celebrity death to really affect me, of course there have been other celebrities who have died and it affected me but David Bowie was one of my favourite artists. He contributed so much to music and film, as well as bringing a lot of attention to gender identity and gender fluidity and sexuality and all that jazz which was quite unheard of at the time which shows how bold he was as a person. I'm still in disbelief, I won't lie - you could say 'the stars look very different today'...

DAVID MITCHELL
This was one of the highest points of the week. I went to a recording of The Unbelievable Truth with David Mitchell (as well as other comedians like David o'Doherty... hey that's another David!) which would've been cool enough, but to top it all off, we got to sit in the front row! I can't believe I was so close to David Mitchell, like it hasn't really processed, but it was amazing nonetheless.

A bunch of other cool things happened this week but they're not David related, so I'll just list 'em real quick:
- had a night of watching all the weirdest videos the internet has to offer with friends (as if I hadn't seen them before, but you can't go wrong with Shrek is Love, Salad Fingers, and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared)
- got tickets to see Marina & The Diamonds next month with a couple of friends, we've wanted to see Marina for so so long and it's finally happening so I'm super excited!
- found the house I'm moving to for my next year of University and it's 10 minutes away from the beach, pretty fab!
- got the module I wanted for next semester so I'm going to be learning about social welfare and slightly more political shiz

I usually hate resolutions but...

I have made some resolutions. These are things I've been thinking about doing for a while and things I had started incorporating into my life towards the end of 2015, but I haven't really voiced them and I feel like if I do I'll be more likely to stick to them.

I know this photo is blurry but it's kinda cute and candid if you feel me, plus it was taken on New Years Eve so I feel it's appropriate for a New Years Resolutions post..

MAKE THE CONTENT I WANT TO MAKE - I said in my last post that I created a new channel on YouTube so I could start fresh and make the sort of content I really enjoy, but I want to apply that to my blog as well. I've become really b(l)ogged down with the sort of content I do and I feel like my content has become quite contrived, so for this reason, taking effect immediately, I'm stopping any 'series' I have on my blog until I feel like I want to do them again because it's making me feel forced to post content that I don't care about, which in turn is making me care less about my blog. So, I'm just gonna post when and what I feel like posting.

READ MORE BOOKS - If you remember, in this post I said I wanted to read 50 books in 2015 and follow a very challenging regime, which killed my love of reading. I'm serious, like I've been a bookworm since I learned to read but this year I just didn't feel like reading according to this schedule, so I'm setting my reading challenge to 15 books and I'm going to read the books I like.

GET BACK INTO MUSIC - This is quite specific in terms of singing. I have kept up with playing guitar and ukulele since being at University, and the times I've visited home I've had a whack at the piano, but in terms of singing I've completely let go. I had vocal lessons for 4 years, and I feel like since then my voice and slowly deteriorated and I've only realised how dramatically it has recently (my range has decreased significantly) so I'm going to try and work on it everyday to try and get it back to where it was. I used to be able to hit an A5 and I was really proud of that but I can't really do it anymore which is sucky. Plus, I want to do music on my new YouTube channel (which will be properly up in February) so I feel like I should do some sort of preparation for that..

GET A JOB - This isn't a goal I'm expecting to fulfil until the summer, but I have never had a proper job. I've had about 4 days of work experience before, but other than that, zilch. I would really like to get a job for the summer so I can stay down in Brighton for a bit and get a bit of job experience, failing getting a job in Brighton, I might try and get one in London and stay there for the summer. Part of the reason I want to get a job, of course, is so I can sing 'I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now' and have it be somewhat relatable.

Have you set yourself any resolutions?

A review of 2015

2015 has, by far, been one of the biggest years of my life so far. I feel like a lot of things changed for me, and after reading and taking inspiration from Maddie's post, I thought I would do an extremely similar thing and do a lil summary of the past year.

COMPLETED GRADE 8 PIANO - I started playing piano when I was 4 years old and I did my Grade 1 in about 2005, and doing Grade 8 was one of my goals for quite a long time so to do it was one of the most surreal things because I no longer had anything to work for. It also felt like quite an accomplishment for myself and my teacher who took me from grade 3 onwards because she had said since about Grade 5 that she couldn't teach me any further but we kept tackling the next grade up, and I became her first student to ever do Grade 8 which is pretty rad.

GOT OUT OF A TOXIC FRIENDSHIP (frigging finally, lemme tell you) - This is something I had been trying to do for years and years, essentially the entirety of my high school life. Without going into too much detail, I was 'friends' with a very manipulative girl and I had had issues with this friendship for a long time but was always manipulated into maintaining the friendship, and then other people had a similar situation but we didn't manage to sort it out until this year, and it was possibly the most drama our sixth form has ever seen, but I'm glad that me and my friends got out of it and we became closer than ever as a result of it.

FINISHED MY A LEVELS - A Levels were probably the most stressful exams of my life, it was such a relief to have them over and done with. I do miss my sixth form though, we were so close and then all of a sudden we went our separate ways, but that's life I s'pose.

PLANNED AND PARTOOK IN A HOLIDAY - I used to find travelling quite anxiety-inducing if it hadn't been planned for me or I didn't know the area or if I thought I might be late, but when me and my friends decided we wanted to do something to celebrate the end of sixth form, and after we failed to plan a trip to Alton Towers, I suggested renting out a cottage/holiday home for a week, and it seemed to be a perfect idea. After losing a couple of houses, we managed to find one that could cater such a big group and one that was close to the beach, as well as being in our budget. It felt like such a massive accomplishment because we planned it all ourselves with a limited budget and so it fit in with all of our schedules (believe me, it was frigging hard as we only really had one week where everyone was free and our group was massive). It was such an awesome holiday and I have really fond memories of those 5 days in Lytham (probably not the biggest tourist area, but the weather was amazing and we had the beach to ourselves for most of the days).

BECAME A TREE HUGGING HIPPY (a.k.a I became vegan) - I went vegan for a month in the summer just to give it a go and I absolutely loved it, I felt so much healthier and energised and happier, and it was pretty awesome. Then I went back to being a meat-eater (for the Lytham holiday really) for a few weeks and was really unhappy, so eventually I went vegan again and I've been vegan since about mid-August, and it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I've tried hard not to be a preachy, militant vegan, but it feels good to have my ethics aligned with my nutritional lifestyle. Plus, being a vegan gave me a fun fact to say at those goddamn awful University icebreakers.

GOT INTO UNIVERSITY - This is a pretty big'un for me as well. The first University I looked at in Year 12 was Brighton and I immediately knew it would be a great area for me, outside of London so I'd get some independence and grow up a bit, but also close enough to home that I could visit pretty easily. It was my first choice when I sent off my UCAS form in Year 13 and I got a conditional offer. Although, me being pessimistic as always, after my exam results I was convinced I wouldn't get in and I had already looked at a bunch of Universities and different courses to apply to on Results Day. Then, interestingly enough, I actually got into Brighton onto the course I wanted (Psychology, if you're interested) and it's been one of the best things to happen to me this year. I adore my house mates, I love the big activist presence in Brighton, I love the town centre, and I love how popular veganism is there too!

STARTED FRESH ON YOUTUBE - This is the most recent one, yup my YouTube channel is no longer. All of my videos are unlisted (I left them unlisted as I didn't want to leave the vlogs I made and I didn't want to abandon a channel I worked hard on) but this isn't the end of YouTube for me, but rather a new beginning (ew, cringe). I've made a new channel, and I'm planning to upload the sorts of videos I really want to make. So there will still be beauty videos, but I want to do music and talk about the sorts of things that I'm really interested in. I know I'm going to have to start again subscriber wise because rebranding and all that jazz, but I'm really excited.

How was 2015 for you guys?