Housewife Tips

Storage is a huge problem in our house, my husband would blame my hoarding ways. So am always thinking of better ways to live in a packed out house. I came up with a great way of storaging our Christmas and Camping stuff.

To camp in our car, I used plastic boxes to create a bed in the back. I will do a blog on this as it was brilliant fun. I then used the boxes to store all the camping gear. In the summer the live above the washing/tumble dryer, high on some shelves we had put in. In the winter they can be stored in the loft, leaving this space to store the Christmas things. 

Each year the cardboard boxes holding all our precious Christmas decorations, was becoming more and more scary to get in and out of the loft. So I brought some more large plastic boxes with lids, and transferred all the stuff over. 

Now all the Christmas stuff in down, I've boxes it up. 

Naming each box and which one it is, ie 1 of 4. So they are easy to find in the loft.

And that's Christmas packed up for a few months, leaving lots of space ready for the camping stuff.

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Vegan Christmas

I was quite worried about our first vegan Christmas, I have always cooked a chicken and a duck for Christmas and never ever a nutroast! 

I was so proud of us, sticking with it even for our Christmas meal. It's the first Christmas meal where I didn't feel like I needed a 3hr nap and had a painful tummy after.

I did use a few pre-made shop brought nutroasts, but I did cook my own on our Christmas mk2 for the other side of the family a few days after Christmas. 

I roasted for an hour or so, covered in tinfoil a whole cauliflower. Cooked in red wine, herbs and a little chili. Then cooked with the tinfoil off till roasted. It was yummy and a bit of a showstopper for the table.

After lots of research and help from a lovely vegan Facebook site, I gave making my own nutroast a go. I used cashew nuts walnuts and peanuts, in the blender, added mixed seeds, sunflower and sesame seeds. Two apples and lots of mushrooms, chopped up and then throw in the blender. Mixed up like a cake and added to a cake tin. I used far to big cake tin and it needed to be cooked much longer. I cooked it with tinfoil over the top for about an hour, in a large cake tin. I will work on this one and update once I have got it perfect. I then cooked without the cover to brown off the top. 

I then added pre-made puff pastry, first covering the roast whole, then laying out strips over the top leaving the same size gap as the strip. Then added on holly leaves cut out of the extra pastry. I lightly painted on oil, to stick on the extra pastry and to cover all showing pastry. Returned it to the oven till golden brown. 

It was yummy. Merry Christmas!