What I ate in a birthday

I don't know about you, but being a nosy sod, I love reading those 'what I ate in a day' posts. It's interesting to read what people eat on an average day, and I think it's kind of handy to show new or would-be vegans that we eat normal, everyday food, and we're not all clean eating quinoa and alkalised nut smoothie or haute-cuisine-cooking, food super-styling lifestyle mavens. But mainly, yeah, I'm just nosy.

Not so long ago, I added another year to my age - so rather than show you what I eat in a day, I'm going to show you what I eat in a birthday!

I eat porridge for breakfast every single day, and my birthday was no exception. Only, because it was a special day, I thought I'd try and special-up my brekkie too!

I'm not sure I succeeded in making it look pretty really, but I did amp up my topping my game - there's peanut butter, vegan chocolate spread, and homemade bergamot lemon marmalade.

I also decided to make a recipe from a book I'd been given as a present for my birthday: Bowls of Goodness. The book is veggie and vegan, and every non-vegan dish has a vegan substitution (you might wonder why not make the book entirely vegan in that case, and I'd have to agree with you). I decided to make the Stockholm Scramble, having happily discovered I had pretty much all the ingredients in my kitchen (even the suggested-but-optional addition of furikake, which I had in the cupboard after making up a batch roughly a million years ago - how's that for serendipity?!)

I wasn't expecting much from the tofu scramble - I thought the ingredient list seemed far too simple to deliver anything impressive. I was wrong. It seems like getting older doesn't mean I'm getting any wiser - I still can't spot a decent recipe when I see one. There wasn't much to it - tofu, dill, spring onions, garlic, that sort of thing - but for such a simple dish, it was punching above its weight on taste. This is one scramble that's definitely going into my regular rotation. I'm looking forward to trying out more recipes from the book too.

I kept lunch light as I knew I'd be going out for dinner, but I couldn't resist one of these dainty pots of Booja Booja ice cream.

While I view Booja Booja chocolates as pretty much the best out there, after a run-in some years ago with their vanilla ice cream left me underwhelmed, I'd never ventured to give their other frozen goodies a try. Again, more fool me. I decided to try out the raspberry ripple flavour and, post-birthday, the caramel pecan. Both are fab, though their not-cheap price tag means I'll be filing these under 'things I buy after another round of medical exams has reduced me to a quivering mess' or 'things I buy when I'm feeling flush'. Needless to say, the first of the two tends to get invoked more often than the second.

As it was my birthday, Mr Flicking the Vs treated me to a round of mini golf, which I love more than most members of my family. No idea why, but a chance to hit a ball around some dinky, ridiculously crafted holes fills me with joy. (Actual golf? I'd rather eat my own sick than watch or play it. Just the tiny kind for me please.)

After a hard-fought round of mini golf (which he won - harrumph!), we headed up to Camden for dinner at Mildred's.

After a brief and paralysing internal discussion about what to order (Sausage and mash. No, burger. No, wait, sausage... argh... don't make me choose), I picked the usual beetroot burger. This was truly a dill-heavy birthday. No regrets on that one.

Then we got a beetroot brownie to share. Looks like it was a beetroot heavy birthday too. Again, no regrets there either. Despite normally being a beetroot dodger ('it tastes like mud', he moans, 'it's geophagy!') Mr FtVs was still able to relieve me of half my brownie. On my birthday too. Pretty sure that's grounds for divorce. Admittedly, we'd have to get married first, but still.

From the half of the brownie I did get to eat, I can report it was the sort of comforting fudgy goodness you'd hope to round off a day of good food on your birthday. Another solar orbit, another day well spent, and another day well eaten.