What does it take to put me off my dinner? Er, this....

Let's just start out by addressing the elephant in the room. I love Great Food's Aromatic Moroccan Koftas, but they do have a slightly unfortunate look about them. Case in point:

No snickering at the back. Oh alright, snicker a bit, then. If you look at the koftas on the left, they do look a bit like something you'd try and avoid stepping in on the street.

Once you've got over that minor disadvantage, you can get back to thoroughly enjoying them in your North African dinner of choice. For me, I like serving a couple up with some foul medames, perky green vegetables like sugar snap peas, and a warm salad of squash, red pepper, mint and dukkah.

I have another confession to make, aside from revealing I have a juvenile kofta-comparison habit: I'm a bit of a comper. As a student, I don't have a lot of spare cash around for luxuries, so any competition prize that lands on my doormat is always really exciting. (I was also delighted to find out that Tea and Sympatico is also another comper!)

Recently, I managed to win two big bags of chia seeds from Naturya - at around £10 each, they're products I definitely wouldn't be able to afford otherwise.

So, I've been putting them to good use, combining them with some blackberries foraged from a park near us to make berry chia pudding:

The rest of the ample blackberry haul will be going towards blackberry and apple gin, or blackberry jam, which may find its way into some of my friends' Christmas stocking this year! That's the blackberries accounted for, but if you've got any ideas on how to use up half a kilo of chia, send them my way!

Elsewhere in my kitchen of late, I've been making various versions of Thai-type curries, including this yellow curry with chick peas, sugar snap peas, carrots, and water chestnuts. There's something about coconut milk with kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lemongrass, and spices that I keep returning to again and again and again. If I had to choose one comfort meal I can't get enough of at the moment, it's laksa - a pretty similar sauce to this, only with soba noodles swimming in a thinner, but equally scented, broth.

Here's a slightly confusing vegan product I found recently at a cinema near me: vegan mojito sorbet. Sounds good right? But you're probably thinking it's not overly confusing though, unless you're the sort of person that spends minutes staring at your orange juice, because it says 'concentrate' on the box.

Here's the bit that confused me: the vegan sorbet (marked with a big green 'vegan' on the front) is made by company called Drunken Dairy. I mean, I buy vegan products from non-vegan retailers - whether it's the health food shop up the road, my local grocer, or a supermarket chain - but there's something really weird about buying something from a company that has a milk product in its name.

It's great a cinema chain is stocking vegan sorbets, but I'd feel really uncomfortable buying something from a company that's named after a dairy. Does that make me a massive hypocrite? As I say, I regularly buy from non-vegan places, why should this be any different? For reasons I can't quite make clear to myself, these sorbets are probably not something I'll be buying any time soon, despite their veganity. Am I wrong? Should I be encouraging the company to make more vegan products and move away from dairy by buying their vegan offerings? I'd be interested to know what you think on that one.