Pre-exam feasting - involves vegan croissants and Christmas dinner sandwiches!

With the first (and, happily, last) exams of the year just over the horizon, I've been concentrating less on food and more on gastroenterology. Gastro is one of my favourite modules, but there's no shortage of things to learn, which means meals need to be quick and filling, so I can go back to shovelling facts into my tiny brain.

This year there seems to have been an explosion of readymade vegan Christmas sandwiches: Pret, Boots, Marks and Spencer, AMT and probably a few others have made their own seasonal sangers.  So, one day when I found myself with a box of leftovers after making a roast dinner the night before, I knew what I had to do.

I did this:

Yep, it's a vegan Christmas dinner in a sandwich. There's Linda McCartney's beef and red wine roast, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, pan fried brussels sprouts,  grated carrot, and spiced red cabbage, all between a couple of slices of doorstop load. And yep, it was definitely as good as it sounds. I'm not going to lie - if I had more leftovers, I would have made it for dinner as well as lunch. For a few minutes of reheating, there was enough joy and calories in that one sandwich to keep me going for a good few hours of studying.

One of the other few joyful things I've discovered of late is proper vegan croissants. Don't get me wrong, I love a bit of baking Jus Rol at home, but recently I found vegan croissants that are a whole new level of amazingness.

Hackney Fresh is a tiny, cave-like place near Hackney Central station that has lots of interesting vegan bits and bobs, including (you guessed where this is going) vegan croissants. As well as standard issue croissants, there are pain au chocolat and almond croissants. I grabbed one of the latter and I think I ate it in about 5 seconds, because it was that good.

Behold:

SO GOOD. 

That's not the only vegan wonder that I found at Hackney Fresh: there was also vegan bourek. I see bourek at a lot of markets, but mostly the options are cheese, or cheese with something else (the notable exception I saw was at the Boiler House in Shoreditch). Hackney Fresh had two vegan flavours last time I was in: potato and spinach. As you can imagine, most things encased in any variant of flaky pastry are great, and spinach is no exception.

But don't worry, nutrition fiends, I've been getting some proper food in me as well as readymade stuff. As well as finding leftovers that needed to be turned into a Christmas dinner sandwich, my fridge yielded up a tub of rice and lentils. Turns out some days lentils and brown don't sound so exciting, but treat them kindly, and they'll be nice right back.

I just warmed them back up with greens, cashew cheese, and a few tablespoons of ajvar, and feasted like a vegan king. Exam, what exam?!