Don’t try this at home…

When we started out on this vegan lark, I absolutely promised myself that this month would be all about producing delicious food from fresh vegetables, salads, pulses, good bread and anything I can make with any of those things. I swore I would not try to emulate non-vegan dishes or use weird and wonderful ingredients.

Well, reader, today I decided we would have a vegetable/seed loaf, so that we could try to emulate a roast dinner. And the result? So revolting that the thought of it makes me shudder even as I type. I’ve just had to eat a crispbread with a healthy coating of Marmite to make me forget the awful overly-sweet sludge to which I just subjected us. I blame Nigel Slater.

While browsing the weekend Guardian, my eye fell upon a vegetable and seed loaf in Nigel Slater’s column. I thought it looked quite delicious and only needed the egg replacing with some trusty bean juice or a flax egg. What could possibly go wrong?

I must try to defend Nigel here. I used to share a flat in Soho with a wonderful and funny girl called Vikki, and both of us wanted to marry either the hairdresser Nicky Clarke or Nigel Slater. The fact that both of us have untameable curly hair and, at the time, wanted someone around to cook our dinner after work, had nothing to do with it, you understand – we would clearly never be that shallow. Obviously Nigel would not have proposed for many reasons, not least of which are a) he is gay; and b) he’s never met either of us, but they are minor hurdles…

Anyway, I no longer want to marry Nigel Slater (though I wouldn’t mind Nicky setting about my hair). He cannot possibly have tasted this abomination that he allowed to go into print under his name last week. It was TRULY REVOLTING. So sweet that I couldn’t even eat the roast potatoes that I’d made to go with it – it just made everything in the world seem sweet. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

The worst thing is that I used my last, lovingly imported, parsnip to go inside the flipping thing. And I carefully photographed each stage for you to follow. I won’t show you the various stages, as the pain is still too raw, but you can have a quick peep at the finished article (I’ve saved the rest so that Linda can taste it – just so that she knows never to make one).

Here’s Nigel’s version:

And here’s what it really looked like:

I’ll be back directly with something edible. Tatty bye.