Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #3

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all animal products.

Today's challenge is simple, but stringent. Especially if one is not habitually vegan, which I'm not. Nevertheless, some of my regular, staple cooking does fall into that category, if more by accident than design. My £1-a-day food challenges in 2017 and earlier this year expanded my repertoire permanently on this front which is handy for the coming weeks.

Today's vegan meals have looked like this:

Breakfast

tea with unsweetened soya milk

apple juice

citrus fruit salad - orange and red grapefruit - as per yesterday

oatcakes (made from the recipe I gave here but substituting 42g of rapeseed oil for the 56g salted butter) with maple butter instead of honey on top

The jar of maple butter is past its sell-by / use-by date which I am ashamed to say is marked as 'June 2017' - I can't even remember where I bought it but it's labelled pure maple syrup, which is vegan-friendly and despite the date stamp, it's fine. Having bought it, I don't know why I hadn't tried it before - it's gorgeous! Essentially it's just maple syrup thickened to the point of being crystalline which is perfect for spreading on oatcakes. Almost too thick to get out of the jar but I think that is down to its 2017 vintage, probably!

Lunch

minestrone soup (made from onions, leeks, carrots, celery, potatoes, tinned chopped tomatoes, homemade vegetable stock and vegan-friendly, (ie egg-free), pasta stellette) left over from the weekend, as per yesterday.

Tea 

black tea

multigrain seeded crackers with sesame, poppy, linseed and pumpkin seeds as per yesterday

Supper

chips cooked in corn oil in the deep-fat fryer H gave me last Christmas (and which still feels like a new toy) seasoned with salt and homemade apple cider vinegar

avocado, tomato and watercress salad with toasted pine nuts

Greek fig and melon spoon sweet* (Diana Henry's recipe in 'Salt, Sugar and Smoke')

* I made a few jars of this last month when I happened to have a surplus of purple figs to use up but hadn't got round to trying it. It's a typical 'spoon sweet' of the type that Greeks often serve in small quantities at the end of a meal with a very small, very strong cup of coffee and a glass of water to offset the intense syrupy sweetness. It's very good. I shall definitely make it again next year.  

I had some temporary misgivings about whether it qualified as vegan or not. The only ingredients are figs, melon and sugar so you would think that's a no-brainer but actually figs have a complicated symbiotic relationship with the wasps that pollinate them that raises a bit of a question mark on the matter. 

Apparently, because of the unusual, inverted and enclosed shape of fig flowers, they rely on wasps to carry out pollination in a unique way. The female wasp, already carrying pollen from the fig from which she emerged as a larva, does this by crawling inside a male fig flower to lay her eggs. In the process of entering the narrow entrance to the fig (called the 'ostiole') she loses her antennae and wings and nearing the end of her life anyway, having laid her eggs, she dies inside the fig. Her body is then digested by the fig using an enzyme present in the flower called 'ficin', the active substance in the milky, white sap of the fig tree. Ficin is powerful stuff that in the ancient world was used in cheese-making - it's even referred to by Homer who compares the double-quick time of the healing of Ares' wound to the speed with which fig juice curdles the milk into which it is stirred, in Iliad Bk V. 902-4. 

Back to the wopses. When the eggs hatch, the young male and female wasp larvae begin their own, (and the fig's), life cycle all over again. The male larvae mate with the females and tunnel out a channel big enough for the pregnant female larvae to depart and develop into fully-grown queen wasps. 

If the female wasp enters a female fig flower, she cannot lay her eggs but her load of pollen allows the incipient fruit to develop and ripen. Her mistake is a fatal one as she will still die inside the fig and her body is digested in the same way as if she enters a male flower.  Either way, the fig absorbs and incorporates the wasp into itself which you might feel potentially compromises the fig's vegan status.

It is a fascinatingly labyrinthine symbiotic process that you can read more about here and here, if you're interested. Slightly off-putting to begin with, I admit, but I adore figs and on balance decided that I would include them without too much guilt today.

E x