This is how we make popcorn...

... at Skint Vegan Towers. Yeah, that's right - no pussying about, we just make it in the 5 litre pressure cooker. Shake of mexican salt, drizzle of hempseed oil and lemon juice and voila! Just enough to get us through a viewing of the Rugrats Movie!
With the warmer weather, potty training my youngest has begun in earnest. As I am the laziest mum on the face of the planet I prefer to leave my young to the point where they can change their own nappy before attempting potty training. Some mums consider this scandalous - don't forget, certain areas of motherhood are a competitive sport - but I always think: in twenty years time, who's gonna give a shit? (Pardon the pun.)

So, my son is currently wandering around the garden wearing a t-shirt, a pair of my multicoloured stripy knee socks and a smile, while I pack-up the terry nappies ready for resale on ebay. To all the mums out there - he knows when he wants to go when he is half-naked from the waist-down, but the minute I slap a pair of pants on the young man, all he wants to do is pee in-situ. Any hints or tips on how to overcome this issue? He starts nursery in August and I would hope that at that point I'm not sending him there still looking like a Pippi Longstocking-inspired flasher.
As I'm preoccupied with wiping-up misses, and general chaperoning the sprinkle-happy Ho-Tep constantly, I don't want to spend too long in the kitchen. Food has been easy.

Stir-fry with tofu puffs, cauliflower, chinese spinach, carrot, onion, ginger, celery and lots and lots of rice noodles. I seasoned it with hoisin sauce, veggie oyster sauce and dark soya sauce and it was delicious!

I roasted a whole butternut squash chopped into large chunks, 2 onions and a head of garlic drizzled with truffle oil, smoked salt and my mum's home-made extra spicy garam masala. Meanwhile I simmered a cup of lentils in about four cups of water until tender. Once the veggies were tender (about an hour and a half as I did have a school run in the middle!) I blended them together with the cooked lentils and water and about 1/4 cup soya sauce.

This soup was CRAZY good!!!! And it practically made itself!!!

I made mini-pizzas topped with redwoods pepperoni, sliced black olives, a really good marinara sauce and Sofcheez crumbles from 'The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook'. These got the big thumbs-up from the kids which was great as it was a really easy topping to whip up - firm tofu, salt, miso and lemon juice and you're good to go! I subbed red wine vinegar for lemon juice as I'd ran out of the fresh stuff and it was still really good! We had this with curly fries - yummy!!
The following day I used some leftover pizza dough and marinara sauce, sauteed onions, sliced black olives and a shed-load of grated cheddar-style cheezly to make the world's ugliest stromboli. It was absolutely delicious, but such a mess I just couldn't bring myself to take a pic!!

And I think this has been helping me keep my head between spillages and fights and laying laminate flooring in the midst of a hayfever resurgence - Pukka's harmonise tea. It's my new favourite tea - I love it so much I've bought a couple of packets for two of my friends! Sadly, this is the tea that Tesco has decided to discontinue just as I've discovered it, but you can buy it at healthfood stores and also online - and upon browsing the site I felt a bit abashed that I'd never before realised how much stuff Pukka did apart from from tea! A lot of commercially-produced fruit and herbal teas are a bit insipid for my taste but this one is lovely - the vanilla adds a hint of sweetness, the rose and shatavari are lovely and fragrant. I've been drinking this in preference to my regular sweet milky builder's tea it's so good! So that's been a round-up of our busy weekend - hope yours has been slightly less hectic!