A Complete Menu For a Very Vegetarian Christmas.

Everyone needs a good full menu idea for a very vegetarian Christmas so we thought it would be a good idea to do this, and as anyone can say their food is good we invited a couple of avid meat eaters to sample our offerings and give their verdicts - aren't we brave! Obviously we started off with a small drink of sherry....then

For the starters we decided on melon balls or fresh fruit in orange juice.

For the soups we chose the Fresh Tomato soup or the Winter Warmer soup.

For main we chose Roast Stuffed Peppers with a fresh salad or Red Pepper and Mushroom Rogan Josh with basmati rice and Chapattis  

For the sweet we chose Old School Chocolate Pudding with Mint Custard, or shop bought Panettone. If you haven't tried Panettone please do it's very good! 

To finish we ended up with an Irish Coffee. 

You can of course choose any soup that you want and do a traditional roast dinner with the Quorn or other slices. We did try the Quorn roast which we cooked in the oven first and (this was nice) and used onion gravy to cover.

The girls Sharon and Reena were lovely, and they gave their honest verdicts, and it does sound like they were very  pleasantly surprised! 

Here is the video of it.

Christmas Dinner

Well now Christmas is almost upon us, it is time to decide upon the Christmas Menu.
To suit all tastes like Lia who is five years old, and mum who is eighty, and not to mention my brother who can be difficult to please at most times (there is always one in every family - including yours)!  I have decided upon:

 Starters - Extra Special Fruit Starter With Ginger

Soup - Yummy Mushroom Soup

The main meal I will be doing will be Roast Potatoes, steamed Brussels Sprouts and Carrots, Bisto Onion gravy (in the glass jar not the cardboard pack), and perhaps the Quorn Turkey Slices, with the Paxo Sage and Onion Stuffing as an extra.

Christmas Pudding (which is very good with a Brandy or Rum Sauce), and the Christmas Cake itself is provided by my mum, who always insists on the good old Marks and Spencers' varieties! Which never fail to please.

Finishing off with our most excellent Irish Coffee - so hopefully a good time will be had by all.

Drink wise all guests will be starting off with a small glass of Croft Sherry, and a good vegetarian red wine will be served alongside the dinner.

Wishing all our friends here and across the world, a very Merry, Safe and Happy Christmas and New Year.

Hope to see see you all again in 2018!

The Christmas Table and The Vegetarian Roast Christmas Dinner.

                                                                                                                                                     
The Christmas Tableware is as follows:

Tablecloth, place mats and serviettes ( that we rolled into roses and put into the wine glasses), are from Poundland
Candle and crackers are from B&M
Holly and dinner plates from Morrisons
Wine is the vegetarian variety from Marks & Spencers.
Tulip wine glasses various suppliers.
Salt and pepper pots we sourced from a Cancer Research Charity Shop.

The full Christmas meal this year would be:

 Sherry to start.

Melon balls with fresh ginger.

Choice of Mushroom soup.

Or Tomato Soup.

Or Cauliflower and Broccoli Soup

Roast potatoes, carrots, brussel sprouts, sage and onion stuffing, Bisto onion gravy (in the glass jar) and Quorn chicken style or turkey style slices.
If you are using the beef style slices don't forget the small Yorkshire puddings. Also if slices aren't your thing be sure to substitute them with a couple of good vegetarian sausages!

Then Christmas Pudding with a brandy sauce.

Small slice of Christmas Cake if anyone has the room for it!

Then Irish Coffee to finish.

Finally Have a great Christmas everyone wherever you are!

The Bonfire Party

Due to work commitments the bonfire party took place on Monday 6th November, instead of the traditional 5th, which weather wise turned out to be a good choice. The 5th, in our experience, always turns out to be cold wet and windy! And it was!

We started out running a little behind to say the least, and at 2pm we still hadn't made the bonfire toffee, so we rushed it through and I ended up putting the trays in the freezer, so when we took it out at 6pm it was rock hard! It didn't make any difference to the flavour though, as Logan (who is ten years old and very wise!) said "Last night at our bonfire party, we got some bonfire toffee from Asda, and yours is a lot better." Note to public you can make it on the day if you want and do this!

Food wise the Pumpkin Soup turned out to be really nice. We nearly didn't have the Pumpkin Soup at all though, because the pumpkin that we had bought previously had seen better days, so it was well after Halloween (because we had been on holiday), when we tried to source another one. We rang around, but the cupboard was bare so to speak, and then, on a random trip to Morrisons later that day, we discovered a whole range of them at 50p each. Crisis over! They turned out to be the best pumpkins I had ever seen, and the one i chose was nice and orange and not very difficult to peel either because this is not a job that i relish! Surprisingly it went down very well with the children who thought it was nice and spicy. It also went down very well with some of the adults who had never partaken of Pumpkin Soup before, and had several helpings. We made 3x the quantity as featured in the video and still had half of the pumpkin left over, so we will be making it again this week!

Parched Peas wise, there were a few who had never had them before, they tried them and they liked them. Health wise if you check out their vitamin and mineral content, they are probably one of the healthiest foods you can eat. I have also heard it tell that the best way to do them is to put a little bit of vinegar in the water before you simmer them up. I haven't tried it myself but i might do later.....given that i have another whole bag left unused - we overbought somewhat!

Cider wise because of having to drive, samples were given to guests to take home and try out when the little monsters had gone to sleep. Hopefully they did get up for work the next day😃.

We also made some hot dogs (Tesco meat free) on finger rolls, buttering the rolls first, then added onions fried in butter with a little ground black pepper, we also had ketchup available for the children, or relish and mustard for the adults, which also went down really well. For those of you who haven't read the previous post, it's right here along with all the recipes on video.

The next step now is to work on our Christmas channel art and recipes, because horror of horrors there is only six weeks and five days left until Christmas.....in the meantime here is some music - no really here is the firework video!

The Pub Grub Vegetarian Does Bonfire Night!

Hi and welcome to The Pub Grub Vegetarian Blog spot!

With Bonfire Night fast approaching (for those of us who live in England anyway) the children have been wanting a Bonfire Party, so currently we are preparing for that. We have decided on feeding the little monsters a choice of home made Pumpkin Soup, Parched Peas (which is a traditional Lancashire street food) and of course, last but not least, delicious home made (after many trial attempts) Bonfire Toffee. For the long suffering parents amongst us, we have a treat in store, with some very tasty home made Apple Cider. So hopefully a good time should be had by all! Watch this space for an update of how events unfolded...

 All of these recipes can be viewed right here on our easy to follow videos!

Footnote: For those of us interested in the brief background of why we in England celebrate Bonfire Night, have a sneaky peek at this short and very amusing child friendly Horrible Histories version of events.