I'm going vegetarian! (For January)

I'm going meat-free for the whole of January. 31 days of no meat or fish. Obviously, everyone keeps asking 'why?', which is a bloody good question, and one that I'm starting to ask myself. I almost definitely eat too much meat. I have pretty much no clue about how to cook good veggie stuff. I think that perhaps I just fancy a new challenge.

A few kind souls have offered to sponsor me for my efforts, so I've set up a page on JustGiving to raise a bit of money for the Children's Heart Unit at the Freeman. If that's not an incentive to stay on the meat-free wagon, I don't know what is.

If there's one thing I've learned over the past few weeks while I've been researching, it's that it's a bit of a minefield in terms of knowing exactly what you can and can't have. So in the interests of clearing things up from the offset, I will be eating dairy products, but I'll be avoiding everything that isn't suitable for vegetarians (not vegans).

I absolutely love meat and I've got no desire whatsoever to give it up permanently, but I'm pretty excited about the whole thing now.

So, please do point me in the direction of any veggie blogs I should be reading, recipes I should be trying, or places I can go out to eat in the North East when I totally run out of inspiration.

Meanwhile, I'll be cursing about the whole thing over on Twitter.

Getting back on the food blogging horse

As far as hobbies go, food blogging is a bit of an odd one. Taking photos of your dinner and writing about it is a fairly strange concept to most normal people. Giles Coren went so far as to call all food bloggers 'pointless wankers' recently. Even so, it's been the source of much enjoyment over the past few years, and something that I always wish I had more time to do. 

In fact, it was probably what led me, in a round-about way, to start my own business earlier this year doing copywriting and other 'wordy stuff'. But since I now spend a large chunk of my time stringing sentences together for other people, it's hard to find the motivation at the end of a long day to write about the latest restaurant I've been to, and whether or not the waitress had a look on her face that suggested she might have spat in my soup. 

Every now and again though, I really miss it. It might be a self-indulgent pastime, but I've made many lovely friends with a similar passion for food. Writing about fashion and SEO and whatever else rears its head might pay the bills, but it's not really anywhere near as exciting. Plus, I've been amazed at just how many people actually take the time to email me and just say that they love reading my blog. What, MINE?! It turns out that it's not just me who will happily spend 5 hours reading whatever drivel they can find on the internet before actually getting down to some frigging work. 

Getting to the point, and as the title suggests, I'm back on the blogging horse. 

So here's to continuing to be a pointless wanker in 2013. 

And just to prove that I haven't been doing nothing whatsoever for the past 6 months, here's a few cakes that I've made during my unplanned blogging break.