WHY I ASKED MY FAMILY TO BE VEGAN

Nadiya Hussain challenges her family to cut out meat and dairy

You can imagine the look on my kids’ faces when I announced, ‘Guys, we’re going vegan for a week – maybe even two if you’re lucky!’ The resounding silence was a sure sign that they weren’t impressed. My youngest son asked me, ‘What is being vegan?’, so I explained that it meant stripping out all animal products from our diets, including honey and eggs. After explaining in as much detail as I could (with a little help from a search engine), they were up for the challenge. I was looking forward to trying something new. As a family, we’d been feeling tired, sluggish and a little out of sorts – I felt like we needed to recharge, and this was the way to do it. It wasn’t long before I started to feel restricted. I’ve always cooked fresh meals for my family, but I realised when I went food shopping – almost picking up butter and eggs – that so much of what we ate contained animal products. This encouraged me to find alternatives, such as using flaxseeds instead of eggs, and coconut oil instead of butter. We even discovered new ingredients like tempeh, which is meat substitute made from fermented soy beans (sounds weird but tastes delicious). Fried, it gave us the meaty texture we were craving.

We found that we could still eat most of our favourite family meals, including lentil curries with flatbreads and mushroom bhajis, and Bolognese made with soy mince. The whole family was eating more vegetables and pulses, and felt full of energy. The one thing the kids really missed, however, was fish fingers. I managed to find Quorn Fishless Fingers (it’s amazing what comes up when you