Time for a Pamper

When I walk around shops today I get slightly fed up of seeing the same brands and designers over and over. Perhaps I am alone in this but I can't help but feel inclined to buy products that are unique. I love brands that pride themselves on being different, even if they have shops on every high street in the country, just making an effort to stand out from other shops is enough of an attraction to make me want to have a look. Lush is a great example of this with their strong ethical views towards animal welfare being proudly displayed on their shopping bags and in their window displays. However I find it even more thrilling when I find a brand that isn't on high streets but instead has to be found mostly by being at the right place at the right time, such as when I came across 'Bathing Beauty' at 'VegFest' last year.

'Bathing Beauty' is a hand made collection of products made by a lady named George from North Wales who in her spare time picks ingredients, experiments with them, makes her products and then sells them across the country. Yet she still has time to raise her children, go to work, look after her horses and live a full life. Remarkable. I got chatting to her and she began to explain the background behind some of her products and the process of making them. She normally starts with finding an ailment and then tries to make a product accordingly. All of her different soaps, oils, lotions and potions smell absolutely divine and to top it all of each and every one is packaged beautifully. As can be imagined my excitement levels were at an all time high when I discovered all of this.

When making time to indulge myself, by having a simple bath or a full blown pampering session, I've found myself automatically being drawn to her products as they never fail to impress and fulfil their function. One particular detail I like is how the pots for the bath salts are handmade by a man in her local village. I can't help but feel that these little details amalgamate to making my pampering sessions, and myself, feel extra special. She makes a huge array of products for all various functions and purposes catering for the masses for whether you have specific considerations or not. Many of her products are vegan and all of them are free from animal testing. I rapidly made my way through testing many of her products and am now coming to the end of my second buy. I thoroughly recommend having a browse through her website if you're on the hunt for luxurious bathing products that will not fail to impress.

love, bean xx

Self Worth, Respect & Love

A series of connections were made in my head earlier on this evening bringing me to a slight revelation of the great importance of self-worth, respect & love. And I got thinking about how surely in order to love anybody else you must possess a certain amount of love for yourself before you are truly able to expose yourself to another being, and I think that having that belief that you are worthy of another person's love can be quite an unnerving thought for some too. 

Last Wednesday Russell Brand made some comments in his show about his past drug addiction, surely this must have stemmed originally from a lack of self-worth in order for him to stoop to such a low, that forced him to form a coping mechanism that fundamentally influenced and altered his behaviour and personality? The annoyance for others of his unfamiliar and perhaps over-bearing behaviour whilst under the influence of these drugs must have been infuriating, something only a person who knew his true inner-self would have the tolerance for. 

I find it quite remarkable thinking of the almighty hurdle it must have been to to wean himself off them whilst still under the influence of the fog like mentality that heroin tends to bring (said not out of experience but an educated guess!). For despite the support that others offered that initial decision and willpower had to come from him personally. He'd have had to address the true issues that were causing him to use the drugs in the first place, changing his view of himself and beginning to see himself worth more that the damage the drugs were doing to him. Russell said that everyday he is faced with that temptation to reform to his old ways, whether the temptation is small or great it's still remains, but for the past decade or so he has never succumbed to the lows of his old self and instead embraces and actively loves the person that he is, something I strongly admire. 

The drugs in this example could be an endless number of other things for it is just the 'symptom' of an under-lying problem, they could be general habits for some or fatal and harmful actions such as the drugs for others. Whether it be drinking, over-eating or perhaps just blocking people out of your life, these are all coping mechanisms which need that exact same sense of compassion and self-worth to refrain from such abuse instead the ability to visualise yourself as worthy of respect. I think when you can love yourself you can then go forth and begin to go on an endless 'journey' of forming healthy and fulfilling relationships. But that leap of faith, exposing yourself to be vulnerable and learning to accept and cherish all the ins and outs of who you are is quite a daunting process, well certainly for me but we can but try! Anyway just some food for thought! 

love, bean xx 

So much to do, so little time!

I've suddenly realised its been over a week since my last post, how lazy of me! I didn't think life could get any busier but I was mistaken as it seems to have been going double-time lately, leaving me with very little time to remember to breathe, let alone write my blog. Somehow in the middle of every day to day life my family and I went to see Russell Brand live on Wednesday in Manchester, it was a rather magical experience and my sister was lucky enough to meet him yesterday in Edinburgh too. 

For some reason my family seem to feel a great connection with him, perhaps it's because he does TM (transcendental meditation) like us or maybe because he's rather crazy, whatever it is I think we feel like he's a part of our family so it was rather lovely seeing him live (I was secretly half expecting him to jump down mid show and give us all a hug, it's suffice to say he didn't!). I shall write about the show in more depth another time and I'm also planning to do a couple more of my 'Vegan Lunchbox' posts this week and hopefully a review or two of some of the vegan makeup I've been buying from 'Cute Cosmetics' - ah so much to do and so very little time. What I'm trying to say is 'watch this space' but in the meantime I shall leave you with my latest vegan makeup video that I somehow managed to record:

Love, Bean xx 

Lunch Box #1 (Pesto Pasta)

So a couple of days ago I started college and with that came the new responsibility of making my lunches everyday. I've never been too keen on having the same thing to eat everyday, which is why I've always struggled with choosing what to have for breakfast, so it is my new task to come up with healthy, delicious and varying lunches everyday which are all easy to make. No pressure then. I shall be putting a series of posts on here with different lunches that I come up with, starting with today...

So the main thing that I had was the homemade vegan pesto pasta that I'd already made, the blogpost for the recipe is here, this was perfect as it was really delicious and it also really kept me going all day. One of my all time favourite things to have at the moment for a treat is corn chips dipped in homous, oh my goodness it's to die for and if somebody doesn't physically take the packet away from me I can easily just keep on going. I like to also have something sweet so I added a little booja champagne chocolate truffle, if you want to know more about them then the blogpost for them is here.

It's obviously a good idea to try and counterbalance some of the more stodgy and less healthy options with some fruit so I had a banana and fruit flakes, the flakes also count as one of your five a day. To finish it all off with I had an alibi drink, which are the most delicious energy drinks that are full of vitamins and minerals including the following vitamins C, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12.

So this is just day 1 and I shall keep on going until I run out of ideas! I hope you found that useful and yet me know what you like to have for your lunches!

love, bean xx

Homemade Vegan Pesto Recipe

Today I want to talk about a delicious and quick homemade vegan pesto that I made yesterday for my lunchbox. The recipe that I based it on was from a cookery book called 'let them eat vegan' written by a lady called Dreena Burton, it's clearly laid out and all the recipes are well explained meaning that even atrocious cooks such as myself can use it. I like my pesto to be relatively strong which is why I didn't use any of the water that it recommended but instead I used black olives, pine-nuts and nutritional yeast (which contained B12) to bulk it out and produce lots of mouth watering flavours. 

The ingredients are in the picture above (excluding the nutritional yeast and pine-nuts) and it was literally a case of putting them all together and wizzing them in a food processor until I was pleased with the consistency, as I said it's literally a fool proof recipe. I added the olives and pine-nuts into the food processor after everything else so that they didn't lose all of their texture. Then I just stirred in a bit of nutritional yeast and boom, finito!

The pasta I used took about 12 minutes to cook and once I drained that I stirred the amount of pesto I wanted and then cling-filmed the rest for the next day as it easily makes a couple of decent sized portions. It's a perfect and simple recipe for when you are in a rush and the great thing is that you can easily experiment and add different elements to the dish to make it your own. I hope you found this useful and be sure to let me know if you give it a try!


love, bean xx

Cat & the Cream Vegan Cupcakes

Today I just wanted to do a quick followup on the blogpost I did a week or so ago about cake, go and read that first here. In that blog I mentioned about lots of different vegan cakes but in this post I want to specifically talk about the company 'Cat & the Cream'. One of the main reasons I am re-mentioning them is due to the fact that my Mum was very enthusiastic on the 'Ocado' order and brought 4 different flavours of their cupcakes!

The first one was a beautiful and refreshing combination of 'Lemon, Lime Grapefruit & Coconut' which tasted pretty exotic and I loved that there were so many fresh flavours in one cupcake, including 'coconut' which is one of my favourite ingredients ever!  

This was the one I'd already had before, which I'd teamed with vegan squirty cream and strawberries for a complete pudding, which is 'Chocolate, Coconut & Raspberry with Chocolate Icing'. This is of course the perfect cupcake for all you chocolate addicts!

I found this one a bit more unusual as it's 'Chocolate, Fresh Mint Ganache & Raspberry Icing'. The mint flavours just gave it a very different and exciting element which I don't think you find too often in cupcakes and with the raspberry icing it really just lifted the chocolate. 

The final one was a cupcake that I would never have had down as my first choice but it was so delicious, it was 'Pear, Hazelnut & Chocolate Chip with Hazelnut Icing'. Now, I have only recently really gotten into nuts and I'm putting them with everything so what better then having them in a cupcake!

So, as I said we got ours from 'Ocado', but may I add that I didn't eat all of them in one go and I did of course share them ;) They're very reasonably sized and a perfect treat so I like to take them every other week or so to college with me. I love all of the different available flavours and they last for quite a long time too which is really useful. And of course the best thing about them is that they're vegan, dairy free, wheat free & soya free whilst tasting absolutely delicious! 

Let me know if you've tried them before and what flavour you would like to try!

love, bean xx

LUSH 'Volcano' & 'Catastrophe' Review

Today I'd like to do two reviews of a couple of lush products I brought recently. Now, if you've seen my YouTube videos (link up above) then you'll probably know that I have a bit of a thing for the company 'LUSH'. There are quite a few lengthy reasons for this, a few of which I'll just quickly run through:

1. They're very reasonably priced
2. They have a big 'cruelty free' campaign
3. Around 80% of their products are vegan
4. All their products are vegetarian
5. They only used preservatives when they need to
6. They use fresh ingredients
7. They're convenient because they have a lot of shops

Now these are only a few reasons from the top of my head but they really are a wonderful company for all their ethics and their ethos, hence why I seem to spend half a fortune every time I even step near one of their shops. The two products I'm going to be talking about today are both vegan, both of which seem to have rather dramatic names!

The first of the two is a face mask called 'catastrophe'. I'd never tried one of their face-masks before and to be honest I thought I'd rather spend my money on one of their more long lasting products, oh what a fool I was to think this! Some may say that the downside to some of their products are their longevity, this one being 3-4 weeks depending on which day you purchase it in the week. But to be honest for me, the 'best before' date just reflects that the ingredients they use are fresh which is fabulous. Now what this mask is designed to do, with the aid of ingredients such as blueberries that are over-flowing with anti-oxidants, is to help with those days when you see a couple of spots creeping up or if you generally have quite problem prone skin. Afterward using it I found my skin was feeling really squeaky clean and fresh, and the smell of the mask was well, quite simply lush! 

The next product is a footmask which I thought was a fairly bizarre idea at first, I realise I'd been living under a fairly big rock as this is a pretty standard beauty product. It's called 'Volcano' and it's perfect for a quick fix to freshen and soften your feet. It took me a couple of goes to get used to the best way to apply it and I think you have to be careful in terms of application because if you don't have things like your water to wash off with afterwards and your cling film handy then it can get a bit messy. But it's now definitely going to be a standard pamper evening essential for me as I'd been struggling to find the best way to keep my feet in good condition. I think it smells just like a 'Soy Chai Tea Late' which is a pretty gorgeous smell if you're into that type of thing like me. If you go on the Lush website here it tells you each of their products' 'backstories' which I personally think is really interesting.



Let me know if you've got any favourite lush products at the moment!

love, bean xx