Hello, my names are Lizzie Gibbons, Mummy, Bibbuf, Yogalizzie and Elizabeth.
I am a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a yoga teacher and an obsessed cook!
Although all of the above are wonderful to be…they are only categories really, underneath it all we are all just energy and light beings here with each other trying to make sense of it all x
My food journey began when as I child I decided to become vegetarian, as a daughter of a pig farmer in the sticks of deepest Suffolk in the 1980’s this didn’t go down very well!
For me however the decision was easy, I HATED the taste and texture of meat and the thought of it being an animal was just too much for me to bare…
I was a very unhealthy vegetarian, living on cheese and baked beans really and tons of sugar, a sugar addict in fact. I was often poorly, with very low energy levels, very little interest in food and cooking unless it was cake however, (another name I am known as is cakeyliz) but never realized the connection between poor diet and my health.
My husband eats meat as do my children (although two out of three of them are virtually vegetarian now) so most of the meals I was making for them at that time were meat dishes and as I was unable to taste these I had no relationship to the food I was making. I occasionally made vegetarian dishes but had very little skills in this area and so didn’t get cheers of excitement when I did!
Then a wonderful thing happened… my husband, Ray, and I were going away on a yoga retreat, he was dreading it, not sure he could cope with four days without meat, I on the other hand was very excited. What happened next changed our family’s lives.
The couple who hosted the retreat (Keith and Helen Rose, The Farmhouse, Reepham, Norfolk, NR10 4NY) are INCREDIBLE cooks, their food blew our minds and by day 3 Ray announced that he felt amazing, he said that we should learn to cook this way and that I should never have to cook meat again if I didn’t want to!
Well…this was monumentous I can tell you…I felt like I had been set free…like the world of food had just opened in front of me!
The other amazing thing that we got from this first introduction to proper vegetarian food was that Helen and Kieth have a huge collection of recipe books and use them a lot, so during our stay I noted down the titles that they were using and once a month treated myself to a second hand copy and worked through them, (every time we go back, in fact wherever I go, I do the same thing, cookbook junkie!) Until this point I had been frightened of using cookbooks, that I should somehow just KNOW how to cook naturally!(how silly was that!)

Since then I have played with raw-ism and have become very interested in superfoods and am currently fighting the evil sugar monster, so the recipes I will share with you here will be sweetened by natural healthier alternatives such as dates, honey, coconut sugar, rice syrup and stevia etc.

For every yoga class I teach I make some cake or other treat for us to come together for a moment and to ground ourselves with….
nearly every time I make something new someone wants the recipe….a blog seems so much kinder to the planet than endless photocopies and scribbled notes…

and why mungbeanfriends?

well…..one of my children always teases me saying…’is that for your mung bean friends Mumsy?’ aha! the blog name is born!

My hope is that you will find my these ramblings useful, fun and delicious and that I will introduce you to a new ingredient or two to play with…..

Enjoy x