Quantcast
Channel: vegan.in.brighton
Viewing all 333 articles
Browse latest View live

Another year, another birthday blog post!

0
0
Last week I was trying to decide what to do for my birthday, I felt overwhelmed with options and that's when I realised that I haven't spent my birthday at home in Brighton for six years. Six! My last Brighton based birthday celebration was before I'd even started this blog! So crazy. I can't believe I've been lucky enough to celebrate my birthday in such amazing places recently, the Monkey Sanctuary in Cornwall (which I'll be re-visiting this summer), London, Berlin, Millencolin Fest' in Sweden and last year's 30th birthday extravaganza in Spain. I adore Brighton so I was super excited to plan a fun day here and Nick and I started with a lazy morning together at home. When I came downstairs there was a helium ballon waiting for me, I love helium balloons, I'm not really sure why but I think they're just super fun and cute!


Nick sneakily bough some Hello Kitty stickers in Japan for decorating future cards and gifts with, he's so adorable!


For breakfast Nick made us our favourite green juice from 365 Vegan Smoothies, it has banana, orange, kale, grapes and lemon juice and I love how frothy it gets. You'd think you wouldn't need a recipe book for smoothies but I'd never made a green juice this good until I bought it so I think it was a good investment! We also had Jus-Rol croissants with loads of Vitalite, two of my favourite accidentally vegan products!


Of course there were presents! Nick gifted me some graphic novels which I was super excited about, I read them so quickly that I find it hard to justify dropping the cash on them so they make excellent presents. He also got me some gorgeous Oracle brass ear weights, I'd been coveting them for a long time so I was super excited and I've been wearing them almost every day!


After our lovely slow start to the day we grabbed a Car Club car and headed for Raystede Animal Sanctuary. It's one of my favourite places to spend time, Nick and I visited last year for an Animal Carer Day and I try to go back whenever I can. I'm looking into volunteering there right now but it's surprisingly difficult to get to without a car.

Our first stop was the cattery, you can't go inside but you can peer through the windows at the kitties being all adorable. I always get so sad reading the reasons why cats end up at the shelter but it made me extra glad we decided to foster Rorschach until we were able to find him a perfect forever home. Our second stop was the goats. Best photobomb!


After a walk around the lake we checked out the donkeys and ponies. I love this part of the sanctuary, it's so beautiful and there are some really little ponies who are obviously super adorable.


Look at their ears! I love donkeys, they're like an extra fluffy horse!


On the way home we listened to one of my gifts, the latest Me First and the Gimme Gimmes CD. I love this band, they play punk rock covers of classics and this has to be the best album they've released for ages. There's even a cover of Cher's Believe complete with ridiculous synths and auto-tune!


We were starving by the time we got back into Brighton so we headed for VBites for one of my favourite meals, the 3Bites plate! It comes with one each of the VBeefy, VFishy and Classic Beefy burgers and a side of fries. I blogged about it with a better picture here, they've definitely made the burgers smaller since the trial period but it's definitely still one of my favourite meals to eat in Brighton right now.


Obviously everyone needs cake on their birthday, or ice cream if that's more your style. One year I'd love to have an ice cream cake, I've never tried one but they sound perfect! I'd had breakfast at Infinity Foods Cafe with some friends a week or so before my birthday and the cakes looked amazing so I was excited to go back. I chose the Chocolate Cheesecake and Nick went for a slice of Chocolate Chip Banana Cake.


I'm not normally the biggest cheesecake fan but this one was tofu based and very mousse like, I really enjoyed it and I'll definitely be going back for more soon. Nick loved his cake too and the little piece I tried was super moist and bananaey with huge chocolate chunks throughout.

That wasn't enough cake for one day though so we wandered down Kensington Gardens and picked up a slice of Lemon, Poppy Seed and Polenta cake and a piece of Chocolate Tiffin from Iydea and a Chocolate Raspberry cupcake from Cloud 9.


I loved the tiffin, it was ridiculously rich and chocolatey and full of chunks of biscuit and cherry. I'll definitely be buying it again. I was a little disappointed by the other two though, the lemon poppyseed tasted strange and I think for me there were just too many poppy seeds which gave each bite an odd mouthfeel. The cupcake from Cloud 9 was ridiculously dry and crumbled as we tried to eat it, the frosting was nicely flavoured but texturally it didn't hit the spot. Cloud 9 have only recently started making vegan cakes and I've seen a promising looking Oreo mud cake whilst walking past so I will be giving something else there a try soon. My recommended spots for cake right now are definitely Infinity Cafe, both of the slices we tried there were excellent, closely followed by the cake we ate recently at Our Cornish Pasty Shop. I'll also give a little shout out to WaiKikaMooKau who stock my Operation Icing cupcakes but don't go out to eat my own cake, that'd just be silly!

After a long day of adventuring in the sun it was time for some quiet time and I read books on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon. Hunger struck early evening and Nick and I got into the kitchen to make some serious birthday food, mac & cheese pizza!


This isn't the greatest pic but as you can probably imagine this pizza was totally ridiculous and delicious and an awesome end to the day!

We'd made the Roasted Red Pepper Mac & Cheese from Isa Does It the previous night so we just needed to slather some jarred pizza sauce on to a store bought base (the Sainsbury's hand stretched kind is my favourite), top it with the mac and then top that with the last of the Follow Your Heart cheese we brought back from NYC in January. For some reason if you shred a block of Follow Your Heart and freeze it for around 6 months it doesn't melt anywhere near as well as before so next time we'll just buy the pre-shreded bags. It was still gooey and close to melty though so it was all okay!

Don't think that my celebrating ended there though! I'm a firm believer in the birthday week especially when your birthday falls on a Tuesday so come Friday evening it was time for the extravaganza to continue. I met Nick when he finished work and we walked down Western Road to Gourmet Pizza Kitchen, a cute little pizzeria that I only heard about a few weeks ago.


GPK have one vegan pizza on the menu, the Vegan Pesto, and then they have vegan cheese so that you can veganise some of the veggie options or create your own. I picked the Vegan Pesto and Nick ordered a Margherita with veggie pepperoni. My vegan pesto pizza was covered in a generous amount of toppings which, as well as the pesto and cheese, included caramelised red onions, black olives (my faves) and cherry tomatoes. I enjoyed it although I think Pizza Face currently holds the best pizza in Brighton crown. The Margherita was definitely slightly lacking in the topping department, I think pizza should be almost drowning in tomato sauce especially if the toppings are as simple as cheese and pepperoni and I think the lack of marinara sauce resulted in a slightly dry pizza. I would definitely go back to GPK, I can't think of many places you can go out to eat vegan pizza in Brighton in the evening (I think it's just here, perhaps La Cucina and Pizza Express where you'd need to take your own cheese or go cheese-less ) and I would order the vegan pesto pizza again, the crust was nice and thin and I liked the restaurant itself.

It was definitely a good plan to fill up on food because our next stop was Boho Gelato's frozen cocktail night held at Slice Sussex. I've been to this event a couple of times before and I last blogged about it back when the event began. I've always thoroughly enjoyed it and this time was no different. We were meeting some of the friends I've made in the last year from the local vegan group on Meet Up and I'm still so glad I bit the bullet and joined last year. Working from home isn't the best way to make local friends and whilst I have some amazing buddies scattered all over the world I felt like I was lacking in local mates to grab food or beers with on a regular basis.

The menu at the cocktail night is always split into two, dairy and non-dairy. Non dairy doesn't always mean vegan but they'd done their research and knew that the Campari in the Boho Aperitivo needed to be replaced with something else.


I love lemon so the Limoncello Classic seemed to be a good place to start the evening, this gorgeous frothy delight definitely ended up being my favourite cocktail of the night. I think I could drink these all day. I won't, but I totally could!


The next drink I tried was the Hendricks + Cucumber Slushy and before the event it was one of the drinks I was most excited about. Unfortunately I think it worked better on paper than in reality. It wasn't a slushy and I think the rose in the rose and cucumber sorbet distracted from the gin cucumber combo that should have been delicious.


Lastly I tried the Boho Aperitivo which consisted of blood orange sorbet, limoncello and gin. This was apparently better than the kind with the Campari which I'm counting as a win for veganism.


This night's not only good for the drinkers among us though, the guys behind the bar were quite happy to whip up some non alcoholic cocktails for the sober among us and they were a super bargain at £2!

My third and final birthday celebration took place yesterday afternoon at the lovely Terre à Terre, somewhere I will always find an excuse to visit! Nick and my bff's Tabitha and Sal were more than happy to accompany me for afternoon tea. The vegan friendliness of the tea is pretty new and we were all excited to try it. Sal and I upgraded our tea to prosecco for £6 extra which is a wonderful choice for anyone celebrating something or for people like me who just dislike hot drinks!

I won't give you a full run down of everything on the tiers, some people will want to be surprised and the rest of you can read the full descriptions on the online menu here. The tea is designed to move from salty to sweet to sweeter and I loved this approach.


The savoury tea layer included some beautiful local heirloom tomatoes in a multitude of colours which accompanied some of my favourite nori crackers. There were also sesame crusted tofu bites and one of my favourite menu items, the Arepas Chilli Candy which even I can manage to eat as long as I remove the biggest chunks of chilli from the sticky sauce!

The sweet tier came next and I was so impressed with it that I took a picture of it separately. You can also see the gorgeous hand painted card Tabitha made me in the background, she's ridiculously talented.


There were a couple of mini churros each, and the two little polenta cakes, one with an orange filling and one with a chocolate filling were delightful bite sized treats. I enjoyed the snappy pistachio wafer way more than I thought I would and the little chocolate cake with freeze dried raspberries was also delightful.

Lastly we ate the scones, two little ones each which was perfect. They were served with almond cream and homemade jam. I would have loved to see some homemade vegan butter here as that's how I usually roll with crumpets but this was still wonderful and everyone else agreed that the cream / jam option is more traditional.

I had such an amazing birthday week surrounded by friends (human and animal), eating great food and generally living it up! I also really appreciated everyone who tweeted or instagrammed birthday wishes in my direction, you're all lovely! Bring on 32, who knows where I'll be!

Saying Goodbye to Japan.

0
0
As you may have gathered from my previous posts Nick and I had an amazing time traveling around Japan. Nikko, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Osaka and Ōkunoshima (bunny island!) were all different and wonderful in their own ways. We were really glad we decided to get a rail pass so that we could see more of the country than just Tokyo but there are so many amazing things to do (and eat!) in Tokyo that we ended up cramming a lot into our final three days! 

We arrived back in the city after a five hour train journey from Hiroshima at around two or three in the afternoon and decided to head straight to Hanada Rosso for one final burger. I was still dreaming of the burger I ordered on our first visit so I ordered that again, it comes topped with homemade soy mayo and ketchup and it's super tasty.


I also chose the side of homemade potato wedges again rather than rice because that seems to mesh better with a burger in a bun in my mind. Of course I followed it with the cheesecake which was obviously delicious.


I'm still searching for a recipe for a perfect Japanese style cheesecake so shoot one my way if you have one! 

We went out late that night to the super swanky New York Bar atop the Park Hyatt because that's the bar from Lost in Translation! Drinks were expensive but the atmosphere was great and the view was incredible. After a nice lie in the next morning we headed to another of our favourite spots Pure Cafe for something resembling brunch. I ordered my favourite Mr Mustard Sandwich which comes stuffed full of roasted veggies, grilled potatoes, and a tofu cheese spread. I also ordered yet another slice of cheesecake. 


Nick got another PB & Banana sandwich and a jam filled oat bar that looked good but it certainly wasn't something I'd have picked over cheesecake, Nick's commitment to jam is strong!


We spent most of the rest of the afternoon walking around the city and taking pictures of everything! Even the drain covers are beautiful in Japan.


Whilst we were drinking matcha lattes, yes, again, we really did spend our final days eating and drinking all of our favourite things, we kept seeing young women coming in with adorable Care Bears / Little Twin Stars bags. A little googling told us that there was a Little Twin Stars X Care Bears exhibit right around the corner! How serendipitous! Of course we headed straight there as soon as we finished our lattes. It was unbelievably adorable, look, puffy cloud bears! 


I wanted to pick this up and take it home!


After Nick was all outa patience for cuteness we decided it must be dinner time and we wandered over to Roppongi to try somewhere new. Our first attempt to dine at Chien Fu didn't go so well as we found them closed when they should've been open (according to Happy Cow). It must be so difficult to keep up with the changing opening and closing times of thousands of restaurants around the world so I always make sure to drop Happy Cow an email with an update if something like this happens. It really helps other travellers and without our updates information on the site could quickly become outdated. Another thing about Chien Fu is that if you weren't familiar with Japan yet this place could prove hard to find, it is almost exactly where google maps suggests but, as we'd already learnt, in Japan you have to look up! We found a lift tucked away around a corner next to a convenience store and Chien Fu was located on the fourth floor. This vegetarian Taiwanese spot has an English menu and they helpfully mark dishes containing egg with a yellow dot and dishes containing cow's milk with a blue one.

We started with vegetable spring rolls and what we thought were going to be mock meat steamed buns. The buns turned out to be fried though and they were really freaking good. They came with an amazing sweet dipping sauce that made them one of my favourite dishes of the trip.



If there's a black bean dish on a menu you can guarantee that Nick and I will order it and after some deliberating we went with a black bean tofu dish and a sweet and sour dish with cashews, mushrooms and mock chicken.


We had steamed rice on the side and had no problem polishing off the generous (for Japan) portions.

The next day we had shopping on our minds, I say we but I think we all know that Kiddyland was my favourite Japanese store and not Nick's. Nick actually hates shopping except at the cash and carry, apparently giant food is fun to him, or Whole Foods because they usually have vegan cake! Kiddyland is located in Shibuya and has whole floors devoted to both Rilakkuma and Hello Kitty. Best. Ever.


Nick thought that the best thing about Kiddyland was it's proximity to Pure Cafe so we stopped off for more sandwiches and green tea and raspberry muffins. This was yet another delicious Pure Cafe muffin (I tried a delicious orange and carob chip muffin at the beginning of the trip) it had a subtle green tea flavour and the raspberry was in the form of jam which is always a win in both of our books.


Because I'm always thinking ahead we also grabbed banana bread slices for the plane the next day.

Finally we ended our trip with a meal at Ain Soph's Journey location, we'd already visited once right at the beginning of the trip and we were excited to go back. We ordered the fried soy meat plate again because we loved it the first time around. This time was no different and the tender juicy soy meat encased in crispy batter was spot on.


We ordered the veggie paella next which turned out to be a wonderful choice. I love paella and this came with loads of roasted vegetables including one of my fave's, aubergine, and plenty of black olives.


We were feeling pretty stuffed but we didn't want to miss out on one final dessert so we ordered the dessert combo plate to share. It comes with waffles, whipped cream, rum 'n raisin ice cream, a brownie and vanilla pudding.


The waffles were excellent, crisp on the outside, soft inside and covered in syrup. The pudding didn't look particularly appetising and as I hate pudding and vanilla flavour desserts I skipped that part but Nick loved it. The brownie was dense and fudgey and the rice whipped cream was as wonderful as I remembered it being from the pancake plate we'd eaten on our previous visit.

After dinner we took one last walk around the city at night marvelling at the busyness and abundance of neon lights. Tokyo is such an amazing place, I really hope that I get to visit again one day.


Now from the title of this blog post you'd probably think I was done writing about Japan but you'd be wrong! I have another post up my sleeve and it concerns something I spent a lot of time researching, convenience foods. It's not always possible to eat out at a veg friendly spot for every meal especially in a city where almost nothing vegan friendly opens until 11am so I'm putting together a picture guide of the vegan products we discovered at 7/11, Lawson and Family Mart which should help future vegan travellers find quick and easy snacks and meals on the go.

Black Cat Cafe

0
0
On Monday myself and some friends from Brighton Vegan Meet Up got together and headed up to London for the day. The purpose of our trip? Cats! Black ones to be precise. As we're a pretty kittie obsessed group hell bent on eating everything vegan in our sights Black Cat Cafe seemed to be an obvious spot for a day trip. Situated in Hackney on the sight of the sadly closed but much loved Pogo Cafe Black Cat is co-operatively run and 100% vegan.


After much train drama we arrived around two o'clock and dived straight into the lunch menu ordering different things so that we could sample our way around what they had to offer.

I chose the BBQ Pulled Jackfruit Burger which came in focaccia and with chips and salads on the side.


I definitely enjoyed this but I had to remove some of the jackfruit to up the mayo / tomato to spicy barbecued jackfruit ratio as it was obviously too spicy for me, when will I learn?! Justine happily helped me polish off the jackfruit though and she loved that there was a wheat free meat sub on the menu. Out of the three salads I enjoyed the spring cabbage slaw with apple and cucumber the most, in fact I could have eaten a whole bowl of the stuff it was so yummy. The other salads were carrot and seeds and quinoa and sprouts both of which were enjoyable but obviously I preferred the chips!

Justine ordered the Garamlette, Black Cat's clever name for their chickpea flour omelette, which was full of peppers, onions, asparagus and corn.


As you can see it looked really good although it's not something I'd order myself as chickpea flour or tofu omelettes are a go-to weeknight meal for me.

I was definitely a little jealous of Rachel's order as she picked the Seitan and Mushroom Pie with mash, peas and gravy but I was lucky enough to get to eat a chunk of it as she declared it to be too big for her.


It was super delicious, the pastry was light, the mushrooms were plentiful and the chunks of seitan scattered throughout were tender and flavourful. The mash looked really creamy too and I think I'll be ordering this if it's on the menu next time I visit.

As well as being a cafe Black Cat is a well stocked vegan shop selling mock meats, imported and locally produced vegan treats, cookbooks and zines. This section has an impressive range of treats spanning from Ten Acre crisps to Bajadera, a favourite Croation chocolate of mine that I'd never seen in the UK before.


On the other side of the space are fridges full to the brim with mock meats and cheeses. They also do coffee with an impressive selection of non dairy milks to choose from.


The homemade sausage rolls were super tempting too...


...but my eyes were drawn towards the just-delivered desserts.


I picked out a Rocky Road bar and a Lamington.


I was immediately drawn to the Rocky Road slice because whilst I love the rocky road style bars I can buy down in Brighton this one was made the traditional way with marshmallows, let's just say I wasn't disappointed by it's deliciousness!

Whilst I'd heard of Lamingtons thanks to my Australian blogger buddies I'd never eaten one before and gawd damn, it was delicious! It's made up of moist white sponge enrobed in chocolate and then covered in desiccated coconut. So delicious! I would like to eat another right now please.

We had such a great time at the cafe, the volunteer running the show on the day was super chatty and friendly and I only just realised whilst writing this that Black Cat are also not for profit which has made me love them even more! We were also all very impressed by the amount of cats we saw wandering past the large open windows and we had to keep halting our conversations to point them out and comment on how adorable they are. We heart all of the cats!

If you're in London I would strongly suggest a visit to Black Cat, get the pie, eat all of the Lamingtons, enjoy!

Planning your trip to Japan.

0
0
There are plenty of trips I've felt I can just wing, before travelling to NYC for the first time I worked out which restaurants were must visits but I didn't really think much further ahead than that. Wifi was easy to come by which made using the Happy Cow app a breeze. The other obvious difference between traveling in the US and Japan is that there was no language barrier in the US. If I got stuck and was desperate for something to eat I could cobble something together from a corner store just by reading labels. I've done the same all over Europe but Japan was more challenging as 99% of the time I couldn't even work out where the ingredients were on the label let alone decipher them. Also things that I would assume are accidentally vegan here, a good baguette for example, most probably contained milk in Japan.

Never one to back away from a foodie challenge I did a lot of pre-planning.

Some online resources that helped me work out where I wanted to eat were Happy Cow (of course!) and the blog posts by previous vegan travellers especially those by Too Happy Vegans and The Urban Housewife as well as vegetarian blog Never Ending Voyage. Here are all of their posts.

Too Happy Vegans 12345
The Urban Housewife 1 234
Never Ending Voyage 1234

Since I've been back Susan from Kittens Gone Lentil has also been blogging about her trip.

A little warning when reading the above posts is that the Doughnut Plant doughnut that has been featured in a few of them is not vegan. I did a lot of research and asked some Japanese speakers to contact them on my behalf and Doughnut Plant do not have any vegan doughnuts. They are currently listed as eggless but with no vegan options on Happy Cow.

One more thing to be wary of with any posts about Japan is that things change frequently, I cross checked my list of restaurants to visit with Happy Cow a few days before we left and found four or five places had closed within the couple of months since I'd started making it. Sadly this included both Cafe Proverbs and Mikouan in Kyoto, two places I'd read so much about and was really excited about visiting.

As always I would suggest annotating your guide book or a map with the vegan restaurants you'd like to visit, in a city as large as Tokyo it really helps to know which eateries are near to the attractions you're visiting as you won't want to wait until you're hungry to realise that the cafe you'd planned to visit is an hour away. It also helps to have a note of the opening hours and any special information such as "the restaurant is up the stairs round the back of the clothing store" as it will make places so much easier to find!

Lastly when I was reading blog posts before we left I would e-mail them to myself and screen-shot any product pictures on my phone. I made a photo album called Japanese Food and added to it throughout the trip.


It was so handy to be able to reference this whenever we were shopping!

Of course I also wrote about all of the places I visited, here are links to my blog posts about
Tokyo 123 4
Nikko and Nagoya 1
Kyoto 1
Osaka, Hiroshima and Ōkunoshima (aka Bunny Island) 1

Before we left the UK we did some research into how easy it would be to connect to wifi in public spaces and cafes and the answer was not easy. We eventually decided to get a wifi mifi router from JCR Corp. It's basically a mobile internet device so you just switch it on and have wifi in your pocket whenever you need it. This was awesome when we were lost and needed Google Maps to help us, when restaurants were closed and we wanted to fire up the Happy Cow app and find somewhere else to eat and, of course, for keeping up with social media on the go. It gets delivered to and picked up from wherever you're staying and we chose the 4G option which worked out at £6 a day. The 3G option is slightly cheaper and I think there are cheaper companies out there offering a comparable service.

Two more things we did before leaving the UK were book tickets for the Ghibli Museum, three months in advance is the ideal time for this, and buy our Japan Rail Pass. You cannot book a JR pass once you've arrived in the country so you'll need to plan out your trip a little in advance. You can buy JR Passes for 7, 14 or 21 days and whether you need one really depends on how often you'll be travelling via train. We were in the country for three weeks and we activated our pass on the sixth day when we were ready to leave Tokyo. We were travelling to Nikko, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima and Ōkunoshima so the pass was well worth it. We even took a spontaneous trip to Tsumago just because we could, we loved the freedom the pass gave us.

Quite a few things helped us whilst we were over there and one resource that came in super handy was the printable vegan card from this site. Nick actually discovered them and I got a couple laminated to take with us. They were actually incredibly useful unlike The Vegan Passport which I have to say I find pretty useless and, because the translation is the same for every country, often culturally irrelevant. It's basically a good last resort but not something I'd like to rely on. We had success with our vegan card when shopping in natural food stores, we'd guess at things we thought were probably vegan (often using Jhenn's vegan vocabulary list) and then when we got to the counter we'd ask whether we were able to eat everything we'd chosen using a combination of gestures, being super polite (an arigato gozaimasu goes a long way) and the card.

We also tried an app called Word Dictionary which unfortunately wasn't helpful. At all. It translates the Japanese very literally so would come up with things such as "bright fat child", "ulcers" or "muffled rooster" which whilst amusing are unhelpful. We actually learnt that the former is the very literal translation for a type of red fish egg but unless you understand all of these meanings in advance the app won't get you very far.

Another thing I did was get in touch with some people who are vegans living in Japan. This is always one of my top travel tips, seek out vegans living wherever you're travelling to. They'll have the most up to date info and, in this case, far superior label reading skills. How you connect with them is up to you, you could follow them on Instagram or Twitter, read their blogs or go as far as dropping them an e-mail. A quick google search of "vegan" and wherever you're visiting will help you find people as will hashtags like #veganjapan #veganbrighton etc on Instagram.

Before travelling to Japan I'd heard that there is a convenience store on every corner, especially in Tokyo, and I have to say that this isn't exaggerated at all! Sometimes there were three or four right in one spot. Convenience store snacks were one of the things I spent a lot of time researching as eating out for every meal isn't always practical or financially viable.

Inari tofu was top of the list of convenience store foods we wanted to try and we had originally been led to believe that they would all be vegan but that's not so. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology it was easy to snap pictures of the ingredient labels of various store brands of inari and then send them to Shawn and Chiaki from Vegan Japan (check out their Instagram account veganjapan!). They then told us if something was a-ok or not, without their help we wouldn't have been able to try the majority of these foods and I wouldn't be telling you about them right now! High five Shawn and Chiaki! I felt like bombarding them with emails could get pretty annoying so we focussed on the three main combini, or convenience stores, 7/11, Lawson and Family Mart and my new Japanese speaking friends assured me that I was helping them with ideas for their own blog so it was all okay!

The packages of inari tofu from Family Mart and Lawson were vegan. The ones from 7/11 were not.



7/11 did have a vegan inari tofu pouch though which is a similar kinda deal.


My favourite inari was the kind from Family Mart!

Onigiri made up a lot of our favourite convenience store breakfasts and snacks on the go and one that ended up being a surprise favourite was the plain rice ball. Simply flavoured with salt and sugar these were delightful at any time of day. Vegan versions below were found at 7/11 and Family Mart



Other vegan versions we discovered were Konbu with sesame seeds and Ume (pickled plum), both from Family Mart.



As well as these Ume versions from Lawson and 7/11.



We made a meal out of these more times that I should probably admit, they were delicious and so, so cheap. Here's a classic 7/11 dinner. Plain onigiri, edamame and Chip Star crisps.


As you can see there is also a little bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce in this pic, most of the soy sauce you will be served alongside your food in Japan will not be vegan as they contain dashi from fish. This includes the little packets that come with your inari tofu so we bought a mini bottle to carry with us and it easily lasted for the duration of our three week trip.

I ate the vegan nori flavoured Chip Star crisps with a whole lot of tangelos for breakfast one day, it was a delicious morning.


The soy milks pictured above are Kikkoman brand and they come in loads of great flavours including vanilla ice cream pictured here on the right. Soy milk is another thing you may assume would be vegan but not in Japan where many brands also contain dairy milk.

Whilst we're on the subject of crisps, or chips as I'm sure many of you call them, we also found these delicious vegan options. Vegips were in almost every store and I preferred this pumpkin and sweet potato mix to the (also vegan) kind in the green bag which I think contained regular potato and onion.


These next crisps are nori flavoured and we picked up a pack every time we spotted them. So delicious!


These ones were plum and salt and again we grabbed some whenever we stumbled upon them because they were so good.



We never did spot these ones but Chiaki and Shawn from Vegan Japan sent the pictures to us after they'd had a read of the labels.



Japanese convenience stores aren't great for vegan desserts, in most countries it's easy to find a bar of accidentally vegan dark chocolate or some Oreo's but in Japan they will contain milk products. I had incorrectly assumed that most mochi would be vegan but on closer inspection most of them seemed to contain cream or chocolate based fillings. We did find this type of vegan mochi in 7/11. It's green tea with a red bean filling, turns out I'm not a fan of red bean paste but maybe you are!


We also found this accidentally vegan brand of sorbet so we snapped up a mini carton of the lemon flavour.


Other vegan flavours include blood orange, mango, pear and pink grapefruit. If I'd spotted pear I definitely would have tried that one too.

We didn't spot these in a convenience store but after we got home our vegan friends Katie and Nicky who travelled to Japan just after us said they found these Happy Date bars in every Lawson store they stepped into in Tokyo.


We only found them once at a vegetarian restaurant in Nagoya and we loved them, the chocolate version was everyones favourite and they contain a fun ingredient, miso!

You can also look out for import stores in stations where we found things like Clif bars, Digestive biscuits, crackers and Lindt chocolate. They were expensive but who can really go without chocolate for three weeks? Not Nick that's for sure! We also shopped for food in a couple of natural / health food stores in Tokyo, you can see what we found in those stores here.

Another place we ended up hanging out at a lot was Starbucks, they're everywhere, and they're very careful not to cross contaminate dairy milk and soy milk drinks. When you order your drink you get a card...


...and when you collect your drink the sleeve will have a sticker.


Matcha green tea lattes were our regular order and this system offered great peace of mind.

Whilst we're on the subject of drinks if you're into beer both Asahi and Kirin are ubiquitous and vegan friendly. As you can see I will pair onigiri with anything!


I really hope that this post helps any vegans or veggies out there who are planning a trip to Japan, avoiding fish is challenging but it can be done and Japan is an amazing place to visit. I would recommend a trip to anyone and I will definitely be going back one of these days.


VDelicious & the Allergy and Free From Show.

0
0
Yesterday I decided to pop up to London to have a look around the VDelicious and Allergy and Free From shows at London Olympia. As I was in California when Veg Fest London was on last year it was the first time I'd ever visited Olympia and I was amazed at how huge it was, I'm even more excited about this year's London Veg Fest now! I was also excited about how easy it was to get there from Brighton, you just need to change to the overground at Clapham Junction and you're there in 10 minutes. Olympia is literally right outside the station and you don't have to deal with the tube at all which on a busy Saturday in summer is definitely a bonus!

After swinging by to say hi to my buddies at the Ms Cupcake stall and checking out Mell's amazing new hat my first stop was Ruby's of London. I'd heard a lot about their delicious sweet treats but I hadn't managed to make it over to Greenwich Market to try them.




Everything looked super delicious but I'm trying to save for tattoos and travel right now (as always right?!) so I just picked one thing, a Chocolate Rainbow Sprinkle doughnut and brought it home to share with Nick. It was super tasty, I haven't had a baked doughnut quite like this one since Mighty O in Seattle and that's some high praise!

I was lucky enough to have the stall next to this next company when I was working on my Operation Icing stall at Veg Fest Brighton. Smooze are a godsend when you're working hard or exploring a hot venue! Their super refreshing coconut based frut ices are my fave' despite having never been the biggest coconut fan. Their Coconut and Pink Guava flavour are the best in my opinion and I snapped up a box of 10 for £4.


Whilst we're on the subject of coconut I was amazed by this next company, as well as being dubious about coconut I hate pretty much all yoghurt! I know, ridiculous right but I was drawn in by The Coconut Collaborative's packaging and I'm always on the look out for a yoghurt that I'll love so I braved my fear and went in for a sample.


I was totally blown away! To say that I loved it would be an understatement. The natural yoghurt itself is unsweetened making it the perfect vessel for fruit toppings at breakfast or alongside savoury foods and they have fruity options for those looking for a more sugary fix. You can find The Coconut Collaborative in selected Waitrose stores and at Itsu, we're getting a Brighton branch soon peep's!

The Allergy & Free From Show section of the show is a minefield for vegans, for example I really wanted to sample Tesco's dairy free cheeses but they were all on bread or accompanied by breadsticks containing egg! Luckily there are many hidden gems including Amy's Kitchen. I knew they'd hook me up and they didn't disappoint, I sampled their new breakfast sandwich which'll be hitting stores in the not too distant future.


They'll be sold in individual packs and are gluten free as well as vegan.


I also tried a sample of their new cashew cream noodle ready meal and I cannot wait to get my hands on a box when they come out, yum!!

The pink carpeted VDelicious area wasn't just all about the food and free samples though there were also stalls from charities and I stumbled across Better Living Books who I was excited to see had Terry's latest book, Salad Samurai, in stock already.


I'll definitely be checking these guys out next time a cookbook I need to get my paws on is being released especially if they can make their website a little more user friendly.

I was super excited to spot this next stall, Dee's Wholefoods are a new vegan company selling quinoa pots, vegetable pots and, the things I was most focussed on, sausages and burgers. 




Dee was great and we chatted about when these products would be hitting the shelves in Brighton. (Hint, it's now. Go to Waitrose!) and she let me take these products for review purposes. Obviously I haven't had a chance to try them yet but I see a fry up with Infinity Foods bread, baked beans, Dee's traditional sausages and mushrooms coming up in the not too distant future. 

Another company generous enough to give me some free products to try were Ten Acre Crisps who furnished me with a huge mixed bag of crisps. 


Ten Acre are the people behind the vegan cheese and onion crisps I'm sure you've all been hearing about as well as my favourite flavour so far, sweet and sour. Ten Acre are hoping to get into Infinity Foods soon and I totally want to help them make that happen! I think Brighton vegans will go crazy for cheese and onion crisps and I'll be reviewing the other flavours soon so stay tuned!

My next spot was the green koala covered beacon that is the Goody Good Stuff Stall, I wanted to see what the deal was with their flavours all becoming vegan and it's totally happening! The koala gummy bears should be appearing in stores now. Sour's my thang when it comes to gummies though so I stocked up on this huge party bag for £5.


It's choc full of mini portion sized bags of sour cherries, cola bottles, summer peaches and gummy bears. This'll last me a while!

I was getting hot and thirsty by this point so I had a little sit down in the coolest place I could find, by the freezers, and it was a good thing I did because I spotted a guy from Mozzarisella emerging from a giant fridge with his arms full of dairy free cheese. Mozzarisela weren't listed in the official show guide because they were sharing a stand with Venice Bakery, purveyors of gluten, egg and dairy free pizza bases. I followed him home as it were and grabbed myself a pizza the action for five pounds.



Now I'm no gluten free grrl, if I had to pick one carb to be my bff for lyfe it would most probably be bread, delicious gluten full bread, but I'll eat anything if it has vegan cheese and this was a decent pizza. Mozzarisella's wheat, soy and palm oil free cheeses melt beautifully and whilst they're not my favourite vegan cheese to eat on a cracker (holler at Vegusto) it's downright delicious on pizza. A fiver was a total bargain for a whole pizza too and aside from samples and Vegusto's cheese sandwiches there weren't a tonne of vegan savoury options at the show. I enjoyed eating this sitting on the floor with some lovely Vegan Society volunteers, such a fun lunch!

I was excited to see London restaurant Itadaki Zen tucked away near the back of VDelicious' pink carpeted area. I've only visited once and it was years ago but I'm dying to go back.


They had bento boxes, sushi and huge deep fried spring rolls which I tried a sample of and it was delicious. A great reminder to get over to that part of London sooner rather than later.


I had a little time left before the Vegan Society's tea party so I had one more wander around the VDelicious area and I was so glad I did because the first time around I'd missed Sweet Virtues, a new company making superfood truffles. Now usually this wouldn't be my thing, I often find mentions of super foods a little off putting, but there were samples and I was totally won over. I'm a big fan of fancy chocolates, Booja Booja and Montezuma's make some of my current favourites, and Sweet Virtues easily slides into the top spot with them.


Chia Seeds and Lime was my favourite flavour and a bought a little box of two home with me, I wish I could have justified buying a bigger bag or a mix & match of flavours but I'm still rich in birthday chocolate and at £2.20 for two these are on the pricier side.

The Vegan Society tea party was lovely but I was too excited chatting to new friends and sampling some delicious bakewell tart that I didn't snap a single decent photograph! I'm sure there are some on their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages though so you can check out the fun there if you'd like to.

On my way out of the door I was distracted by pesto and couldn't resist having a quick peek at the Free From Italy stand.


They had an amazing deal going on, three for £3 and I picked up two pestos and a veggie filled marinara. Such a bargain!

Between shopping, products I'd picked up to review, and the Vegan Society's tea party goody bag I came home with one of the most ridiculous show hauls ever! Obviously that means it's time for a giveaway so that you too can share in the joy.



If you enter you'll win everything in the picture above;

A bumper pack of Goody Good Stuff's Cola Breeze sweets
A bar of Cornish Sea Salt Chocolate by Seed & Bean
A Sweet Freedom Choc Shot 
A bar of Lovechock's 100% raw Pineapple and Inca Berry chocolate 
Green People SPF 15 sun lotion

The competition is open to anyone in the UK, sorry far away friends but I have to keep the postage low with this one. To enter you just need to leave a comment below telling me which product in this blog post you're most excited about. If you're feeling extra kind please share this competition far and wide via social media but it's not a requirement of entry so you totally don't have to! The competition closes on Sunday July 13th at midnight and please make sure to leave some details, Twitter, e-mail, a link to your blog, so that I can contact you if you win. Good luck!

Self Catering in Mallorca.

0
0
Nick and just I spent 6 nights in Mallorca and we had an amazing trip. We stayed in Port de Pollença, a small town on the coast in the north of the island that we discovered on our last trip to the balearics in 2011. We loved it so much that we've been aching to go back ever since. 

I love to self cater when I'm travelling, when you're in a major city sure you want to eat out all the time but when travelling for longer periods, on the cheap or to not-so-veg-friendly spots self catering wins for me. As soon as we picked up our hire car at the airport we headed for Carrefour, one of Spain's largest supermarket chains, to stock up on food for the week. First things first, fresh produce. I couldn't resist this 2kg box of cherries for just €4.40, best thing? Nick does't even like cherries so I got to eat them all myself!


On our last visit I remember being so impressed with how many exciting seitan and tofu products were sold in Carrefour, there were meatballs, flavourd tofu's, tofu fillets and many types of burgers to choose from. This time there was only one kind of seitan, a couple of burgers and some plain tofu. Slightly disappointing but no big deal, at least there was some seitan! We also grabbed some Artura margarine as we weren't sure where else we'd find a dairy free option.


We bought loads of these seitan steaks and Nick ate them for almost every meal, he's seitan obsessed! On our first night we ate dinner on the roof terrace. We made simple salads, fried the seitan in plenty of garlic oil and served it alongside delicious freshly baked bread. My salad's the one with the black olives and tomatoes!


We arrived too late to hit the beach but there was time to explore the waterfront and the pine walk before heading to bed. I love being close to the sea and the pine walk winds right along the coast.


We met a cat on our walk, s/he was super friendly. I love to stop and pet kitties when I'm travelling or, y'know, just walking around my neighbourhood in Brighton.


The next day we hit the beach around lunchtime and spent all day lying on the sand reading. It was bliss. We were starving by the time we got back to the apartment so I cooked us huge plates of pasta with butter beans, olives and marinara sauce, store-bought of course, there's no time for homemade marinara when you're travelling! We topped it off with the Vegusto cheese I'd brought from home.


The next day we went to the beach again (if you pay attention you'll being to see a pattern emerging here), rented a pedalo, and got out onto the water. Now until recently I would have been far too scared to get off of that boat, I was always happy to swim in the sea and peddling the little boat would have been a-ok but getting from the boat into the water? Nuh-uh, that would have meant water splashing onto my face which would have given me a panic attack and I'd have probably drowned. It wouldn't have been fun! Recently I had a one to one lesson followed by a full days swimming class with these people who help you cure your fear of the water, I don't know how it's possible but the teacher had me dunking my face underwater within the first 20 minutes of my first lesson. It was amazing, up until then I didn't even let water from the shower touch my face!


I'm still not 100% confident in the water, the idea of learning to dive is stressing me out a little right now and if you showed me to a diving board I might back away, but I'm a work in progress. I totally went down this slide right into the sea and you know what? It was so fun I did it twice!

We decided getting out of the mid day sun would be sensible next move, I turn pink pretty fast despite continuous applications of factor 30+, so we popped back to our super central apartment for lunch. Salad, an open topped seitan sandwich, and a bowl of gazpacho.


I freaking love gazpacho, I should really learn to make it myself. This one was very garlicky and super fresh.

After more afternoon beach time at one of our favourite spots, Formentor Beach, we headed home to shower off the sand and to relax on the balcony with our books and some fun drinks, beer for me, iced tea for Nick. Formentor beach has gotten a lot more popular since we were last there in 2011 and we liked it best in the afternoon, around 4 o'clock, when the majority of the crowds had gone home. Parking seemed to be free then too which was a nice bonus!


We threw together another easy dinner that night. Nick made himself pasta with tomato sauce and ate a hunk of bread on the side and I threw together a salad with pasta, cubed garlicy tofu, chickpeas, butter beans, black olives, tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce and a little more of that Vegusto grated on top.


It was delicious, I love cheese in or on salads! The balcony turned out to be a wonderful place to eat  because it has a view of the town square, as there was a saints day coming up there was a little stage set up there and people were taking a group zumba class as part of the festivities. Fun to watch but I have no idea how people do outdoor exercise when it's so hot, I found lying on the beach challenging somedays and was glad of our apartments air conditioning.

Port de Pollença has definitely become more vegan friendly since our last visit and we were excited to stumble upon Bio Botiga during one of our adventures. They're an organic wine shop and grocery store chock full of products from pasta and sauces to seitan fillets, tofu and vegan margarine. If we'd known this store was here I'd say that we could have probably skipped the Carrefour trip and just bought food from here and the local groceries and supermarkets.


A little further away and somewhere we made a special trip to scope out is Farmatural in Alcudia. 


They stock a wide range of vegan products including non-dairy milks, soy yoghurts, vegan cheeses, burgers, seitan sausages, tofu frankfurters, veggie burgers, cream cheese, tofu based spreads, vegan margarines and cereals. Definitely worth a visit if you're on a self catering trip in the area, Alcudia is probably too anglicised for me to want to stay there but it's busy and has a late night bar and club scene if that's your thang.

One of my fave' things to hunt down when I'm in Spain are palmeritas! These delicious sweet pastries are up there with my favourite treats. All of the freshly baked ones we found had honey but these were a-ok and I ate a lot of them! They're make perfect snacks after a long day on the beach, hell, go crazy, take them to the beach!


Another thing that makes a great beach snack is these crisps, so yummy, so addictive. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the MSG! We found both these and the palmeritas in the Eroski supermarket.


We broke out the veggie burgers for dinner the next night after a long and relaxing day at, yup, you guessed it, the beach! We ate them alongside noochy cheesy pasta which is one of our favourite easy to cook dishes.



As you know I took a block of Vegusto with me but I also took a baggie of nooch. I almost always take nooch on my travels! It perked up my salads, enlivened my avocado toast at breakfast time and made noochy cheesy pasta possible. Yum!

We had the best trip, we love the beach, we love swimming in the sea and Nick loved taking me for my first snorkel ever! It took me a while to let go of his hand but I did it and I saw fish! Big ones, small ones, medium ones and even some stripy ones. It was so great and I can't wait to travel to some further flung places where I'll be able to see exciting coloured fish, rays or even turtles, it's going to be so amazing.

Bellaverde, Puerto Pollensa.

0
0
As I mentioned in my blog post about Mallorca last week Nick and I were trying to be as frugal as possible on this trip, we have a lot of travel plans coming up in the next year so we definitely need to focus on reigning in our spending both at home and abroad. This definitely meant less eating out than usual but we couldn't stay in Puerto Pollensa without visiting one of the restaurants we'd enjoyed on our last trip, Bellaverde.


Bellaverde is situated in a side street just off of the main seafront drag and behind the gates lies the most beautiful garden I've ever had the pleasure of dining in. It's shaded by hundred year old fig trees and full of some of the most amazingly bright flowers I've ever seen. It's the perfect spot to sit, relax and enjoy a meal


We started dinner with a jug of freshly made lemonade and some mineral water because we're wild and crazy like that.


We also couldn't say no to the offer of bread and olives and as she poured the olive oil the owner told us about her friend who makes the it from trees that are at least one hundred years old.


As soon as we tasted the oil we could tell that it was something special. It was zesty and fruity and it made us want to spend all of our money on fancy oil when we got home.

The last time we visited Bellaverde was back in 2011 and whilst we did eat a delicious vegan meal then I remember having to use my terrible Spanish to explain what we would and wouldn't eat and them modifying a couple of dishes on the menu for us as nothing was vegan as written. This meant that this time around when we saw the menu and noticed that there were not only plenty of vegan options clearly marked but some raw vegan dishes too we were ecstatic. It's so awesome to see a restaurant moving with the times even in a small town on a small island. I think a lot of restaurants around the world could take some tips from these guys!

After much discussion and deliberation I ordered the Fake Plate which was essentially a gyro plate with peppery seitan, tzatziki, salad and perfectly cooked french fries. It was fantastic.


Nick went for the Vegetarian Hamburger which also came with fries and the burger itself was full of veggies and topped with an amazing raspberry ketchup which Nick said elevated this burger to the next level.


Obviously we weren't going to skip dessert once we'd seen that over half of that menu was vegan too, dishes ranged from Panna Cotta to Elderflower Sorbet with Hibiscus Gazpacho. I couldn't resist the Chocolate Cake with Rhubarb Puree.


I apologise for the terrible photo, my phone went a little strange in the heat (it's like me!) and every picture I took that night had a strange blue tinged blur to it, if you can believe it these have actually been fixed up in iPhoto already! Anyway, you get the idea. Delicious, rich, moist chocolate cake not only served with rhubarb puree but also with a thick dark chocolate sauce and topped off with pieces of fresh orange. Delightful.

Nick ordered the gingerbread mousse with cherry coulis.


I have to admit to not being a huge ginger fan so this one wasn't for me but the texture was spot on and I enjoyed the tangy berry coulis.

After such an amazing meal on our last night we decided that we couldn't bear to go home not knowing when we'd get to enjoy Bellaverde's food again. Basically both the food and the setting combined to make us break into our savings to enjoy one more meal on our last day. As it was super warm again, even in the shade, so I decided to go for cooling foods and started with the Green Gazpacho. Nick went for the delicious veggie burger and chips he'd eaten the previous evening and as you can see the plate was overflowing with fries.


The green gazpacho was beautifully thick and garlicy and I detected coriander which I love. I followed my refreshing soup with the raw Vegetable Lasagne with Spinach Cream which was gorgeous but hard to photograph despite me carrying it around the place looking for the perfect lighting to highlight it's beauty!


The spinach cream was like a pesto in taste and texture and the lasagne itself was made up of slices of courgette, mushroom and tomato. I can honestly say that this is the first time I've ever enjoyed raw mushroom, the key seems to be super thin slices. I'm going to give mushies sliced like that another whirl at home soon.

Of course I wasn't going to skip dessert, if we're eating out we're doing it right and the Carrot Cake sounded too good to pass up.


The cake was succulent and covered with what appeared to be fruity yoghurt with pieces of peach inside. However strange that sounds it totally worked, it wasn't too sweet meaning that it complimented the flavours of the cake perfectly. I adored it.

This meal was such a wonderful end to our trip and I would recommend both Puerto Pollensa and Bellaverde to anyone considering a trip to Mallorca. The beaches in the area are gorgeous and as you've seen from this post and my previous one your stomach will be well taken care of.

Veg Fest London Announcement and Ticket Giveaway.

0
0
When one giveaway closes another begins, or at least that's how it seems to be going on my blog right now! I'll get to that part in a minute though because I want to tell you why I'm getting really excited about London Veg Fest right now. There are two reasons... 

One, I missed it last year! I got back from California a couple of days after Veg Fest weekend, worst planning ever, but I just had to take advantage of a cheap flight deal! I'm excited about Considerit Chocolate, Lost and Found Caramels and Kizzy's Cookies, catering from Rupert's Street and Happy Maki and hitting up the sample tables of brands like Sheese, Vegusto and VBites. Yup, that all counts as one reason - food!

Two is that I'm going to be speaking there this year! At 4pm on Saturday in the Workshops Room I'm going to be discussing all things vegan travel related in A Vegan Abroad; a talk on everything from how to avoid arriving at your destination starving, hangry and light headed to tips on how to seek out the vegan specialities in the countries you're planning to visit. 


Myself and my friends at The Vegan Society will be opening up the floor for a Q&A session at the end, partly because I want to be as helpful as possible by answering your questions, and partly because I love to chat about travel! I'd love to hear about your favourite places to travel as a vegan too. I am beyond excited about this and I can't wait for September! It's going to be so fun!

To celebrate I'm giving away one pair of weekend tickets to the fest'. To enter you just need to leave a comment below telling me which product, company or talk you're most excited about checking out at Veg Fest (saying mine does not increase your chances of winning!). Please leave me some way to contact you, your blog, e-mail address or Twitter account, and make sure that you're free to attend Veg Fest on the weekend of the 27th and 28th of September. Sharing this competition on social media is not necessary but it would be nice of you if you're into that sort of thing! The competition closes at midnight on Monday July 21st.


Dee's Wholefoods and 10 Acre Crisps Reviews.

0
0
When I was at VDelicious and The Allergy and Free From show a couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to be given some products for free for review purposes. Exciting! I often say no to free promotional goodies but both Dee's and Ten Acre are brands that I'd not only heard of but was genuinely excited about trying.

Dee's Wholefoods gave me packs of their Omega Burgers, Roast Garlic and Mushroom Sausages and Traditional Sausages to try.


Unfortunately when I went to try the Garlic and Mushroom Sausages the package had gotten all puffed like a little balloon meaning that they were no longer safe to eat. This was a full week before the eat by date and the company generously offered to refund my money if I bought another product from Waitrose. As Waitrose don't stock this product I turned down the offer but it was much appreciated. 

Anyway, onto the reviews. The traditional sausages were the first thing Nick and I tried. We were super impressed at how meaty they looked, the casing was even similar to the kind found on a meaty sausage.


We fried ours in a non-stick pan in just one tsp of oil as directed on the package. You have to let these sit and get properly browned before turning them over otherwise they'll stick. Patience prevailed and these came out wonderfully. We couldn't think of a better way to eat a traditional sausage than as part of a full English breakfast, served at dinner time because that's how we roll.


The sausages were incredibly flavourful, you can tell that they're packed with spices and we enjoyed the texture too. We served them alongside our favourite seeded loaf from the Infinity Foods bakery, fried mushrooms (not for Nick!) and a new brand of baked beans called Hodmedod's. We were a little unsure about the new beans upon opening the can due to the watery sauce but they were fantastic. I'm trying to break my Heinz addiction and I think it's working.

Next we tried the Omega Burgers which we grilled and served alongside a couple of salads from Terry's latest cookbook, Salad Samurai.


Unfortunately whilst we enjoyed the burgers texturally the flavours just didn't stand up next to the bold flavours of the salads. We were surprised by their blandness especially given how flavourful the sausages were. Maybe they'd have been better stuffed into a pitta full of hummus and salad leaves or something but I have to be honest and say that I wouldn't buy these. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for the Organic Mega Burgers and I'll buy the Traditional Sausages again for sure, both are sold in the Brighton branch of Waitrose. Salad wise I made the Sea Chickpea Salad and the Basil "egg" Avocado from the Niçoise Bento Box and they were both total winners, the basil egg was so wonderful that I ate both portions immediately and I've already made the sea chickpeas again after scoffing the first lot in a day and a half.

I was very excited when I stumbled across this next stall, I'd heard so much about Ten Acre and their innovative vegan Cheese and Onion crisps. They handed over a whole grab bag full of goodies and it didn't take me tong to polish off the lot. Of course I started with the famous The Story of When the Cheese Met the Onion.


Unsurprisingly they were fantastic, the buzz about these is for good reason! They're just like the cheese and onion we all knew and loved back in our cheese eating days but minus the cruelty. It's so nice to have this flavour back in my life again. 

The next pack I dived into was When Hickory Got BBQ'd, these were delicious but due to the cayenne my mouth was a little on the hot side by the end of the packet. Anyone with a regular tolerance for spice will adore these though, such a fun flavour!


How Chicken Soup Saved the Day was next up to bat and yet again Ten Acre knocked it outa the park serving up another delicious animal friendly twist on a classic flavour. They're also ridiculously good dipped in hummus, just sayin'! These are up there in my top three for sure.

Ten Acre also make the classics. The Secret of Mr Salt, pictured above, and The Amazing Adventures of Salt and Vinegar..


Ready Salted has always been a firm favourite of mine when it comes to potato chips and not just because a vegan version is almost always easy to find. Ten Acre's are neither greasy nor overly salty and it's safe to say I loved them. Salt and Vinegar is a flavour I either love or hate, I think this depends very much on the balance of salt to vinegar and Ten Acre have got it spot on in my opinion.

This next pack deserves a second pic, The Day Sweet and Sour Became Friends could be accurately renamed The Day Jojo Fell in Love With a Crisp, Ran Away Together and Lived Happily Ever After In A Van By the River.


These crisps mimic one of my favourite Chinese dishes and just in case you haven't got the picture already, I love them.

Ten Acre also make When the Chilli Got Sweet and When Bombay Got Spicy but I try to be a little sensible about risking a chilli allergy flare up and didn't take samples of these flavours.

Brightonians will be pleased to hear that these are on the shelves in Infinity Foods right now. It's pretty great to be able to by crisps from one of my new favourite small independent companies from my favourite local co-op.

Vegan Finger Foods Review & Giveaway

0
0
Vegan Finger Foods by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes is the third book by this experienced cookbook writing duo, their other co-writes include Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day which I adore, my buddy Sal made the chicken seitan last time I went to her house and I'd go as far as to say that it's a game changer, and Whole Grain Vegan Baking which I don't have yet.

Vegan Finger Foods is full of recipes that are perfect for entertaining, snacking on, sharing with friends or scaling up to make a full meal.


The first recipe that caught my eye was the Corn Fritters with Tomato-Thyme Gravy. Whilst the gravy sounded great I preferred the sound of their other serving suggestion, spiked vegan mayo.


I didn't have straight up hot sauce so I used a mild chilli and garlic sauce which was perfect. These really lived up to the Quick and Easy logo at the top of the page, I was amazed at how swiftly they came together and they were super flavourful thanks to the combo of chives, cumin, thyme and paprika. Nick and I polished off the whole lot for lunch one day, we love corn and we love frying things so this was the perfect recipe to start off with. We'll be making these again.

Next up, the Green Snackers. This recipe wasn't quite as easy as the previous one but aside from some fresh spinach it uses pantry staples so I couldn't resist. Here they are pre and post oven.


I served them alongside one of my favourite dips, the Crock Cheez from The Uncheese Cookbook.


I may have rolled the crackers a little thin and therefor overcooked them a touch but they were nicley crispy and I enjoyed the flavour the wholewheat flour imparted. I would make them again but I did have to add a little under a 1/4 cup of extra flour to form a dough that would roll out so keep that in mind if it's getting a little sticky!

Lastly I made the Spinach Swirls, these are like little savoury cinnamon rolls and they were super good. I made the Marinara Sauce from Appetite for Reduction to accompany them which was a good call.


I've actually never worked with a rolled and sliced dough before but the instructions were easy to follow. I did wonder if UK wholewheat flour is a little different from the kind found in the US as these turned out looking a lot more wholewheaty than those in the picture in the book but that didn't affect my enjoyment of them. These were wonderful dipped in the marinara and if I was holding a fancy party with finger foods these would definitely be on the to-make list.

There are plenty of other eye catching recipes in this fun new cookbook and the Fig and Nut Canapes, Pad Thai Summer Rolls and Chocolate Stout Truffles are all on my to-make list.

Would you like to win a copy of Vegan Finger Foods? Well it's your lucky day! I'm giving away two copies and all you need to do to enter is leave a comment below telling me what your favourite finger food is. Make sure you leave me some way to contact you if you win, e-mail, Twitter or your blog works, and the competition closes at midnight on Sunday 27th July. This giveaway is UK only, sorry far away friends.


WaiKikaMooKau Cafe.

0
0
If you follow me on social media I'm sure you've heard of WaiKikaMooKau Cafe. It's situated right in the centre of the North Laine area and whilst I pop by to deliver my cupcakes every Friday I hardly ever have the time to stop by and eat. Thankfully I found time to grab a late lunch with a friend there recently, we both ordered burgers because they're my favourite menu item.

Homemade, soy based, and made with plenty of sweet potato WaiKikaMookau's burgers are great. The bun it's served on is soft, seeded and wholewheaty and it comes with salad and a side of fries upon request.


Obviously we added the salad and fries but the burger would be a good take out option just on it's own. I love the fun salads they make to, they're often packed with herbs alongside baby leaves, courgette, carrot and cucumber.

We weren't going to stop there though because WaiKikaMooKau has an amazing array of vegan cakes to choose from these days. We were very tempted by this Beetroot and Avocado cake.


My Speculoos cupcakes were there looking all adorable but obviously I wasn't going to buy a cake that I'd made! Who does that?!


Eventually we settled on a slice of freshly baked lemon cake which was divine.


The frosting was almost buttery in taste and texture and we adored the lemon curd spread generously between the layers of sponge cake. They make a raspberry version of this cake too and I'll definitely be trying that next time.

WaiKikaMooKau are currently looking into vegan cheese options so you can expect to see me shoving a cheeseburger into my face on Instagram sometime soon!

Chocaffinitea, Brighton.

0
0
Whilst I'm not a coffee person I totally get the appeal of having somewhere to sit and chat away the hours over a hot drink with a friend or lover so I was overjoyed when I heard that Chocaffinitea had opened it's doors just around the corner from me. Situated on Gloucester Road just five minutes from the station and right in-between Kensington Gardens and Sydney Street this is a convenient spot for just about everyone.


Chocaffinitea is a health focussed, raw leaning kinda place who shine a spotlight on ethically sourced artisanal products. It's a really cute space that is bigger inside than first impressions would suggest and I love both the perfect people watching window table and the cosier area at the back of the cafe.


My main reason for deciding to pay Chocaffinitea a visit was that I'd heard a rumour that they had vegan hot chocolate on the stove, ready to go, all the time. This rumour was thankfully true and you can get a small shot sized cup of single origin hot chocolate for £1.25 or a proper sized mug for £2.50. 


Of course I went for the mug and boy was I glad I did. This smooth, rich, hot chocolate was wonderful and I can see myself returning for many more in the winter months. On my first visit I also tried a slice of raw peanut butter chocolate slice and my friend Justine had a slice of raw carrot cake. 


Whilst I enjoyed the chocolate and peanut butter slice it wasn't my dream cake, a little too healthy and a little too nutty. If I'm going raw I prefer a creamy chocolate cheesecake or a rich chocolate tart but this is filling a hole in the Brighton vegan cake market that has been crying out for some attention. Chocaffinitea also make raw vegan chocolates making this the perfect date spot for the chocolate lover in your life. I would love it if they'd balance these healthier options with something a little more decadent, like a vegan version of their chocolate caramel brownies, but I know my friend appreciated the gluten free-ness of these un-baked goods. My only other peeve was the "guilt fee" sign next to the raw cakes, I really think that guilt-free should be taken away from food discussions all together - it's  pretty unhealthy mindset and nobody should be feeling guilty for eating a gluten / sugar / fat filled treat.

One other cool thing about Chocaffinitea is that they're also a chocolate shop.


Almost everything on the shelves was vegan and the staff are super knowledgeable if you're unsure or have questions about where the bars are made. Options ranged from the pricier handmade raw chocolate from Forever Cacao (£5.50 40g) to beautiful looking organic bars from The Grenada Chocolate Company (£3.50 85g).

I've already been back once and I'll definitely be popping back for another hot chocolate fix as soon as the weather cools off. Chocaffinitea also sell pour over coffee and tea if you're that way inclined.

Re-Visiting Vienna (Part 1)

0
0
The end of July and beginning of August have been a bit of a whirlwind of travel, first Vienna followed by a brief stop at home to do a little laundry and eat some salad (I'm loving Terry's Salad Samurai) and then I was off again on a camping trip. I'm back home now (for three weeks!) and I'll be blogging about Cornwall soon but first things first, Vienna. 

I first visited Vienna back in 2009 for a vegan meet up, people I knew online from The PPK forums gathered in Vienna to hang out, eat food and get to know each other better. It was a great trip for many reasons but my favourite is that I got to meet Carmen and Melanie who I'm still really good friends with today. Since that trip they've visited me in Brighton, I've visited them in Vienna and we've travelled to Barcelona and Zagreb together. I've had some awesome times with these ladies and after not seeing them for a year and having heard about the changes that have been happening in Vienna's vegan scene since my last trip back in 2011 I knew it was time for a re-visit.

Just like last time we met up at Eissalon am Schwedenplatz, it's opposite the Schwedenplatz U Bahn stop so it's easy to navigate to and y'know, they have ice cream so it's the perfect fist stop.


I always go for the soy milk based Almond/Pistachio but they were out so I picked the new rice milk based Coconut/Pistachio instead.


This was refreshing but the coconut overpowered the pistachio and I probably wouldn't order it again.

The next day for breakfast Melanie and I met up to eat one of my favourite breakfasts, the wholewheat, raspberry jam filled, chocolate dipped croissant that is at least the size of my face if not bigger. It's wonderful, I would be very happy to eat it every day.


You can buy these from Waldherr organic bakery which you can find either at Naschmarkt (a must visit destination anyway) or on Marc-Aurel-Straße which is close to Schwedenplatz.

Vienna doesn't just have one place you can pick up a croissant though, oh no, there's also Tart'a Tata.


This more traditional croissant can be found a short walk from Neubaugasse U Bahn station and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If I was to compare traditional croissants from around the world the one I ate at Chaostheorie in Berlin would win but that shouldn't put you off trying this one if you're in the city.

I was even more excited than usual when I heard that Carmen and Melanie knew of a place we could get Onigiri. I've been craving it ever since mine and Nick's trip to Japan and this spot was perfect. Metcha Matcha is located in the 4th district and it's adorable on both the outside and the inside.



You can pick up onigiri to go but we decided to sit at the bar to eat.


After a close encounter with some miso soup (hint, it's not vegan) we decided on three onigiri each. I chose two Furikake, one mixed vegetable and one shisoume, as well as the California Vegan.


These transported me back to Japan at first bite, simultaneously different in presentation but similar in taste the shisoume became my favourite but then I tried the California Vegan and it became a tie. I loved them both. I would definitely make sushi at home more often if avocados were less hit and miss and I would love it if a place like this opened in my area. The vegan onigiri options at Metcha Matcha are marked on the back of the menu with a star.

As well as having friend reasons for wanting to re-visit Vienna I also had ice cream reasons. Veganista, Vienna's new all vegan ice cream joint, had opened since I last visited and after seeing numerous pictures of their amazing sounding flavours on Instagram I knew I needed to get there asap.


Ice cream aside Veganista is gorgeous. I love the design but I was quickly distracted by the twenty different flavours waiting for me beneath the counter.


Choosing two flavours from a varied selection which included Maple-Pecan, Cookies, and Hazelnut was a real challenge but I eventually settled on a scoop of Matcha and a scoop of Brownie.


This proved to be a wonderful decision as both flavours were delicious. The brownie stood out though and I went back for another scoop later in the day.


It was rich, creamy, super chocolatey and filled with chunks of brownie. I'd like to see more of this kind of thing in vegan friendly ice cream parlours around the world.

We managed to squeeze in one more trip where I tried both Basil and Hazelnut.


The basil was interesting, I definitely enjoyed it, I love the Strawberry, Basil and Black Pepper Sorbet from Boho Gelato in Brighton and before ordering I guess I assumed it would be somewhat similar but it was nothing like it. The basil really had a chance to shine here and I loved the creamy texture. Hazelnut is always a favourite flavour of mine when it comes to ice cream and this one was no exception. I would advise everyone to drop what they're doing and head to Vienna immediately, it's summer and Veganista is the perfect place to be. 

Veganista is not the only new spot to have opened since I last visited though, far from it. Next Melanie took us to one of her new favourite coffee spots, Brass Monkey, where they make delicious vegan cupcakes. Flavours that day were Peanut Butter Chocolate and Sachertorte, now I like PB Choc but nothing beats Sachertorte in my mind. It's also traditionally Austrian so of course this was the perfect place to order it.


This little cupcake was delicious and I devoured it pretty swiftly. I loved the ganache topping which made a nice change from buttercream and the apricot jam was inside rather than spread across the top, this is how I make my victoria sponge cupcakes and it's definitely my preferred way of getting jam into a cupcake.

Another new spot on Vienna's vegan scene is Veggie Burger which, as I would hope you can ascertain from the name, is a veggie burger joint. It has an all vegan menu and shares space with a regular meaty burger spot. I guess this would be cool if you were travelling in a mixed group as you can order from either menu. The burger menu is expansive and overwhelmed with options I ended up choosing the first thing on the menu, the Classic Vegan Burger. I chose to have this with the mock meat patty rather than the other option of a vegetable burger patty. It came with cheese, cocktail sauce and the usual salad suspects, tomato, gherkin, lettuce and onion.


I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the best burgers I've ever eaten. It was so good that I ate it twice in four days putting it up there with the cheeseburger from Arlo's in Austin (I'll be reunited with you soon my sweet!) and the mac & cheese burger from White Owl Social Club in Portland. The mock meat was succulent, the cheese and sauce to burger ratio was spot on which to me means there was a tonne of it. I ordered the sweet potato fries once and the home fries once and the home fries (pictured) were the clear winners. Sorta like a cross between a thin cut chip (not a fry!) and a puffy crisp these were wonderful. The only thing to bear in mind is that Veggie Burger charge €2 for ketchup...yeah, that blew my mind too! What the hell Veggie Burger?! Burger €8.90, Ketchup €2. Not cool!

The sixth new spot on our eating itinerary was Mark's, a relaxed but more upscale kinda spot with plenty of vegan options on the menu. These are highlighted by two stars. Carmen ordered the Roast Pepper Tofu Steak which she'd enjoyed previously but was disappointed by on this occasion.


It comes served with pak choi, pomegranate seeds, steamed jasmine rice and plum soy sauce. It certainly looked good but I guess the sauce is a little hit or miss. I went with the crowd and ordered Mark's Döner which at €11.60 with french fries is on the pricier side for a burger.


Served on a fancy bun alongside hand cut skin-on fries the homamde seitan and fresh tomatoes paired well with the Indian style coleslaw which everyone else said was super mild. I know you can't really trust my opinion on such matters but I certainly didn't think it was mild. I enjoyed the flavour the cumin imparted and I'd go here again if I was travelling with vegan sceptics who wanted to stop somewhere with meat on the menu or with vegans fancying a swankier experience than that offered by Veggie Burger.

One place I would have breezed right past was Freiraum Deli. Located right on MariahilferStraße, one of Vienna's main shopping streets, this little deli is chock full of vegan options. I was sucked in by the popsicle menu as they use almond milk for the chocolate dipped lollys.


They were so pretty!


I took a little vegan tour before I chose my flavour and spotted two kinds of vegan sandwich as well as chia pots, mini loaf cakes and cookies, all clearly labelled.



Eventually I panicked and did an "I'll have what she's having" and walked away with an Acai, Blueberry and Banana popsicle dipped in chocolate.


Good call Carmen! This is totally not what I would have picked myself but let me tell you this gourmet lolly was perfection. I loved both the fruity flavours and the light crackly chocolate coating. I wish I'd had time to eat another before leaving the city and I'll definitely be visiting Freiraum Deli again next time.

As well as wanting to try new things both for fun and also to keep you all updated on current hap's in Wein there were a couple of favourite spots and dishes that I just couldn't skip. Firstly the Formosa Pancake at, you guessed it, Formosa. It comes stuffed with veggie ham, vegan cheese and vegetables but it's so much more than that. Behold.


It's even two pancakes! The herbs are cooked into the light pancake and it's covered in both a miso dressing and something akin to a sweet tonkatsu style sauce. It's out of this world. I could eat this all the time!

My second never-miss spot is Rupps, despite hating Irish bars with a passion (unless they're y'know, in Ireland, or at the very least run by Irish people and not populated by bellends wearing Guinness hats and appropriating Irish culture) I can't help but love this veggie pub. It's a little dark and kinda gloomy (as an ex-goth these bars will always be my fave'), they have a great jukebox, friendly staff, decent beer and a great selection of vegan bar snacks. They also allow dogs which is great as my friend Barney is a dog!


I always order the Haustoast, a grilled cheese with chopped onion, garlic and tomato inside. I'm not gonna lie, I totally ordered this for dessert too.


I also tried the hash browns and the potato salad.



The hash browns were a total win. Who doesn't want to eat fried potato alongside their pint of radler? The potato salad was less of a hit, whilst I was expecting vinegary rather than mayo-y this was a little too vinegary for me. The potatoes were perfectly cooked though so you should totally give it a whirl if it sounds appealing. I can also highly recommend the garlic soup (it was just way, way too hot for me to even consider it) and the spicy Doppeldecker sandwich which is always a popular order with every group I've visited with. They also make classics like veggie burgers, soya burgers and goulash which I'm yet to try but it's on my list. If you're visiting Vienna I'd say this place is a must visit.

Next time I'll be writing about Vienna's vegan supermarkets (yup, plural!) and Austria's fun accidentally vegan snacks. See ya soon!

Re-Visiting Vienna (Part 2)

0
0
I was lucky enough to get to visit one of my favourite cities, Vienna, a few weeks ago. Part one of my Re-Visiting Vienna series is right here, there are pictures of ice cream so you probably want to check that out!

Since my last trip in 2011 Vienna has spawned not one but two entirely vegan supermarkets. I was so excited to hear this! I feel like everyone's heard of Veganz so I'm going to start with the slightly lesser known market, Maran Vegan.


I was amazed by the size of the place as soon as we stepped through the doors, it's the size of a smallish regular supermarket! It feels spacious and well laid out and like I could actually do my grocery shopping here.


The counter on your right as you enter the store is full of delicious looking salads so that you can grab lunch to go.


There's also a case of baked goods which are accompanied by cookies and croissants ontop of the counter. Perfect for a grab and go lunch if you're pushed for time.



I was also totally impressed by their produce section.


But obviously I was more impressed by the mock meat and cheese section! There were so many kinds of seitan, it kinda blew my mind.


There were also plenty of vegan cheeses to choose from. This is the cheese used by Rupps, one of my favourite bars in Vienna, to make their grilled cheeses.


Wilmersburger is another one of my favourite non-dairy cheeses. It's similar in taste and texture to Violife but they're a different deal. I've been known to snack on a whole pack of this stuff whilst exploring European cities.


As well as your staples - rice, pasta, non-dairy milk and a great selection of Japanese products by Clearspring, there are plenty sweet treats. I think these are a repackaged version of Freedom Mallows! They're a bit like a flump!


I picked up a pistachio rice milk chocolate bar that I didn't love but Nick sure did.


Maran Vegan is an awesome addition to Vienna's vegan scene and I'd say it's a must visit spot for sure.

Next stop on the vegan supermarket tour was Veganz, having already visited their locations in Berlin I knew what to expect but I was still wowed! This is the non-dairy fridge. There are so many kinds of vegan yoghurt and cheese these days and vegan cookie dough exists. This is such a rad time to be vegan!


This is possibly the largest bag of vegan shredded cheese in the world!


Veganz definitely have more imported American products than Maran Vegan. I was sad that I couldn't take home any Gardein products, I seriously love them and I'm hoping to try the new Fishless Fillets in Austin later this month - if anyone has an oven they wanna lend me then holla!


I also want to try the Tofurky Quiche and maybe the Pockets, again though I couldn't be taking frozen stuff home and it seemed silly to pay import prices to try them at my friends houses when I can probably give them a whirl in Austin.


People in the US of A have the widest range of vegan ice creams to choose from so I'm excited products from there are slowly trickling over to Europe. If I'd seen the So Delicious Almond Milk Mini's I'd have snapped up a box and eaten them right there and then.


Veganz also sell enormous bags of Vital Wheat Gluten, something I always pick up when I'm travelling as it's so much cheaper anywhere other than the UK, and a huge range of imported chocolate bars from Go Max and Eli's Earth. There's also a chiller section with prepared foods but it wasn't overly impressive. This parfait looked super good though!


The savoury selection really wasn't great, there were sandwiches that appeared to be filled with a couple of slices of roasted pepper and a lettuce leaf (my friend confirmed that these were indeed as terrible as they looked) and I bought this pasta salad that was just downright gross. It tasted like vinegar!


If I hadn't been sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed plane when I opened it I wouldn't have eaten more than a couple of bites. Having eaten some delicious prepared foods from the cafe adjacent to the Veganz store in Berlin I think the Vienna location definitely needs to step up their game.

Vegan Supermarkets aside Vienna, in fact Austria in general, is a hotbed of vegan activity! Ubiquitous Austrian brand Manner have plenty of vegan options. There was a terrifying moment a few years ago when they put milk into the original recipe but the backlash was strong and almost everything's back to normal now. The Original Neapolitaner wafers are my favourite, I always buy a huge bag because life's too short not to eat copious amounts of delicious wafers.


These little packs are also vegan, perfect for when you're on the go to or, y'know, for breakfast.


On this occasion I also discovered these delicious chocolate coated gingerbready bites which have to be my second favourite Manner product.


I also picked up these adorably names Nougatcreme dumplings! These are essentially the filling from the wafers in sweet form. They were way too sugartastic for me though (and I love a Go Max bar!) but Nick and my friend Tabitha were super into them so they didn't go to waste.


You can find Manner products in almost every store in Austria that sells food as well as in Veganz, the flagship Manner store at Stephansplatz, and the Manner concession on the first floor of the Thalia bookstore on Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna.

The Anker chain of bakeries is another place where it's easy to find delicious vegan food. The stores are all getting makeovers at the moment so expect to be looking out for slightly different signage. Part of bringing them up to date is labelling the vegan options, I'd love to see that happening at chain bakeries over here.


The word vegan is in the top right hand corner of the label on all suitable products.


As well as bread there's a sandwich which has roasted vegetables and a tofu spread. I was wishing I'd picked one up before going through security at the airport after I tasted that pasta salad from Veganz!


The thing I was most excited about though was the vegan friendly pastry selection, they have both an apple turnover and a currant turnover.


I picked apple and I wasn't disappointed, this was delicious and I'll certainly be eating it again.

Another chain that's down with their vegan labelling is Spar, I found all of these products and more whilst wandering around the Spar at the airport. Spar is right opposite arrivals so if you're headed for departures you just need to go down a level to find it. There's an Anker bakery right there too making Flughafen Wien the best airport I've been to so far.




If I'd had any cash left I'd have definitely tried to squeeze some of these products into my Manner filled backpack. I think it's ridiculously awesome that a supermarket chain not only labels vegan options but goes as far as to have own branded hamburgers, gyros and pates! Again, awesome job Austria. You know I'll be back!


Summer Camping Trip

0
0
I love camping! Whether I'm in a van or a tent there's just something special about being outside under the sun or the stars trying to cook your meals on a couple of gas burners. I do wish more UK campsites allowed proper fires and I also wish the weather here was more reliable as despite doing a whole lot of research into which weekend in summer it was least likely to rain it rained so much on our first night that mine and Nick's tent sprung a leak (okay, more like 20 different leaks) and we ended up sleeping in the car. Haha, silly me for even trying to predict the weather!

Nothing perks me up more than breakfast though and thanks to Sal's genius we soon discovered that crumpets make a perfect camping brekkie! It's no secret that I'm obsessed with toast, to the point that I have two specific camping toasters that my friends mock me for endlessly. See, the gas rings are small and round and toast is large and rectangular so you do often end up with a burnt and undercooked toast thing going on. I'd still argue that that's better than no toast at all but I'm happy to concede that crumpets are way better because they're small and round, just like the stove. 


Another ridiculous camping breakfast fave' of mine is pancakes with sugar and lemon. I just mix up the dry ingredients (8oz flour, 1oz Soya Flour and 1oz Sugar) in a zip seal food bag and bring a mini soya milk to add to it alongside water (7fl oz Soya Milk, 7.5fl oz Water). These fry up nicely and sugar and lemon make a super easy topping. You could be fancy and bring jam or chocolate syrup or whatever else you enjoy on a pancake.


Snacks are another important part of the camping experience and I was overjoyed when Sal pulled a packet of the newly vegan Fox's Party Rings out of her bag as soon as she arrived. These were my favourite biscuit when I was a kid and whilst I won't be buying them all the time they'll be perfect for my next birthday celebration / children's tea party.


Sometimes when you're camping you just want to eat something quick and easy which is where baked beans or spaghetti hoops come in handy. You can eat these hot or cold - although apparently doing the latter makes you something of a savage according to my buddies. Of course I went for the cute option! Hello Kitty for me and My Little Pony for Sal - you can read her account of our trip here by the way!


One night we decided to cook up something a little more gourmet so we made fancy Smash!


Nick fried up some VBites bacon and Vegusto sausages in a little olive oil...


...and after rehydrating the instant mashed potatoes with soya milk and water I added Vegusto Piquant cheese, nutritional yeast, salt and margarine before Nick topped the whole lot with the meaty fry up. This was warming and surprisingly tasty, it even won Nick over to the belief that reconstituted potato is a-ok!


No camping trip would be complete without S'mores so Nick and I brought chocolate and marshmallows and Sal brought digestives as her local American import store had no vegan graham crackers.


S'mores aren't meant to be made on a gas stove but with the "no fires" rule in place we made do. Freedom Mallows are quite little and due to their size they don't quite melt as well as Dandies or Sweet and Sara but they did melt and that's what matters.


Tabitha patented a technique that involved patiently waving the mallows close to the flame to melt them gently and then balancing the square of chocolate carefully on top of them so that it'd get a little melty too before sandwiching the whole lot between the biscuits. Perfection.


I will warn you that this technique will end with your stove being covered in melted chocolate but it's worth it and it's easily cleaned off with a selection of baby wipes!

I love being in the countryside, I grew up in it and I've re-kindled my love for it now that I don't need to deal with getting everywhere on a bus that leaves once an hour, only goes to the next small town and stops at 5pm. Dawn and dusk are my favourite times of day in this kinda setting, there's something super beautiful about the light and the quiet calm. Here I am watching some adorable sheep!


I'll be back soon with more of our Cornish adventures including a trip to The Eden Project and a review of exciting new vegan restaurant Wildebeest Cafe.

Vegan in Japan: Day One in Tokyo

0
0
Eeeeek, you guys, I'm so excited to tell you about my trip! I can't believe how in love with Japan I am. I mean I knew I was going to enjoy it but I wasn't necessarily expecting to fall in love. I fell hardest for Tokyo, it was like that feeling when you just click with someone but y'know, with a big, bright, buzzy, bustling city. We arrived home on Monday after a three week trip that started and ended in the capital but also took in the sights and sounds of Nikko, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Nara, Hiroshima and Ōkunoshima.

All of my research and obsessive cherry blossom watch website stalking payed off and we touched down super early in the morning on the day that the cherry blossoms came into full bloom. So perfect and so serendipitous as you can never really predict when the blossoms will come. After dropping off our luggage we walked to Shinjuku Gyoen and despite having looked at a million pictures of the blossoms online I was amazed at how beautiful it was. We wandered around the park taking breaks to sit on the grass and on benches to check out both the blossoms and the people checking out the blossoms. Hanami, cherry blossom viewing, is a big deal and it was wonderful to watch people enjoying the bloom; so many people had fancy cameras and tripods and everyone was trying to get the perfect shot.




This was a spectacular start to our trip, I could have stayed until dusk but hunger eventually dragged us away and we headed for T's TanTan to fill up on ramen. T's is one of Tokyo's most blogged about spots by vegan travellers so I was pretty excited to finally be visiting myself. Located inside Tokyo station it's been described as difficult to get to but we had no problem at all thanks to instructions we found online. It's located on a shopping street (yup, inside the station!) called Keiyo Street. If you're arriving by train you just need to follow signs to the Keiyo line and then for Keiyo Street, if you arrive on foot you need to use a ticket machine (instructions available in English) and buy a platform ticket for ¥130. You'll find T's in a little corner just at the top of some escalators and it will either be a very long or very short walk depending on where you're coming from, the station's massive!


As well as serving a variety of ramen dishes T's also serves curry.



On this first visit I picked the Miso Ramen from the Spring menu...


...and Nick chose T's Shoyu Ramen


We both loved these hot, flavourful, comforting bowls of soup and as we were eating and chatting we realised that neither of us had ever eaten ramen before! I've eaten noodle soups but with udon or soba and we've both eaten ramen style noodles with stir frys but never actual ramen. Ridiculous. I'm sure there's a recipe on The PPK and I can't wait to try my hand at making it at home. Whilst I enjoyed the spring special, I love corn, my favourite and the ramen I ordered over and over again was T's Shoyu Ramen. I loved the slightly salty broth as well as the yuba, nori, bamboo shoots hidden within. My love for the noodles should go without saying. Being a little ridiculous when it comes to anything peppery I did find the broth a little on the peppery side but we cunningly circumnavigated this issue by visiting at breakfast time. We discovered entirely by accident that the broth's significantly less peppery at breakfast, don't worry though pepper lovers it comes with a shaker of the white stuff so you can go crazy! If you're visiting Tokyo T's should be a must visit, we loved it so much that we ate there three or four times and I'd be pretty stoked if a place like this opened up in Brighton.

After walking around the city a little more we checked into our hotel so that we could change out of our travel clothes and then we headed out to do even more exploring. On our early evening adventure we stumbled across a Hello Kitty Sakura pop-up shop! I was so excited! As we we'd only brought backpacks on the trip and were heading all over the place via train in the coming weeks I just picked up a couple of little things.


They came in the cutest bag I've ever seen, there's a rosette sticker for fucks sake! Obviously I kept it! 


There really is cute stuff everywhere in Japan, it was so hard not to buy every single thing with Rilakkuma or Hello Kitty on it. I'd have needed 10 extra backpacks rather than the one extra bag I bought and brought home full of stuff.


As well as loving spotting cute things everywhere I looked I was also enamoured with the amount of neon in the city, I swear I was taking pictures of everything that glowed that first night. This kitschy looking place was one of my fave's. I assume they have no vegan options, I'm often optimistic about these things but not stupidly so!


We ended our evening of exploring at the famous Shibuya Crossing which I would guess we crossed about ten times before deciding that that was probably enough for one evening!


This is also where I tried my first ever Starbucks! I'll be going back to boycotting them now that I'm home but in a place where vegan options aren't scarce but are definitely harder to come by I couldn't resist the call of a matcha soy tea latte - a Japanese speciality that I'm told isn't on the menu anywhere else in the world. I'd read about their soy milk card system online before we left and it made me feel much more confident that I wasn't going to end up with dairy milk by accident. I'd love it if all busy coffee places would do this!


This was the first of many of these latte's that I enjoyed on the trip, I'm a long time matcha fan and I'll be attempting to make one at home soon. We loved people watching from up above and we were super lucky to grab a table, that never happened again at this busy location!


We had a pretty early night that night and dinner was some snacks we grabbed from the conbini eaten in bed.


Conbini, if you don't already know, are small, well stocked, and seemingly always open convenience stores that are on almost every street in the big cities and are relatively easy to find almost everywhere. 7/11, Family Mart and Lawson are the three we spotted the most and the ones we put the most effort into researching the vegan-ness of snacks at. At the beginning of the trip we only knew that these few things were definitely vegan but you'll never catch me complaining about salted potato chips, onigiri and edamame. Thankfully we got a whole lot of help from the amazing people who run the veganjapan Instagram account and together we found loads more snacks that I'll be devoting a post to soon.

I don't want to overwhelm you with a hundred pictures or hurt my wrists (stupid joint pain is now exacerbated by typing as well as everything else - don't worry I'm seeing a physio next week) so part two of my super fun adventure will be popping up shortly. Have a great weekend!

Exploring Cornwall

0
0
Surprisingly for me I didn't just go to Cornwall to eat, I also had the beach in mind. Uh, yeah. So the famous British weather ruined that idea but I still had a great time exploring rainy coastal villages and towns with my buddies. Mevagissey was one of our first stops and it's super pretty, we walked around the harbour and I saw my first ever jellyfish which was really cool.



We stumbled upon this cute little soap store which had loads of vegan options, some of them even had the vegan society logo! Their bath bombs smelt amazing!


We popped into this little grocers to buy some fruit to snack on and were super surprised by the vegan delights hidden inside, they had a huge variety of non-dairy milks as well as Alpro soya desserts.


One place that we did plan to visit just for the food was Falmouth, we went specifically to dine at Wildebeest Cafe which was so great it's getting it's own post. After lunch and a fair amount of walking I spotted this sign out of the corner of my eye! How exciting!


Annie's Kitchen had two kinds of vegan cake to choose from, I was stuffed but Nick took a piece of chocolate cake away and it looked really good.



Falmouth also has a health food store where you can pick up a pasty and some snacks or staples.


Falmouth is also one of the places you can pick up a vegan Cornish pasty from a traditional pasty shop, we were super excited when we spotted King's Pipe Pasties but they'd sold out already. Womp womp! Don't do what we did and rock up at 3pm, you need to get in there early!


The next place to tick off of our Cornish to do list was The Eden Project, I can't believe it's taken me this long to plan a visit and we were super lucky as it was a lovely sunny day.


The Eden Project has been focussing on increasing the wild bee population for the last couple of years, they've planted a wild meadow and a lavender garden, both of which are attracting bees by the bucketload. It's great. So much of the food we eat wouldn't be available if it wasn't for bees so we need to do everything we can to help them flourish.


The Eden Project seemed to have a few vegan options available, I spotted a vegan looking salad and a sandwich in the shop near the entrance / exit and the cafe just inside the entrance to the Mediterranean dome looked like it had some vegan friendly options. It was all on the expensive side though and as we weren't 100% sure we'd find anything to eat we came prepared with some snacks and sandwiches. Yup, that's a Muscolo di Grano smoked seitan slice and Pringle sandwich. Thanks for the genius idea Sal!


We spotted vegan chocolate in the gift shop.


And we were all excited by the juice bar, we love juice!


I went for the Revitalise which has spinach, mint, ginger, apple and lemon. Juice cheers!


We all really enjoyed The Eden Project, the Rainforest Dome was my favourite part but I also loved exploring the outdoor areas and riding the little land train. The dinosaur stuff they had on because it was the school holidays was super fun too! I would have liked it if somewhere so focussed on conservation sold a lot less animal products but I guess you can't have everything!

The last stop on our journey was The Monkey Sanctuary which is based in Looe Bay. They focus on rehoming monkeys from the pet trade, they have an anti-vivisection stance and they're definitely vegan leaning - the cafe is entirely vegetarian with a lot of vegan options which is a great start. I first visited The Monkey Sanctuary five years ago and I've been dying to go back ever since. They're one of the charities my not-for-profit bakery Operation Icing donates to and it was fantastic to see how the monkeys are doing and to hear some talks by the volunteers. I didn't take pictures because the monkeys really aren't meant to interact with people and I wanted to keep a respectful distance. They have loads of space but we were all saddened to hear the stories of how they ended up at the sanctuary.

We wound down in the cafe before our long drive home, it's in a lovely spot and the volunteers were super nice and happy to tell us what was and wasn't vegan. Nick ordered a the Traditional Burger and I went for the Hotdog. They both came with hand cut wedges.



The cafe use Fry's products for their mock meaty offerings which is great because they're one of my fave' vegan companies. The hand cut chips were delish and you know how I feel about hot dogs!! This was a good filling lunch but once we discovered all of the cakes that day were vegan too we dived right in. Sal went for the Carrot Cake with Lemon Frosting and everyone else had a slice of the Chocolate Cake.



The cakes were great and I was impressed at the size of the piece you got for your money too. This was a great end to our trip and I would definitely recommend a visit to The Monkey Sanctuary if you're in Cornwall.

Wildebeest Cafe, Falmouth

0
0
I can't lie the main reason I decided to make Cornwall the location for our summer camping trip was to visit the newly opened, all vegan, Wildebeest Cafe, which is situated in the lovely port town of Falmouth. 


The people behind Wildebeest used to live in Brighton and whilst they were here they ran popular sushi pop up Yum Tum Sushi whose food I ate and enjoyed on multiple occasions. I've been following their journey towards opening this gorgeous new restaurant since the very beginning and I was overjoyed to finally make it down there to try the food. The space is gorgeous, this couple are super stylish and have created a lovely, welcoming, relaxing space.



Despite having a peculiar phobia of chalk (seriously, don't use it near me) I loved the handwitten chalk board menu and the area people could doodle on above the bar seats. I was pretty happy nobody used it whilst I was there though or I might have had to step outside! We arrived far too early for lunch which begins at 12 and we were all happy to chill out with a drink and use their speedy wifi for 45 minutes before ordering. As we'd been eating ridiculous camping food I decided to go for a green juice as I couldn't remember when I last ate a vegetable.


It had spinach, pear, apple, cucumber and lime and was perfectly refreshing. I love a little citrus in my green juice and it wasn't overly cucumbery which I dislike. Everyone else had coffee or tea, this is Sal's chai latte which she enjoyed.


It was the food we were most excited about though and I seriously wanted to order every single thing on the menu. It was great that we had so much time to deliberate and I managed to convince Nick to share loads of things with me which meant I got to try four different dishes. Here we have the Miso Soup & Seaweed Salad and the Hoisin Cucumber Rolls from the Light Bites menu.


I loved everything about these three dishes. The cucumber rolls weren't what anyone was expecting, the finely sliced cucumber was wrapped around tender perfectly seasoned seitan. The hoisin sauce had just the right level of spice so as not to overwhelm the cucumber and, aside from being a little challenging to pick up with chopsticks, it was perfect. Seaweed salad is always a favourite of mine and the addition of a miso dressing and sesame seeds elevated it to the next level, I found this one hard to share! Miso soup, another fave, was up there with some that I had in Japan. So, spot on! We also ordered the Butterbean, Garlic & Dill dip with homemade bread.


Whilst I enjoyed this I would have preferred it to have had a more pronounced dill flavour, the garlic was a little overpowering for me. I thought that the homemade bread was excellent and Nick, who doesn't love dill, thought everything about this light bite was great.

The real star of the show was this next dish. Polenta with Pesto Tomato Sauce, Aubergine, Roast Cherry Tomatoes & Leeks.


This dish wouldn't be out of place at an upscale NYC spot. The deep fried polenta was spectacular and it paired perfectly with the pesto and aubergine and the leeks and roasted cherry tomatoes could easily stand alone as a punchy canapé. Every bite of this was exceptional and when I go back I will be requesting that this is on the menu.

One dish I actually didn't consider ordering was the Chilli which came with salsa, guacamole, chipotle cashew cheese and handmade blue and white corn tortillas.


It was beautifully presented and both Sal and Tabitha raved about it. A bottle of homemade hot sauce also appeared at the table and everyone who tried it thought it was excellent.

Dessert was another area that needed a lot of deliberation, there were five options and in the end we all went for three each. Yup! Three. That's how hard it was to choose. We all opted for the Warm Chocolate Brownie and a scoop of the home-made Chocolate and Hazelnut sorbet.


The brownie came with cream but being a cream hater I skipped it. Ice cream's better anyway and boy did we hit the jackpot with this decision. The brownie was served hot out of the oven, it was perfectly gooey and super chocolatey and the chocolate and hazelnut sorbet is the kind of things my dreams are made of. It was intensely rich, nutty and creamy, bordering on Nutella-esque in flavour but better, so much better. Honestly I'm pretty tempted to make the seven hour journey just to eat this again. Hold me back!

We also each took away a piece of the Lime Sponge Cake which made an excellent post-nap snack eaten lying on a picnic blanket in the sun back at our campsite.


We all ended up with a bit of a sugar rush because the slices were huge and because we have no self control where cake is concerned but it was delightful nonetheless!

Whether you live near Falmouth or not Wildebeest Cafe should make it onto your must eat list, it'll be worth every second of travel time I promise!

VeganMoFo's Heading Our Way Fast!

0
0

Vegan MoFo is always one of the highlights of my year. I love being a part of the online vegan community so bloggers getting together to flood the internet with pictures of amazing vegan food, inventive new recipes and stories of their every day lives for a whole month is right up my street. I also love the challenge of blogging every day becuase it forces me to come up with more creative ideas and it's also the only time I ever show you what I cook and eat at home which is super fun. I also love seeing what other people come up with, their themes, the glimpse into people's day to day lives, the challenges people choose to embark upon. It's like everything I love about blogging but amped up a notch. For the last few years I've been part of the official VeganMoFo team, I help with round ups and organise giveaways and I love it. If you're still on the fence about signing up what are you waiting for? You only have until tomorrow evening so get on it, the sign up form is here.

This year rather than doing daily or weekly themes I'm doing one all encompassing theme for the first time ever. I even drew a swanky (haha) logo. Don't laugh!


That's right, for the whole month of September I'll be focussing on two of my favourite things, cheese and chocolate. These were also two of the things I thought I'd find difficult to give up before I went vegan years ago. How wrong was I?! We have so many amazing options now that being vegan's a cinch. I'll be incorporating one of my favourite weekly themes, Mac & Cheese Monday into the month and the reason it's international? I'm heading back to Austin on Thursday! I can't wait to hang out with friends, re-visit Sweet Ritual, Capital City Bakery and Bouldin Creek Cafe and you bet I'll be spending plenty of time cooling off in the water at Barton Springs. You can expect to see amazing cheeseburgers, pizzas and reviews of American cheese and chocolate on the blog during MoFo as well as reviews of my favourite European goodies.

You know what else is exciting about Austin? It's the location for Vida Vegan Con III! I'm so excited that they chose my favourite American city to host their wonderful conference because it gives me an excuse to go back there again next year. I also recently found out that I was accepted to speak at the conference and I could not be more excited. I literally squeaked and jumped up and down when I got the acceptance e-mail!


It's a total dream come true and it feels amazing to have been chosen from what was blatantly a super strong group of applicants. I can't wait to see who else is speaking and I hope that I can hang out with some of you there. If you haven't bought your ticket yet maybe my blog post about 2013's conference will be the thing to convince you? It was such an amazing whirlwind of a weekend. I came home so inspired and I'm really looking forward to getting to work on the session I'll be running. More info on that later in the year!

See you Monday for the start of MoFo!

MoFo '14 Day 1 - Favourite Mac and Cheese Recipes Redux

0
0


Mac and Cheese, or Macaroni Cheese, as we call it here in the UK, was always up there with my favourite foods before I went vegan and it's still right up there now. Hence the Mac 'n Cheese Monday theme! I wrote the original version of this blog post during VeganMoFo last year but my favourite macs are a constantly evolving thang so I wanted to update y'all on my favourite mac and cheeses as of right now.

As a student I used to eat the kind that comes out of a can and when I met my husband it was one of the only things he could cook so he made it for me a lot. When I first went vegan I avoided trying to make a macaroni cheese for fear of disappointing myself but once I threw myself off of the nutritional yeasty deep end I realised I didn't need to worry, vegans can have cheesy pasta fun too!

Here are my favourite macaroni cheese recipes in no particular order...

New Farm Cookbook Mac and Cheese

One of the first vegan mac recipes I ever tried and still up there with my favourites. This recipe is all over the internet and it's totally worth making.

Mac and Trees - Appetite For Reduction



I eat a lot, both when I travel and when I'm reviewing restaurants and eating out locally, so when I cook at home I occasionally eat foods at the low fat end of the scale, y'know, for balance. AFR is by far my favourite healthy cookbook and the Mac & Trees is one of my go-to dishes when I need to make a fast healthy meal, I love the high broc content and easy to throw together sauce.

Mac Daddy - Veganomicon

Only the second Mac recipe I ever tried and still a favourite today. I love the creaminess of the tofu ricotta, the cheesy sauce and the overall creamy baked deliciousness of the recipe. I like to add peas to this one!

Five-Cheese Baked Macaroni and Cheese - Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites



This book, now known as Home Cooked Vegan Comfort Food, contains one of THE MOST EPIC macaroni and cheeses in the history of veganism. You really do need five cheeses to make it, Daiya (or FYH / Veganic Pizza Cheese), Toffuti Cream Cheese, noochy sauce, a tofu ricotta and walnut parmesan sprinkles. It's insanely delicious and totally worth the effort. If I had these ingredients to hand more often I would have made it many more times than I have currently. Joni posted the recipe for this on her blog, here's a link. Go make it!

Best Ever Mac and Cheese from Crafty Earth Mama


Photo Credit : Crafty Earth Mama

This recipe was posted during Vegan MoFo 2011 and it's seriously one of the best mac and cheeses I've ever made. It's also Nick's absolute favourite. We'd eat it more often if laziness and bad planning didn't often prevent us from buying and roasting a red pepper!

Cheezy Mac - Vegan Diner



Similar in style to Crafty Earth Mama's mac this creamy cashew based sauce gets the majority of its flavour from smoked paprika rather than roasted red pepper. It's delicious and one I come back to over and over again.

Last year I wrote about a whole host of mac's that I hadn't gotten around to making yet which included Isa's Chipotle Mac & Cheese with Roasted Brussels Sprouts (minus the chipotle's!), Isa's Mac & Shews, Allyson Kramer's Smokey Butternut Mac and Cheese and VegNews' Vegan Macaroni & Cheese. I still haven't made the majority of these (c'mon Jojo, sort our your mac game!) but I did make...

Isa's Mac & Shews from The PPK Blog



Whilst this was similar in texture to the Mac Daddy from Veganomicon it had a much deeper flavour thanks to the sauerkraut. It even made Nick admit that sauerkraut isn't all evil! You can find the recipe online here.

One recipe that hadn't come into my life last year is this next one, also from Isa.

Roasted Red Pepper Mac & Cheese - Isa Does It



This new cashew based mac recipe has quickly become a favourite in my house, it's rich and creamy and I find it impossible to stick to the portion size! The sauce also comes together super easily in the blender which is a bonus and makes me inclined to gravitate towards this recipe when I fancy something quick, warm and comforting.

I really need to try the Sunflower Mac from Isa Does It too, it looks and sounds delicious and I've heard rave reviews. The BLT Mac & Cheeze from the PPK blog also looks fantastic. I think Isa might be a mac & cheese machine! Did I list your favourite mac here? I'd appreciate any and all mac recipes that you can bring into my life so do let me know what yours is in the comments. Happy MoFoing!

Viewing all 333 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images