On the road again & headed for Groezrock.

A couple of weeks ago Nick & I headed off to Belgium in the van we took on our honeymoon. It was great being reunited with the van & getting back into road tripping again. We were on our way to Groezrock festival to watch a whole load of our favourite bands but we left a day early so that we could re-visit a lovely little campsite we discovered last summer.

One of the things I love about travelling in the van is having a fridge which meant that I could make & bring some delicious food with us so we didn't have to do too much cooking at the end of our long day of driving.

I made a simple potato salad using Plamil mayonnaise, Alpro soya cream, salt, pepper & lemon juice as my dressing. I also brought a quinoa salad made with everything that would have gone to waste if we hadn't been able to clear out the fridge, it had kidney beans, courgette, cherry tomatoes, peas, sweetcorn & cubed tofu - yum. All we needed to do to get this meal ready was to fry up one of my favourite burgers, slap in on a bun & eat. Here I am looking quite happy about eating!

I tried to do some research into eating vegan at Groezrock festival before we left but I could find nothing about the food there at all, once we arrived the reason for this soon became clear. There is no vegan food at Groezrock. Okay, that's not strictly true, you can get chips and some pretty uninspiring fruit. I still call this a fail.

Here's a selection of quick snacks we knocked up in the van...

A fishfinger sandwich! Sausage & Baked Beans on toast...

...and Alpro soya schnitzel with brown rice pasta & the nooch sauce from AFR.

That was definitely my favourite meal at the festival, I wish we could get the Alpro schnitzels in the UK, Belgium seems to have a much wider range of Alpro products than anywhere else in the EU, I wonder why that is?

I loved how easy it was to throw together the nooch sauce, I just made the dry mix at home, took it with us in a 1 cup sized tub & used that to measure out the correct amount of water when we were ready to get cooking. Perfect. I've done the dry mix & just add water thing with pancakes when I've been camping in the past, it's a great way to eat fancyish camping meals.

Having seen the awesome offerings from festivals like Coachella I think it's pretty lame that the festival organisers couldn't even sort out some falafel or something. If we hadn't have gone in our trusty van with a fridge full of food we'd have been screwed. I'm trying to forget about how annoying it was having to do the 45 min round trip back to the van every time we wanted something to eat because of course you weren't allowed to take any kind of food into the arena AND the fact that ALL the non-alcoholic drinks were made by Coca Cola & cost the same as a beer. I've been boycotting Coca Cola for years and it drove me crazy to have to pay the same price as a beer for a tiny 300ml bottle of Coca Cola water - I was under the impression I was going to a punk festival. The bands we went to see really were were amazing but I'm going to be thinking twice about going back there however good next years line up is.

I'll end this post on a positive note, here's a picture of me with a couple of dudes from one of my favourite bands in the world, Goldfinger.

It was actually the lyrics to the Goldfinger song Open Your Eyes that made me go vegetarian & soon after that, vegan. I fucking love them! In fact I've now been watching video's of their live shows for over an hour, I should stop & hit publish...