vegan.in.brighton

iHerb

2012-02-09T15:07:00.001Z

I have a new obsession! iHerb.com! This US mail order site has a huge range of fun vegan products. The most exciting thing about them is that their international shipping costs are ridiculously low & the packages arrive fast. Really fast. I ordered this box of goodies at around 10pm on Friday the 3rd & they arrived bright & early this morning, it's Thursday the 9th! That's 3 working days! I don't know how they do it, I suspect it's magic!

The only thing you need to do for your shipping to be uber cheap is to keep the weight of your box under or around 4lbs. The website lists the weight of each product & your cart adds up the weights and also the shipping cost without you having to fill in ALL of your details first. It's definitely cheaper to order two 4lb boxes than one 8lb box so I can order in small amounts more regularly rather than having to justify the cost of say, Vegan Essentials shipping, once or twice a year. This box of goodies cost me £10 in total which is an amount I can totally work into my bi-monthly food budget.

Eco Planet Cheddar Crackers are probably the one product that you can't buy in the UK that I can't live without. I can just about deal with a life without Oreo's or Tofurky slice but tell me I can't have these cheesy salty little crackers & I kinda want to pack my bags & move across the ocean immediately! Yeah, I know I'm being melodramatic but that's how much I love them!

The first time I ordered from iHerb I bought 4 boxes of Eco Planet Cheddar Crackers & some Edward & Son's Not Chick'n Bouillon Cubes. This time I squeezed in 3 boxes of crackers, a box of Peanut Butter Caramel Brown Rice Marshmallow Treats & a box of Late July Vanilla & Green Tea Sandwich Cookies.

On my list of things I haven't ordered yet but would like to buy are...

-Peanut Butter or/and Dark Chocolate Late July Sandwich Cookies

-Crazy Rumours & Hurraw lip balms

-Tinkyada Spinach Spaghetti

-Chocolove raspberry dark chocolate, cherries & almonds in dark chocolate, almonds & sea salt dark chocolate and orange peel dark chocolate bars

-A Boom Choco Boom Rice Milk Chocolate Bar

-The Vanilla or Chocolate rice crispy treat bars

-Dandies

There are many more exciting vegan products on there as this search for vegan food shows!

If you're going to order from iHerb (get the crackers!) you can get $5 off of your first order by using the coupon code JOJ321. Whenever people order using my code it seems to give me money off my next order (win!) but also you save $5, awesome! What are you going to order?!

What's new?

2012-01-26T17:22:00.000Z

I found some new & exciting things in Infinity Foods today...

They're now stocking all four of Fry's new products! The first to catch my eye were the Louisiana Tenders, I was lucky enough to try a sample of them at the Kensington Christmas Without Cruelty Fair & they were outstanding. Fry's Chicken Style Burgers are my favourite mock chicken product & these are similar inside but outside is very different. They are coated with a crisp, lightly spiced, batter which is possibly even more delicious than the bread crumb coating of my go to burgers. Nestled next to the tenders in the freezer were the new Fry's Pops. I don't know if this was intended but to me these seem like a cruelty free version of KFCs Popcorn Chicken. It's products like this that'll convince the devoted meat eater in your life to quit it! Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to grab a sample of these at the Vegan Fair... I know right? I must be losing my skills! But I did grab a couple of boxes for dinner tonight, I cannot wait for Nick to get back from work so that we can crack into them!

Also spotted in the freezer section, Fry's new pies! There are two kinds, Meat Free Pepper Steak-Style and Country Mushroom.

I really like that they come in boxes of two, I try to eat a little healthily (Yeah, you would't know it from the blog would you?!) and if I buy a pack of 4 pies they will be gone within two or three days because someone in this house does't like pies. Seriously... doesn't like pie. I'll leave that to sink in for a moment because, really? That's crazy right?! I'm going away for the weekend & my freezer is stuffed full so I didn't pick up any pies today but I can assure you that as soon as I'm back I'll be grabbing a box of Country Mushroom.

Another tasty treat that caught my eye today were these new Swedish Glace Pearl ice cream lollies.

I'm super excited to see a Swedish Glace product that isn't just another straight up ice cream. These are fun! And look how cute the box is! These strawberry ice cream lollies are covered in a chocolate flavoured coating and then covered in strawberry flavoured pearls. Yum! What's also awesome is that Infinity Foods aren't just selling these by the box, oh no, they have them for sale individually too. Perfect for when you're by yourself or with a friend with different tastes in ice cream to you.

Hopefully you live somewhere where you can get a hold of these products & this post isn't just taunting you with the brilliance of new vegan foods that you can't get in your belly immediately...if you don't live near here I suggest that you consider a trip, Brighton's awesome & I've even compiled a handy eating guide for you right here!

Tibits

2012-01-19T15:59:00.000Z

I've blogged about Tibits a couple of times before & I'm going to write about it again right now! You know why? Because I love it! One of my main reasons for loving it is that I am one of those people who will order the same thing at a restaurant over & over again if I have the chance, here you can't do that. There always seems to be something that I've never tried before & I like to be pushed out of my foodie comfort zone from time to time.

In case you've never heard of Tibits they're a veggie pay-by-weight restaurant located just off Regent Street in Central London. I love the pay by weight concept & the fact that you get a free bread roll, yup, that's right, something for free!

All of the food is in the middle of the restaurant on what they call the food boat...

...and if you look closely at the labels there's not only a description of the dish & what it contains but little letters which indicate whether the dish is vegan, and if it contains gluten, nuts or garlic.

As well as a staggering selection of cold salads & nibbles there are always some delicious hot options. I'm a huge fan of their onion rings & falafel because I have a deep seated love for fried food!

Alongside the fabulous food Tibits have a great cocktail list. The staff are pretty knowledgeable about which drinks are vegan and the wine list behind the bar even has V's on it to make things easier.

These plates of food both came to around £12 which given how huge they were is definitely great value for money.

I love all of Tibits pasta salads, their tomato topped focaccia is mouthwateringly good and the onion rings? Seriously, I think they're what my dreams are made of! The batter is alway perfectly crisp and not at all greasy.

Recently Tibits have started adding vegan desserts to the food boat and when I visited they had an excellent Sticky Toffee Pudding...

...in fact it was so excellent & my picture was so terrible that I shall leave how it looked to your imagination. I will say that I have considered paying the £28 train fare just to go to London on the spur of the moment to eat it!

Another great thing about Tibits is that they are the fantastic venue for London Vegan Drinks. This excellent event takes place on the third Thursday of every month and it's a great way to meet new people whilst enjoying delicious food & drinks.

Sadly I can't make it to todays London Vegan Drinks but I hope that everyone who does attend has an awesome time & hopefully I'll be able to make it to the next one.

Where've you been?

2012-01-19T15:55:00.005Z

I feel like I owe you guys an explanation about why I've disappeared from the blogosphere since MoFo ended. I definitely experienced a bit of MoFo burnout, after cooking & blogging like crazy every day for a whole month I felt like I needed a little break but it's been almost three months & I've been finding it really hard to get back into it.

I feel like there's a lot of pressure recently to have hundreds of followers and comments and page views. I was starting to get bogged down in these silly details and it was making it hard to motivate myself to write anything at all.

For me blogging has stopped being fun recently, I feel like I have to get up early (which I hate!) to cook food so that I can take great pictures of it whilst it's still light, and that I need to order a new dish every time I go to a restaurant so that I can blog about it. I almost started thinking that I needed to do a competition where people had to re-tweet me or blog about my blog to enter but thankfully I got a hold of myself before I went there!

I know that other bloggers have been feeling this pressure too and some of them have even quit blogging all together because it stopped being fun. I've decided to keep going. This blog will never be about the most beautiful perfectly lit food photographs - there are plenty of other wonderful blogs with amazing pictures if that's what you're looking for. It won't be about making money or coming up with cunning plans to increase my page views. It will be about me, what I've been doing, what I've been eating and maybe even occasionally which nail polish I've been wearing or what band I've been listening to. Sometimes my pictures will be crap, I'm not a photographer, deal with it! I started this blog because I wanted to help other vegans find great food but I also wanted to connect with people, to make friends & to have fun. I still want all of that & and I definitely want to continue to write about vegan food so that's exactly what I'll be doing. I even have a proper post coming up right after this one & for now I'll leave you with this fact ...

Love Hearts are vegan! Was I the last to know?! I've eaten three packets in the last 4 hours, I think I have a problem.

Christmas in pictures.

2011-12-29T00:12:00.013Z

Vegan MoFo Day 31 - Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T21:32:00.000Z

Happy Halloween MoFo's! I cannot believe Vegan MoFo is over, I'm a little sad about it. It's been so awesome to spend the month trying new recipes, learning to bake bread, stuffing myself with football food, connecting with bloggers (some on a daily basis!) and discovering many wonderful new blogs which I'll be sure to add to my google reader as soon as I get the chance. At the same time this has been kinda hard work & I'm looking forward to having a pretty chilled day tomorrow. I can't promise I haven't already been flicking through my cookbooks deciding what to cook next though. I have an un-carved pumpkin awaiting me and a girl needs to eat! I think I'll be making the butternut apple soup from Appetite For Reduction, I feel like I need to eat something healthy after the crazy food-fest that has been Vegan MoFo!

On Saturday I had a little halloween party, more of a gathering than a party though. Just a few close friends, spooky music & a lot of food. I posted most of the goodies I made in this post but here's a photo of the table which includes the mummy dogs I made.

I typed up a menu using the spookiest font I could find.

My friend Sal from the blog Alien On Toast made amazing Halloween Stuffed Peppers inspired by a post she saw on Wing It Vegan.

Aren't they awesome? My friend Kip, the Messy Vegetarian Cook, made a two bean chilli and Sal made cornbread to accompany it, sadly I didn't get a picture but you can see the chilli topping my hotdog in yesterdays Football Food Sunday post.

There were geeky party games...

...and we carved pumpkins that I'd prepared earlier by cutting off the tops & scraping out all of the seeds.

Mine's the super simple one and the one on the right was carved by my friend Jay, he has the skills!

At around midnight we all headed out into town because it was White Night! White Night's a one night festival that takes place in Brighton and Hove. Things kick off at around 8pm and lots of businesses that usually close at around 6pm stay open until 2 or 3, some until 6 & there are art installations and other fun things to take part in all across the city. We headed to Boho Gelato where I got a tub of Mojito Sorbet.

We tried to get into Red Roaster for late night coffee but they were too full so we wandered the streets and looked at the awesome outdoor art installations like this cool tree...

...which was surrounded by a rope which people had tied their wishes for the future and thoughts about the past and present onto.

The first one I looked at said "I wish the world would go vegetarian", I love Brighton!

The next morning Sal, Kip & I headed out to find breakfast whilst Nick slept. We just went around the corner to Iydea where we each grabbed a Brunch Muffin with a side of hash browns.

I love that you can get a super fast breakfast at Iydea, the Brunch muffins are pre wrapped & ready to go so that you can get the food into you fast!

This toasted English muffin comes with a sausage patty, avocado, tomato and special fruity sauce and only costs £2.20. The hash browns were the perfect combination of grated potato and onion and I think they only cost an extra 95p. This was perfect. Iydea also do two sizes of cooked breakfast, stir fry on toast and beans on toast for vegans. The only disappointing thing about the Iydea breakfast menu is that there aren't enough vegan options compared to the amount of veggie options, the menu's very egg heavy and I think it would be awesome if they'd do a tofu scramble. They could also buy or make some vegan cheese to veganise their Breakfast Hash and their Hash Wrap if they wanted to make me really happy! That said I do really appreciate their speedy breakfast service and this cheap & filling breakfast sandwich was just what I needed on Sunday morning.

I intend to spend what's left of today sitting my my pumpkin filled living room reading blogs, watching George A. Romeros Dead Trilogy and eating leftover apple pie...what a perfect end to MoFo.

Football Food Sunday, Take 5!

2011-10-30T22:46:00.000Z

I can't believe we're closing in on the final day of MoFo and that this is the last Football Food Sunday of the month. It's not the end of the football season though so I'm sure there wil be more ridiculous Sunday food posts ahead of us!

After last nights halloween party I knew I wanted to take it easy today but I also wanted my final Football Food Sunday to be special...quite the dilemma! I eventually decided to make Chilli Cheese Dogs and Apple Pie, fun, but kinda low maintenance.

The motivation behind the chilli cheese dogs was that my lovely friend Kip from the blog Messy Vegetarian Cook made chilli for last nights party so I knew I could use some of the leftovers for these! I cheated a little more by buying the hot dogs (Frys) and the cheese (Vegusto) but I made the bread rolls myself; mainly because that actually seemed easier than going to the supermarket!

The buns are the Plain White Buns from The Best Veggie Burgers On The Planet, I made these a few weeks ago on Football Food Sunday & it was no hassle to shape them differently to make hot dog buns. These do rise a lot though so I had to do a bit of careful reshaping to get them right. Next time I would shape them into 10 hot dog rolls instead of the 8 baps they usually make. These chilli cheese dogs were totally amazing, I can't believe what a difference baking your own bread makes! I've also never topped a hot dog with anything other than ketchup before and the addition of chilli and cheese made them so much more delicious.

Whilst the dough for the bread was rising I started on my first ever totally from scratch pie. I've made mince pies before but only using store bought pastry and I've made store-bought puff pastry topped faux chicken pies but never pie crust from scratch! As I mentioned the other day my copy of Vegan Pie In The Sky arrived so I was excited to get started on some pie making. The Cosmos Apple Pie was the obvious choice, it's classically American and Isa even says in the preamble for the recipe that it's probably the first pie recipe you'll want to master. I decided to make the Buttery Double Crust for my pie because it sounded delicious and can I just say, wow, the pastry came out so perfectly and it was really delicious.

The pastry for the top of the pie fell apart a little as I put it on, mainly because it didn't look perfect so I tried to backtrack & take it off making the whole thing worse. Pie hint, do not try to remove your top crust to re-roll it, it will have touched the filling by then so there's no going back! After a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar I doubt anyone could even tell! As well as having never made a pie before I've actually never even eaten a homemade fruit pie before! This was delicious and clearly much better than the pies I used to buy from the supermarket before going vegan, I was also really surprised at how simple the process was even for a total rookie! I'm so excited by Vegan Pie In The Sky, I can't wait to make the Cherry Pie, the Key Lime Pie, the Chocolate Raspberry Tart, the Berry Chocolate Chip Cobbler, the Lemon Mousse Pie, the...you get the idea! I could go on forever, I will definitely be posting more pie pictures on this blog!

This has been a very successful days eating, I see many more pies and chilli dogs in my future! What are your favourite pies or hot dog toppings?

Halloweeeeen!

2011-10-29T13:35:00.000+01:00

Hello, my name's Jojo & I used to be a goth. Seriously, for a long time I would only wear black, my hair was purple & my room in my shared house looked like it was decorated for halloween all year round. Some of the gothyness wore off but my love for Halloween (and My Ruin!) has stuck around. I remember seeing this haunted halloween house on Mo's blog a couple of years ago & I remember thinking that it was the awesomest Halloween thing ever! I've got a few friends coming over later to listen to creepy music & eat spooky food so I thought I'd give it a try...

As you can see it's more of a ruined gingerbread house. Y'see I cheated & used an IKEA gingerbread house that I bought last Christmas but never got the chance to make. Unfortunately every single piece was broken when I opened the box. I tried to fuse some of them back together but it wasn't really working so I decided a Spooky Ruined Mansion was the way to go! My gravestones are Speculoos biscuits and the house is sitting on a chocolate cake base with bourbon biscuit frosting & extra crumbled bourbon biscuit dirt. There are spooky snakes, a Sour Patch Kid ghost and I threw a giant plastic rat in there for good measure!

Next on the menu for tonight, Green Gunge Cupcakes.

These are just green dyed vanilla cupcakes filled and topped with green vanilla frosting. I tested them last night & the gunge does indeed squirt out when you bite into them - awesome!

There are sugar cookies too. I used a recipe that I found on the PPK years ago, I remember them being called No Whey's Sugar Cookies but I can't find a link anywhere. I did black cats & pumpkins.

Last night after our tamale feast Nick & I carved some pumpkins. We did one proper one & cut the top and scooped the insides of two others so tonights guests can have some pumpkin carving fun too.

There were tonnes of pumpkin seeds so I washed & dried them and then coated them in olive oil, smoked paprika and chilli powder. I roasted them at gas mark two for 50 minutes turning them halfway through.

Last but not least I made Rat & Eyeball Jelly!

The eyeballs are peeled grapes & the rats are just plastic. There are rats inside the jelly too but you can't really see them in the picture.

The only thing left to make are some mummy dogs, I'm going to wrap some hotdogs in pastry & use little pieces of black olives for the eyes. You'll have to wait until Monday for those pictures though because I have some halloween crosswords & word searches to mount on card, apple bobbing to set up, punch to make, a costume to finish and an anniversary drinks party to go to before tonights gathering!

New Food Friday - Tamales

2011-10-28T20:38:00.002+01:00

So I definitely saved the new food I was most intimidated by until the end! I've wanted to make tamales for a long time and MoFo seemed like the perfect time to give it a try. Of course I decided to use a recipe from Viva Vegan and I settled on the Sweet Potato Black Bean Tamales. If you've never made tamales before it's quite a process, you need to soak your corn husks, make a filling, then the dough and then after wrapping them you steam them. There are a few pages on how to plan your tamale making before the recipes and I found that section really helpful. The whole process took me four hours from start to finish and whilst I was making the filling I made the Viva Vegan Tomatillo Salsa.

These certainly were delicious and I'd consider making them again if there was someone here to help but I think ~2 hours is my limit for cooking a meal!

My largest pan with its folding steamer insert can only hold 8 tamales at a time meaning that I have a second pan steaming away as I write!

I hate being negative about cooking experiences & I definitely don't want to dissuade anyone from trying to make tamales but I just don't have the patience for all of the fiddly wrapping, rolling and tying this entails! The tomatillo salsa is really awesome & it was way easier to make than I expected it to be, I'll definitely be making it again. I've never seen tomatillos in the UK so I grabbed a tin when I saw them in Vienna about a year ago. I've been planning to make this salsa ever since and I wish I'd made it sooner. I'm a huge spice wuss so I only used one chilli instead of two but the fact that I bought & used an actual chilli is kind of a big deal because I've actually never done that before! I found the salsa pretty spicy, definitely at the high end of my spice tolerance scale, but it's definitely delicious & I'll be piling it on next time I make a burrito.

Today I was also baking cupcakes & cookies for tomorrows exciting Halloween soirée. I'll be blogging about those & my haunted gingerbread house tomorrow, see you then!

Cookbook Challenge Day XI

2011-10-27T20:47:00.001+01:00

After taking a day off from cooking yesterday I was back with a vengeance today! I picked up the cookbook challenge for its final day with another three new recipes & tackled a haunted gingerbread house for a little Halloween gathering I'm having on Saturday!

Two of the recipes came from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan today, you might think that this was a coincidence but I'll admit that it was pure cheating on our part! Eat, Drink & Be Vegan did come out of the hat once & as per the rules Nick was meant to pick one recipe from it, unfortunately once he saw the picture of the Orange Sesame Tofu with the Coconut Lime Basmati Rice there was no stopping his rule breaking! I have to admit it sounded like a really delicious combo so I figured why not? They're our rules & we can break 'em if we want to!

This was an awesome meal & I'll definitely be making both of these recipes again. The tofu marinade is a mixture of soy sauce, maple syrup, sesame oil and orange juice with some arrowroot to thicken it. I'd probably sprinkle on a few less sesame seeds next time but mainly because they're kinda expensive! The coconut rice recipe suggests that you serve it with a lime wedge but we both preferred the rice without the extra lime, I think the recipe is limey enough as it is & the extra lime kinda overpowered the coconut flavour.

The next book out of the hat was Veganomicon & Nick was instructed to pick a dessert so that we wouldn't be eating two dinners! He chose the Tea-Poached Pears in Chocolate Sauce. We don't often make desserts, there are quite often brownies, cookies or other dessert like things lying around but I don't often whip up a fancy dessert.

I think I'm actually in love with these poached pears! I actually kinda hate tea and I was worried that the tea flavour might overpower the delicious flavour of the pears & subtle orange zest, thankfully that was not the case. You need to let the pears cool for around an hour before eating them & I'm happy to say that they were well worth the wait & this was a truly delicious dessert.

Taking the day off!

2011-10-26T21:08:00.000+01:00

Last year I took a day off from my MoFo theme on the 16th & got take away. It might be 10 days later this year but I though I'd carry on the tradition today. Nick & I ordered pizza from local pizza delivery place Pizza Face and watched a movie (Pretty In Pink - not as good as Sixteen Candles in my opinion!). Pizza Face have had vegan cheese for a while now and the other day on Twitter they announced that they're now doing 4 or 5 entirely vegan pizza's on Mondays and Tuesdays. These come with Cheezly and your choice of mock meats and veggies. I know what you're thinking, this is Wednesday Jojo! Well, we thought we'd give them a call to see if they had any leftover vegan toppings and we were in luck! I ordered a vegan margarita with mushrooms and vegi bacon...

...and Nick ordered a vegan margarita with veggie bacon.

We also got a vegan garlic bread, which you can order with or without cheezly. If you're ever in Brighton you should definitely order some Pizza Face, they don't have anywhere you can eat in yet but feel free to get it delivered to my place!!

Cookbook Challenge Day X

2011-10-25T21:38:00.000+01:00

Just like yesterday I picked the cookbooks for the challenge out of a hat and Nick chose the recipes, unlike yesterday I had to do the cooking myself! His first pick of the day, Apple-Pie Crumb Cake Muffins, came from Vegan With A Vengeance. This is one of my oldest & most loved cookbooks and I was excited to be cooking a new recipe from it.

These muffins have grated apple, chunks of apple and apple cider for triple-apple-awesomeness! The only problem was that I realised after starting to make the recipe that it included apple cider, you don't get apple cider in the UK... well, Strongbow's technically made from apples but I don't think that counts! If I'd had some apple juice in the house I'd have subbed that but a quick look in the fridge told me we only had orange so I used soya milk. This is why you're meant to read the recipe all the way through before starting it isn't it?!

These muffins are perfect for autumn. I used in season British Cox's apples and I don't think my soya milk sub caused any damage. The sugary crumb topping gives these muffins that perfect muffin top crunch and the surprise chunks of apple inside are reminiscent of the inside of an apple pie. Perfect.

The second recipe of the day was meant to be the Blackberry Skillet Pie from Vegan Diner but sadly the ridiculous price of blackberries meant that this one wasn't going to happen, I picked again and Nick decided on the Cocoa-Nut Quick Bread from 500 Vegan Recipes.

This sweet loaf is full of cocoa and coconut and the coconut is blended to make a powder, as you can see from the photo I didn't quite get that bit right! This loaf's really chocolattey and has a delicious crisp top. I think I'm going to make Nick take the rest of it to work tomorrow so that I don't eat it all!

The final recipe of the day is from Yellow Rose Recipes, Nick was so impressed with the taco meat recipe we used on Sunday that he picked another of the authors TVP based recipes, Sloppy Joannas. We had some homemade burger buns from Vegan Diner in the freezer so this was a really quick easy meal.

We've never had Sloppy Joes (or Joannas) before but we'll definitely be making these again. Sloppy Joe's are really, really good, like a sloppy burger... I guess that's the point!

Cookbook Challenge Day IX

2011-10-24T21:49:00.000+01:00

I've decided to shake things up for the last few days of the cookbook challenge! I'm still picking the cookbooks out of a hat but instead of using the random number generator we haaaave *drum roll* the Husband Generator! Nick said that he'd do all of the cooking on Monday if he could pick the weeks recipes, um, okay!

The first cookbook outa the hat was Veganomicon & Nick chose the recipe for Banana Nut Waffles. I knew he'd pick either waffles or pancakes this week & this recipe was a great choice. I've had my eye on it for a while because I love the banana flapjack recipe from Vegan Brunch and I'm also a big fan of nuts in waffles.

These were delicious! Nick did a great job especially because it was his first time using the waffle maker, next time I might cook them on a slightly lower heat so that they firm up a little more but there definitely will be a next time.

After breakfast we popped out to buy ingredients, post some parcels & to retrieve all of my halloween decorations from the place I used to work, when we got back there was a pile of post waiting for us which included this great coincidence!

My pie book & a movie about pie, awesome! I'm so excited to get cooking from Vegan Pie In The Sky...I might even have to sneak a recipe into tomorrow's cookbook challenge!! UK peep's just a heads up, Amazon is still saying that the pie book can't be shipped until November 11th but the Book Depository has them in stock & is getting them into your grubby pie loving hands within 48 hours.

Whilst I read my new cookbook Nick got started on the second recipe of the day the Bakery-Style Crispy Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies with a hint of Maple from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur.

These are seriously THE best chocolate chip cookies EVER. Try them now! Nick said that they were really easy to make but also that he'd never really realised how much sugar goes into cookies!! These cookies are definitely bakery-style, when Nick & I were getting together we used to go to a little local cookie place called Ben's Cookies and their chocolate chip cookies were my favourites, these cookies are just like them so they bring back great memories as well as being delicious! Nick's decided that this is his favourite cookbook & I love that he even has a favourite cookbook so thanks Kelly!

The third cookbook out of the hat today was Vegan Planet, Nick found it quite hard to chose a recipe from this book because it's huge and a bit intimidating and has no pictures. I tossed a few ideas out there and after showing him a picture of the Mac and "Cheese" on Susan's blog Kittens Gone Lentil he was convinced that was what was for dinner. As an ardent onion hater Nick wasn't too impressed that this recipe contained a whole onion but after realising that it was blended he was happy to proceed!

I served mine with broccoli & Nicks with peas and we both loved that it was topped with breadcrumbs. I really should do that more often because it makes everything all crispy & delicious. Sadly aside from the delicious topping we found that this mac & cheese was a little flavourless. The recipe says to use 2 tsp of nooch (that's nutritional yeast!) but Nick knows that that's now how you make a good mac & cheese and threw in 2-3 TBS instead. Unfortunately even that alteration didn't make this cheesy enough for us & it was more like a creamy pasta bake than a macaroni cheese. We added a lot of Parmazano sprinkles though & it ended up being a satisfying cheesy dinner even though we probably wouldn't use this mac & cheese recipe again.

Today's been awesome, I can't believe I've eaten so much delicious food & had three things to blog about without having to cook anything. Isn't Nick the best?!

Football Food Sunday, Take 4!

2011-10-23T20:02:00.000+01:00

Iiiiiiit's Football Food Sunday! It's an exciting one today because the game we're watching is actually being played in England! For the last two years we've been to Wembley Stadium to watch but we're trying to save some cash this year so we're on the sofa with our football food instead.

Last night I went to a girlie sleepover at a friends house in another city, there was a tonne of great food, a few glasses of wine, nail polish, terrible movies, and not much sleep. Because of that I knew that todays football food had to be quick & easy and tacos seemed like the obvious choice.

I decided to make the meaty part of the taco filling from TVP because we have a tonne in the pantry & it's loads cheaper than using store-bought veggie mince. I followed the Yellow Rose Recipes method of cooking & seasoning it and it only took about 10 minutes which was perfect given how tired & lazy I'm feeling today. Nick impulse purchased the crunchy taco shells on our last trip to a big supermarket and they just need warming in the oven for 4 minutes, again, perfect! I also served these with quick & easy guacamole (avocado, salt, pepper & lemon juice), shredded Vegusto Melty cheese, lettuce & tomato. Nick had sour cream on his because he doesn't like guac', lettuce or tomato...weird! These tacos didn't quite seem unhealthy enough for Football Food Sunday though so we drank some Cola too and then followed the meal with a popcorn chaser!

I'm sorry this has been a bit of a short one, I promise I'll be back on form next Sunday & I'll be here tomorrow with a new twist on the Cookbook Challenge.

The Cowley Club.

2011-10-22T13:50:00.000+01:00

Yesterday it got to lunchtime & I realised that I hadn't really got any food in the house. This was actually awesome news as it meant that I'd managed to eat all of the leftovers and I could go out for lunch!

I decided that because it's MoFo I should try somewhere new so I headed to The Cowley Club. I helped cook a Sunday roast there last week to raise money for Sea Shepherd but aside from that I'd never eaten there before.

The Cowley Club is a vegan worker owned co-operative social centre. During the day it houses a cafe & bookshop and in the evenings it's run as a members bar. When I popped in there yesterday there were four lunch options; two mains, a wrap & the soup of the day.

I went for the Sausage Mash Kale & Gravy which only cost £3. The wraps were £2.30 and soup with bread is only £1.80!

This was a huge plate of food especially considering the price. As you can see there were a tonne of smashed skin on potatoes, two sausages, a decent sized side of kale and plenty of lovely onion gravy. I'd planned to get a slice of cake for £1 but I was far too stuffed, if I'd had my own container I'd have gotten some to take away. This was delicious hearty fare & I can't wait to go back for more.

The Cowley Club which is open on Wednesday, Thursday & Friday from 12-6 and serves food from 12 - 3:30 is the perfect place to sit & read a book whilst eating cheap but delicious vegan food. I love their ethos and the fact that they do things like their Migrant English Project where they teach refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers English for free and give them a free lunch. What a great project!

New Food Friday.

2011-10-21T19:27:00.000+01:00

Okay, I have a confession. I think I'm obsessed with baking bread! New Food Friday is meant to be all about trying new foods but after realising that I've spent way more than our usual monthly food budget already & that I have a cupboard stuffed with food I decided to scrap the plan to make pierogis & make something more pantry friendly. I had all of the ingredients for the Spelt Loaf from 500 Vegan Recipes in the house and we were out of bread so this seemed perfect.

I picked a recipe that used spelt flour rather than wheat flour because I wanted it to be a bit more challenging & I guess I'm getting good at this bread thing because it turned out great...that is to say that it tasted great, I get the feeling that it isn't really meant to look this "rustic". I think I need to work on my loaf shaping skills!

On Wednesday I made a couple of mini pie crusts when I was making the quiche & today I decided to make broccoli cheese mini quiches for dinner to go with our bread. I used the base recipe from the You Won't Believe It's Vegan quiche and added the cheese from the Inside-Out Cheeseburger's and some broccoli sautéed with garlic.

These little quiches were perfect and both Nick & I love the bread, it's definitely going to be a challenge not to spend the rest of the evening snacking on the loaf!

What I Ate Thursday!

2011-10-20T15:52:00.009+01:00

I enjoyed taking pictures of everything I ate a couple of Thursdays ago so I thought I'd do it again today. I slept 'till 11.30 & woke up starving so I started my day with this classic, baked beans on toast.

This bread is just cheap wholewheat from the supermarket & my beans of choice are the Co-Op's Organic Baked Beans. This is my breakfast of choice, I'd eat it every day but I sometimes feel like I should vary it so I do!

For lunch I went for a big plate of leftovers. There's barbecue tofu from Sunday's football food feast, an apple, some kidney beans from the can I opened to make hummus, the last of the pilaf from yesterday & as you can see I won the battle for the last slice of quiche!

This was a pretty great lunch, I'm learning to love leftovers and the quiche was still as amazing as it was yesterday.

For dinner I got Nick to grab a bag of mixed lettuce on his way home from work & I threw together a quick salad. There are chickpeas, again from the hummus, sliced radishes, cherry tomatoes, grated carrot and the dressing from Monday's Sanctuary Chef Salad.

That dressing is still SO yummy, I love it! This would have been a dull salad without it, I think it'd probably make the dullest iceberg lettuce amazing though!

After dinner Nick & I made fun dessert plates! They have Roasted Almond Cookies with Fleur du Sel that I made for the Cookbook Challenge on Tuesday, a square of my favourite Rupunzel Nirwana Noir nut truffle cream chocolate (we have to ration it because you can't buy it in the UK), two Sweet Vegan marshmallows and a Bio Bis spelt chocolate sandwich cookie.

It's been a pretty good day for food given that I haven't needed to cook anything...unless heating up beans counts?! See ya'll tomorrow for New Food Friday!

Liebster Award

2011-10-20T14:59:00.004+01:00

When Carrie from Vegan For The Win nominated me for the Liebster blog award last Saturday I was super flattered but I also felt like I shouldn't accept it as I have more than 200 followers. Leibster is German & means 'dearest' or 'beloved' but it can also mean 'favourite' & the idea of the Leibster award is to bring attention to blogs with less than 200 followers but when Savannah of In Her Grace also nominated me for the same award I decided that I should definitely write a post about it & pass the award on to 5 more bloggers.

To keep it relevant I'm passing the award along to bloggers who are also participating in Vegan MoFo...

1 Kittens Gone Lentil

2 Tea and Sympatico

3 Vegan Vamps

4 Vegan Gourmet Caravan

5 Vegan and So Forth

If you'd like to pass along the award you just need to pick five blogs with less than 200 followers and then...

1- Show your thanks to the people who gave you the award by linking back to them.

2- Link to five of your top picks and let them know they've been nominated by leaving a comment on their blog.

3- Post the award on your blog.

4- Enjoy the love and support of some wonderful people on the inter-web!

Cookbook Challenge Day VIII

2011-10-19T20:43:00.000+01:00

Today the Cookbook Challenge seemed to be insisting that I had friends over for dinner with it's three easy to prepare ahead dishes that would all go together well as one meal. I'm not one to argue with the recipe generator so that's what I did!

My first recipe of the day was the Chipotle Lime Two Bean Hummus from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan. Hummus is usually pretty easy to throw together and this was no exception even though I had to open two tins of beans rather than just one!

The hummus is made from both chickpeas & kidney beans and the chipotle flavour comes from Tabasco. This isn't a recipe I'd have picked, there are a lot of hummus recipes scattered between my many cookbooks and as I never have Tabasco in the house, well, until today, I would have skipped it for a more pantry friendly recipe. I was worried this would be too spicy but even I couldn't really detect any spice, I might even add more Tabasco next time.

My next recipe of the day isn't actually from the cookbook challenge but as I was having friends over for dinner I thought I should pull out the big guns & make 4 dishes. I'm a firm believer that hummus should always be accompanied by pitta bread so I e-mailed one of my bff's for her recipe.

This simple flatbread recipe only contains five ingredients but I realised too late that the recipe calls for fresh yeast rather than either of the kinds of yeast I actually had, I decided to guess at active dry yeast & continue anyway!

These certainly didn't turn out as well as Kip's pitta bread usually does but I don't think they're half bad for a first attempt. They look more like a flat bread roll than a traditional pitta but they tasted great so who cares right?!

The second cookbook I pulled out of the hat for today was the The Complete Guide To Vegan Food Substitutions and the generator chose me page 178, Quinoa Lentil Pilaf.

This pretty dish is flavoured with orange juice and caraway seeds & I love that it uses roasted salted cashew nuts. It's also the perfect accompaniment to recipe number three the Quiche from You Won't Believe It's Vegan. I've made quiche plenty of times before using my go to recipe from Vegan Brunch but I have to admit that I've never made the pie crust myself before. I don't usually cheat completely & buy the pre baked pastry case but I do usually buy the pastry in a block & just roll it out myself & I'll admit that I was tempted to do that today...

...but I reminded myself that I was going to need to make pie crust when Isa & Terry's pie book arrives anyway & I also remembered that Nick & I had received some of those fancy ceramic baking balls as a wedding gift so I stopped being a wuss & got on with it! The crust is coconut oil based which I was surprised by, I was worried that my savoury quiche would turn out, well, coconutty, but it hasn't and the crust was perfectly crispy & didn't crumble when I cut it.

I decided to grate some of the cheese I made yesterday into this quiche & it definitely worked out well. It was really delicious, there's only one slice left and I think there might be some fighting over it tomorrow.

I also chopped up some veggies to go with the hummus & here's the whole spread...

I think I'll be making all of these dishes again and I'm happy that I'm no longer scared of pie crust!

Cookbook Challenge Day VII

2011-10-18T21:14:00.005+01:00

The first cookbook that came out of the hat today was The Best Veggie Burgers On The Planet & the recipe, the Inside-Out Cheeseburger Seitanic Stuffer. This is a recipe I've had my eye on since buying the book so I was really excited to have it pop up in the challenge. Now you (well, I) can't really have a burger without a bun so I decided to cheat for recipe two & choose a bun recipe myself. It had to be something new though so I turned to Vegan Diner, the newest addition to my cookbook collection, and picked the recipe for Old-Fashioned Hamburger Buns.

I was a little suspicious of the bun recipe as it didn't include any warm water but of course it was fine. These were great & I'm enjoying practicing baking bread. Tomorrow, I'm going to try my hand at pitta bread!

The Inside-Out Cheeseburgers require a little bit of forward planning, they take an hour to cook but you also need to make the cheese filling which has to set in the fridge for an hour before being used. That said they were pretty simple to make even after I managed to throw in the whole ammount of vegetable stock when I was trying to halve the recipe...oh well, now we have leftovers! I served them on the Old Fashioned Hamburger Buns with mayonnaise & vegi bacon. I realised as I was taking the picture that it would've been prettier with some lettuce & tomato but sadly there was none in the house!

The burgers were both crazy delicious and massive. I thought they were even better than the Bacon Cheeseburgers I made recently for Football Food Sunday. The cheese on the inside was perfectly melty & I loved the seitan patty. I also love how versatile these burgers are, as Joni says in the book she's included her four favourite stuffing recipes but really you could stuff them with anything. I have plans to change the flavourings of the seitan a little and bread these to make a vegan chicken kiev.

My third recipe of the day was from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I was meant to make these Roasted Almond Cookies with Fleur de Sel last week but I got tattooed instead so I made them today. I'll apologise in advance for the terrible picture, it was dark in my house by about 3pm today & apparently no amount of photoshopping's going to fix this shot!

These were easy to make even though I realised at the last minute that I needed to roast my almonds...clue's in the name there Jojo! This certainly isn't a criticism but the cookies didn't turn out how I'd expected, I hadn't noticed that there were oats in the recipe until the last minute & for some reason I'd assumed they'd be a crispy cookie rather than a soft one. I also have to admit that I was suspicious about topping a cookie with salt but as usual Isa & Terry weren't wrong, these are really delicious! I'm about to go & eat a 5th!

Cookbook Challenge Day VI

2011-10-17T18:36:00.010+01:00

The cookbook challenge is back for it's third week & I have to admit that cooking three new recipes a day is stressing me out a little. I'm tired & my arms are killing after chopping 8 tonnes of potatoes (slight exaggeration!) & lifting massive pans yesterday and I've actually been thrown out of the kitchen by Nick for being too stroppy! He's made me sit down, listen to Less Than Jake & drink this...

I'm not entirely sure what it is but it's incredibly alcoholic & it has three straws. Awesome. He's currently cooking the rest of recipe three for me so that I can tell you all about one & two.

First out of the hat was The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes and page 61, Garden Muffins. I had very high hopes for these, I love both zucchini muffins & carrot cake and these contained elements of both.

Sadly the muffins didn't rise at all, if anything they actually shrunk a bit. They were incredibly gummy too & I actually couldn't eat them at all. Muffins are definitely the thing I have the most trouble baking, I love the spelt zucchini muffins from the Babycakes cookbook though & I think I'll stick to them in future.

Second book outa the hat was The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions and the generator picked the last recipe in the book, Chococado Pudding.

Now, I have to say that I love every other Celine & Joni recipe that I've tried (Hello Seitan en Croute!) but I just don't think that avocado in a chocolate dessert is for me. I'm not usually a pudding fan (in the American sense of the word) but the texture was beautiful & it did taste great but I just couldn't get over the avocadoey aftertaste. It's a ridiculously quick recipe though so if you have the book give it a try, maybe you'll have a better tolerance for avocadoeyness in desserts than me.

The third book of the day & the book that Nick's currently reading on his chair in the kitchen...yep, he's taken a chair in there, why've I never thought of that, is Appetite For Reduction. Now after yesterday's football food feast I was pretty happy to see this book. It's one of my favourites & I've been cooking from it a lot this year so it took a few tries with the generator to come up with a recipe I haven't tried, we eventually settled on page 28, Sanctuary Chef Salad. Now to be honest I've never made this because I'm kinda lazy and it has a lot of steps. There are essentially 5 recipes in one here & you have to cook & cool the roasted cauliflower, baked tofu & eggplant bacon before you can dive headfirst into your meal. It's definitely not a quick weeknight meal the first time you make this but once you've made it you'll have dinner or lunch sorted for 4 days if it's just you eating.

This salad is totally worth the effort. It's amazing! It's also huge and has a tonne of fun things in it. The eggplant bacon is perfectly smoky & crisp, the roasted cauliflower is better than I'd ever imagined roasted cauliflower could be & the baked tofu was always going to be a favourite. I made a couple of changes, I hate raw onion so there was no point including it & I couldn't find the correct sprouts so I just went for a random mix that I found at my local co-op. The real surprise with this meal was the dressing, I usually hate dill but I was brave & threw it in there anyway and it's really really good, like, really fucking good, eat it with a spoon good. This salad also made Nick like eggplant! Crazy! We can't wait to make this again.

Football Food Sunday, Take 3!

2011-10-16T21:10:00.000+01:00

Wow, Football Food Sunday again? I feel like MoFo's moving crazy fast. I spent most of today helping to prepare & serve a Sunday Roast for 30 people to raise money for Sea Shepherd so I needed the Football Food to be pretty low maintenance.

I decided on loaded potato skins, barbecue tofu & avocado fries.

Yeah you read that right, avocado fries! Seriously, go & make these now! Mine don't look as good as Naiomi's, they got totally stuck in my fryer basket & I had to prise them out using two spatulas & a knife. I should have listened to her instruction to nudge them a little during cooking. I served these delicious fries with some of last weeks smoky mayonnaise. I really can't wait to make them again...like can't wait as in I'm considering going back to the kitchen to make more once I publish this! They're AMAZING! And yes, that did need the caps lock!

The loaded potato skins were ridiculously simple, I cooked them for 7 minutes in the microwave before chopping them in half, scooping them out & filling them with Melty Vegusto & Redwood Foods Vegi Bacon. I also topped them with sour cream. Um, yum! I didn't think these could be AS good as they were but they were pretty spectacular. I'm glad I only made two because if there had been more I'd have eaten them even though I already felt kinda sick...I ate a huge Sunday Roast at about 4pm! The barbecue tofu was a bit of a cheat, I seared my tofu, covered it in store-bought barbecue sauce & then cooked it for about 10 more minutes. It was delicious but I really need to try making my own barbecue sauce soon!

Sorry it's such a short one today but I'm super tired and the avocado in the kitchen is calling out for some deep frying...

Breakfasting in Brighton.

2011-10-15T15:53:00.001+01:00

This morning I woke up on my living room floor next to 3 of my best friends and a blow up guitar, this could only mean one thing, it was time to find a hangover cure!

For the purposes of Vegan MoFo I decided we should pass on our usual haunts (WaiKikaMooKau or the Infinity Cafe) and try somewhere new. We headed to Bubble Kitschen to check out their vegan breakfast options.

This quirky cafe isn't vegetarian but it does have a lot of vegetarian and vegan items on the menu. The vegan items are marked with two v's & include an English breakfast, a Mexican breakfast & beans or mushrooms on toast. They also have a large selection of freshly squeezed juices which you can add spirulina to if you're so inclined.

I decided to go for the English Breakfast because I thought I'd be able to rate it better next to other English Breakfast experiences.

The breakfast comes with fried potatoes, two Linda McCartney sausages (hidden under the beans!), fried mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, baked beans & a slice of toast. This is certainly the greasiest breakfast I've had in Brighton but sometimes that's just what you need! I loved the crispy fried potatoes, they're the perfect addition to an English breakfast and the fried mushrooms were delicious. Also whilst I prefer the homemade tofu sausages at Infinity Cafe I definitely enjoy a good Linda McCartney sausage and they're perfect with this breakfast. The only thing missing was veggie bacon but that was more than made up for by the fried potatoes. I'll definitely be returning to Bubble Kitschen & ordering this breakfast again.

One of my friends, the lovely Kip from Messy Vegetarian Cook, ordered the Mexican Breakfast which consists of a flour tortilla filled with refried beans, a Linda McCartney sausage, guacamole, salsa, fried potatoes and tofu scramble.

I didn't actually try this but it looks amazing right? It was also ridiculously large! The tofu scramble was made with silken tofu which is a bit unorthodox but it looked fantastic & I'll definitely be trying it one day.

I'm going to try to catch up on some MoFo blogs now & I'll be back tomorrow for Football Food Sunday. Go niners!

MoFo Hump Day! New Food Friday!

2011-10-14T16:09:00.009+01:00

Today is MoFo Hump Day! I'd actually never heard of Hump Day until Kittee mentioned it, but I'm not one to say no to stuff so I signed up to take part anyway! It turns out that Hump Day means the middle of something. Can you believe we're halfway through Vegan MoFo already? I feel like it's going really fast!

Leslie Hall wrote this awesome song to let us celebrate veganism and hump day.

Listen Here!

Just incase you'd like to sing along here are the lyrics...

I eat the finest cuisines, in the finest of places Stuff my mouth full and always say thank you. But if it's raised in a cage, and it can't even move, if it's hormone filled and in a bad mood. I'm gonna pass on that. Reach for something better. The only milk I'll drink comes from the nipple of a soy bean. Veggies make you live forever, and they seem to taste much better. when they're cooked and grown with love. So give a chef who knows what's up a hug. Momma just can't seem to get it, Papa he just rolls his eyes. When I tell them I'm much healthier, they just say that it's all lies. But beans, nuts, fruits and veggies can really fill the belly. Get you vitamins you need, shiny hair and extra speed. Don't take that meat-wich any further, I want a marinated, deep fried, hand-tied mushroom burger. I like it! We gotta stand strong for our feathered furry sometimes scaly animal friends and their little babies. 'Cuz I wouldn't want to live in a cage in a dark warehouse killed at an early age. Pumped full of hormones, sleeping in my feces. Never met my mother, raised by machines. Never get sunshine never get green, but that's just me. [That girl loves fruit leather.] So ask us what we're eating. Delicious and repeating, fruits and veggies are so nice. With a slice of tempeh, yes, I'll have that twice. Don't forget the legumes!

Whilst I think that part of the idea of this is to take a day off from regular MoFo blogging & I just couldn't bring myself to skip New Food Friday!

I have decided to go the lazy route though & stick with bread. I um-ed & ah-ed about whether or not this was cheating since I ended up making bread rolls during the cookbook challenge (and then again on Football Food Sunday) but I decided that as I still felt a sense of trepidation about making a proper loaf of bread it definitely counted. Also my leg still aches & I have very exciting Friday night plans that mean a whole lotta cooking is out - sorry tamales!

I picked the Fresh Rosemary Foccacia recipe from Veganomicon because I love focaccia & I thought it'd be amazing to be able to make it myself. This recipe only uses 6 ingredients, everything in the picture plus water, which surprised me as I'd always assumed that fancy-bread would be really complicated!

I keep my salt in the cupcake!

The bread takes around two hours from mixing the ingredients to coming out of the oven and, as I'm noticing is the way with bread, most of that's downtime. Perfect. I think bread might be my new favourite thing to cook!

The bread looks and smells awesome and when I poke it it certainly feels like focaccia but I haven't actually tasted it yet. As you can see from the ingredients in the background I'm about to make the Smoky Split Pea soup from Appetite For Reduction & I'm holding off on tearing into the bread until my friends get here! I'll attempt to remember to take a picture & update this post once we've eaten but there's going to be alcohol & power ballads involved in our evening so I can't make any promises!

My true love, Ms Cupcake.

2011-10-13T16:33:00.001+01:00

As regular readers of my blog will know I'm a huge Ms Cupcake fan. Her delicious cupcakes are a must eat on any trip to London.

Last time I visited I was lucky enough to try the Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcake...

...the Rocky Road Cupcake...

...and the Matcha Green Tea Cupcake.

They were all fantastic as always, I love the combo of peanut butter & chocolate & Rocky Road is a genius flavour but I particularly enjoyed the Matcha Green Tea Cupcake as it was a new flavour that I'd never tried before.

Nick also had a Vanilla Cupcake & whilst it looked pretty I kinda hate Vanilla frosting so I didn't try it. Nick assured me that it was delicious though & I certainly don't doubt it.

I love everything about the Ms Cupcake store, they sell so many delicious treats alongside their cupcakes & we always buy loads of stuff to take home.

This time we took bought a huge pile of Go Max Go Snap bars & these new bear snacks.

I love all of the bear range, the fruit Yoyo's are something I snack on on an almost daily basis & these new granola nibbles make a great snack or on-the-go breakfast.

I really hope the lovely Ms C brings her store to Brighton one day soon!

Vegan MoFo Day 12

2011-10-12T18:29:00.011+01:00

Okay, so, today was meant to be a cookbook challenge day but I just got tattooed & I can't really put weight on my leg let alone actually cook anything. I'm sorry Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar Roasted Almond Cookies with Fleur de Sel. You sounded delicious & I promise that I'll make you one day.

It's still Vegan MoFo though & as veganism's a pretty big part of my day to day life I still have plenty to write about!

I started the day with baked beans on rye sourdough toast & then boxed up some of the cookies I've been baking to take to my tattoo artist.

He was pretty happy to see these, as was his vegan colleague. My tattoo artist's rad, aside from the fact that he's a shit hot artist he seems to like my ridiculous ideas (you've seen my broccoli right?) & he was happy to source vegan inks for me when I asked him. After the appointment I headed home through the park where I saw my favourite squirrel...

...I've seen this squirrel (at least I like to think it's the same squirrel!) almost every time I've walked through this park since I moved to Brighton almost 10 years ago. The squirrel was there the day I fell asleep drunk in the park on my 20th birthday, the day Nick & I walked to our wedding, the day I met 3 of my bff's at a PPK potluck picnic there & on countless other uneventful days. I've been wanting to get a tattoo of this squirrel for a while now & I think I'm going to have to now that it came to hung out with me whilst I was limping home after getting my latest ink.

I also walked via via Infinity Foods to grab snacks. As soon as I got home I piled my snacks onto a tray with the laptop, some magazines & the post that had arrived & headed upstairs to chill out in bed with a My So Called Life DVD.

As you can see I bought some InSpiral kale chips & some mixed vegetable crisps, a sausage roll & some cherry juice. I also grabbed a peach & pear Alpro soya yoghurt from the fridge & there's a black & white cookie in the tin. I'm currently munching my way through all of that!

I also opened my post & kapow, more vegan related stuff! My new cookbooks had arrived!

I've had The Vegan Table on my Amazon wish list for about a year & after flicking through it at a friends the other day I had to buy it. I've also seen countless wonderful pictures of food from Vegan Diner on peoples blogs during MoFo so I thought why buy one cookbook when you could get two?! They're both beautiful books & the pictures have been making me wish that I was up for cooking right now!

Also about an hour ago another awesome vegan-related thing happened. I found out that I won the Veg Fest twitter giveaway! A whole hamper of vegan goodies will be winging its way to me soon!!

It's time for me to go & harass Nick to make me a baguette pizza now! Maybe he'll read this & get the not-so-subtle hint!

Cookbook Challenge Day V

2011-10-11T20:52:00.000+01:00

The recipe generator's cookie bias is continuing in full force this week! First outa the hat were the Orange Chocolate Chunk Cookies from Kelly Peloza's The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur. I was happy to see this book again so soon because the Jam Thumbprint cookies from the other day were great and, well, it meant that I got to eat cookies again!

These chocolate chunk cookies certainly weren't a disappointment . The chunks of chocolate make a change from chocolate chips & I actually really liked the orange flavour. These cookies reminded me of a Chocolate Orange, y'know that non-vegan ball of orange flavoured chocolate segments? They made me think of christmas because chocolate oranges were the gift of choice between my friends & I at school!

Next out of the hat was Veganomicon & the generator chose me page 109, Lemony Roasted Potatoes which I served with the next recipe outa the hat, the Firestorm Falaf-hell from Please Don't Feed The Bears.

The potatoes were amazing! I think I might've chopped them too large or something though because these took around 2 hours to cook rather than the 55 min's the recipe suggested! The potatoes actually went perfectly with the baked falaf-hell but only because these aren't really falafel, not as I know them anyway. They didn't contain any parsley, cumin or coriander and were more like a lemony chickpea burger. They were delicious but I think I'll stick to the baked falafel recipe in AFR next time I want something to stuff in my pita pocket!

That should have been the end of the challenge for today but as I have a tattoo appointment tomorrow I decided to make one of the recipes meant for tomorrow today. I know that I'll be too wiped to make three recipes, including TWO more cookie recipes tomorrow...seriously this recipe generator is biased, either that or I have too many baking books?! Anyway, as it came out first I baked the Black & Whites from Hannah Kaminsky's first cookbook My Sweet Vegan. These NYC inspired cookies are massive & iced with both white & chocolate icing, hence the name.

These soft cookies were fantastic, seriously, I think that they're what dreams are made of! They're perfect. I love My Sweet Vegan but I don't turn to it that often because the recipes do often use quite expensive ingredients (this one had margarine, a lot of icing sugar and sour cream) and the recipes can often be quite time consuming. That said everything I've ever made from this cookbook has been completely worth the time & cost, one of my favourite recipes ever is the Silken Chocolate Mousse Cake & I'll definitely be making these cookies again.

Cookbook Challenge Day IIII

2011-10-10T19:32:00.009+01:00

Wow, I can't believe we're into the second week of MoFo already! I'm loving reading so many new blogs and cooking even more than usual. Today is cookbook challenge day & I knew it was off to a great start when I pulled Vegan Planet out of the hat & the generator came up with page 457, Apple Cinnamon French Toast. This was a very weekendey start to the week but my husband works on a Saturday so Sunday & Monday are his days off, perfect.

I really really like French toast but I've never actually attempted to make it before. Of course I decided to use my new love, the Grill & Griddle again...I swear they're not paying me to link to it every day! I just love it!

The recipe was very simple but as I'm not very awake in the mornings I managed to throw in the full amount of sugar even though I was halving the recipe. Normally I'd give up on my halving at this point & throw in another 1/2 of everything else but, alas, I was out of applesauce so it wasn't to be. I figured that an extra 1/2 TBS of sugar probably wouldn't do too much harm & I was correct.

It turned out great & it definitely wasn't too sweet, I actually added quite a lot of extra maple syrup after the picture was taken! I would say that next time I might try a different bread, I'm unsure what the perfect bread for French toast would be though, I'm guessing a baguette? I would also use a different apple topping, probably the one Isa used to top these Apple Pie Pancakes, it's thicker, has more flavour and doesn't use oil.

After a morning of grocery shopping & visiting my tattoo artist to see the artwork for my next piece it was time for lunch. I'd pulled The Urban Vegan out of the hat & the generator directed me to page 128, Haricots Verts et Tomates. This French inspired green bean & tomato dish is sweetened, either with sugar or agave - I went with agave, and stewed until the tomatoes break down.

Of course I couldn't just have beans for lunch & as I'd opened a new box of silken tofu to make the French toast I decided to make this omelet from the blog Fat Free Vegan Kitchen. I filled it with vegi bacon, Cheddar Cheezly & chopped tomatoes.

I have to say that the omelet ended up being the star of this meal. Whilst I thought the beans were okay I found the sweetness a little odd, they weren't really to my taste & I probably wouldn't make them again.

Nick took one look at the bean recipe (he's a hater!) and had one of yesterday's burgers for lunch, on a toasted bun with peanut butter, vegi bacon, melted cheese & tomato ketchup. I think he might be a genius!

The third recipe of the day comes from 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes & the generator threw out the Chewy Chocolate Peppermint Cookies. Awesome. I made a cookie recipe from this book last year during MoFo & it also contains the recipe for my favourite banana bread.

This recipe is a little more involved than a cookie recipe I'll ever end up using regularly, melting chocolate is a bit of a hassle & I prefer to bake with oil rather than margarine, but they were definitely worth it. Because the cookies have both cocoa powder & melted chocolate in the batter they pack a double chocolatey punch to the tastebuds & once the peppermint icing was added they were pretty damn perfect .

Just outa the oven...

The recipe says that it makes 2 dozen cookies but it became apparent that if I was also making them 1 teaspoon in size like the recipe suggests I'd end up with closer to 50 cookies rather than around 20. I decided to make the cookies 2 tsp in size & ended up with 30 cookies, pretty perfect.

Here are the cookies after they were iced with a simple soya milk & sugar icing which is flavoured with peppermint extract.

These were seriously the hardest thing I've ever tried to photograph at night! I'm trying not to hold it against them though because they are delicious!

That's it for day 4 of my cookbook challenge but I'll be back with more random eats tomorrow!

Football Food Sunday. Take 2!

2011-10-09T21:24:00.000+01:00

It's Sunday people and that means it's football time. Woot! Okay, so I can't tell a lie I'm not very excited about the football (yep, it is still on!) but the 49ers are playing so Nick's excited & I was definitely excited about eating more delicious traditional American food... and what could be more American than a cheeseburger? Erm, a Bacon Cheeseburger perhaps?

Todays recipe came from The Best Veggie Burgers On The Planet because really where else would I go for a burger recipe now that I'm the proud owner of this awesome cookbook? I haven't had it for very long & consequently had only tried one recipe before today, the Super Quinoa Burgers. For Football Food Sunday we of course turned to the USA inspired chapter of the book & the recipe that immediately popped out at me was one for Bacon Cheeseburgers.

Now you obviously can't just eat a burger on it's own...well you could but not during MoFo & certainly not on Football Food Sunday! As I'm no longer scared of baking bread I started the day by whipping up a batch of Plain White Buns also from The Best Veggie Burgers On The Planet.

As you can see I was so proud of these that I made Nick take a picture of me with them!

PPK, represent!

These turned out amazingly well, some of them even have that bakery style crack in the middle!

These buns only need to rise for an hour & as our heating's now fixed I just popped them under the radiator.

Of course just buns & burgers didn't seem like enough so I decided to make some potato wedges to round out the meal. I didn't just want to wing it so I turned to my cookbook shelf & found a great recipe for Smoky Potato Wedges in The Complete Guide To Vegan Food Substitutions. This is yet another new(ish) cookbook & I haven't made anything from it yet. These wedges were a great start though and I now have a tonne of recipes bookmarked including the Berry Fro Yo & the White Chocolate Orange Corn Muffins.

The wedges are oven baked & far far nicer than their pre-packaged equivalent. I didn't have the potato starch called for in the recipe so I subbed 1/2 Tapioca Starch and 1/2 Cornstarch & it turned out just fine.

The TVP & wheat gluten based Bacon Cheeseburgers come together really quickly. After rehydrating the tvp in the microwave you do need to wait for it to cool a bit (I decanted it into a larger cooler bowl to speed up the process) but then you just throw the rest of the ingredients into the bowl together, kneed for 5 minutes, form into patties & slap 'em on the grill or in this case your awesome Grill & Griddle...and yes, I know, this is the third time I've mentioned it in 9 days but I think I'm actually in love with it! Check out these grill marks...

Whilst the burgers were on the grill I decided to whip up a quick batch of smoky mayonnaise to go on the burgers and as a dip for the smoky potato wedges. Terre a Terre, one of my favourite vegetarian restaurants in Brighton, makes a delicious smoked mayonnaise so I thought I'd see if I could recreate it at home.

It's definitely not the same as Terre a Terre's but I'll bet that they spent more than 4 minutes perfecting their recipe.

I mixed together approximately 3 TBS of Plamil vegan mayonnaise, 1/2 a tsp of smoked paprika & 3 dashes of liquid smoke. Voila, smokey mayonnaise!

Here's the final meal...

I actually feel really proud that I made everything on this plate except for the slice of Cheddar Cheezly & I enjoyed it all so much. I was a little worried that the burgers might be too sweet for me given that they contain both peanut butter & maple syrup but they really weren't & the smoky mayonnaise went with them perfectly. I really can't wait to make more burgers from the book, I think the Really Meaty Burger or the Seitanic Stuffer will be next but I am also very tempted by the Denver Omelet Burger. Do you have The Best Veggie Burgers On The Planet? What are your favourite recipes?

I'm already very excited about next weeks Football Food Sunday but I'll have to be patient because I have to wait a whole week & as of tomorrow it's cookbook challenge time again! See y'all tomorrow!

Vegan MoFo Day 8, Apple Pie Pancakes.

2011-10-08T23:17:00.001+01:00

I know I've posted once already today but raving about these pancakes just couldn't wait! Earlier this evening Isa Chandra Moskowitz posted this recipe for Apple Pie Pancakes on The Post Punk Kitchen Website & as soon as I saw them & realised that I had all of the ingredients in the house I knew what I had to do. Get off the sofa & make them of course!

I realised when I went to get the apple juice needed for these from the fridge that we actually only had apple & mango juice, no biggie, I like apple & mango juice & I couldn't see any reason why the substitution wouldn't work. By this point I already had my heart set on these pancakes so I knew I was going to forge ahead! I like how they make you feel fancy with their accompanying apple topping & as Isa says on the blog they were meant to go into Appetite For Reduction making these a healthy pancake! That meant no guilt about eating them at 10pm after a full day of polishing off all of the leftovers in the fridge, a whole lotta toast & half a bar of my favourite chocolate.

These are seriously some of the best pancakes I've ever made. Taste wise the combination of apples, cinnamon & maple syrup was always going to be a winner & they were just the right level of sweet. On top of the winning flavour these actually turned out round & perfect looking too! I used my new favourite gadget the Grill & Griddle to make these as the flat plates are perfect for pancakes but they're also the perfect size to make a half batch of this recipe. It keeps an even temperature all over too which is something I often have trouble with when cooking pancakes on my gas stove which can result in sad burnt bottomed, mushy centred pancakes.

Anyway, it's definitely time for me to head to bed now (perhaps I'll read a few more blogs on the way...) but you should definitely make these immediately, or y'know tomorrow for breakfast if you have a little more restraint than I do!

Local Food Market.

2011-10-08T13:41:00.001+01:00

I'm having a pretty relaxing Saturday today, it's 1.30, I'm still in my pyjamas & I'm munching on some rye sourdough toast topped with peanut butter & banana. Yum! I think most of the day will be spent grazing on leftovers, reading blogs, pulling the coming weeks cookbooks out of the hat & writing many lists. I love lists!

The Brighton & Hove Food Festival took place here during September & the event came to a close with a Sussex & The World Food Market. Nick & I decided to cycle down to Hove lawns to see if there'd be any vegan eats on offer & we were pretty optimistic because Brighton's a pretty vegan friendly city.

First we stumbled upon Moshi Moshi's stand. This local vegan friendly sushi restaurant had a vegan chicken curry on offer alongside a mixed vegan sushi box.

The box of maki rolls contained 2 avocado, 2 cucumber, 1 inari tofu, celery, red radish, lettuce & campio, 1 vegan cheese & sun blushed tomato and 1 tofu, mizuna, sun blushed tomato, red onion & cucumber. I loved this mixed box. I'm not really a celery fan so I wouldn't ever have picked that maki roll off of their menu but it was probably my favourite of the bunch & I'll definitely be ordering it next time I visit.

There was only one entirely vegan stand at the festival run by local company Titbits Catering. They had both sweet & savoury items & we picked up a few things to take to eat on the beach.

We had a Sausage Roll which was flavoured with rosemary.

It was really tasty but the real star of the show was the Apple & Blackberry Crumble Tart.

This was SO good & its also kind of a genius idea. I love crumble & this is a fantastic way to make it portable. This crumble was made from apples from the ladies of Titbits' gardens too which made it extra special. We also picked up a couple of chocolate chip cookies, who could resist them at 80p each?

These were great melt in your mouth cookies & I loved that they were filled with a good amount of chocolate chips.

I love Brighton in the summer & cycling around town & eating delicious food was definitely a great way to enjoy one of the last warm days of 2011.

I'll be back tomorrow for Football Food Sunday, see ya then!

New Food Friday - Paella.

2011-10-07T21:15:00.000+01:00

I've wanted to make a Paella for ages & I decided that MoFo would be a great time to try it. I actually have a few things on my list of 'intimidating foods' & I'll be spending Fridays during MoFo trying them. In the coming weeks I'll be making tamales, pierogis and bread although I am slightly unsure about the bread after my cook book challenge bread baking success, I think it'd feel a bit like cheating & I'd welcome some new ideas.

I decided to use mock king prawns and chicken drumsticks in my paella. Nick & I picked them up in Berlin in June & had been struggling to come up with a recipe to use them in, I thought paella would be perfect. I also used vegi bacon, red pepper & peas.

For some reason I could't just pick one recipe & go with it, oh no, that'd be far too simple! I ended up spending the morning researching and I took inspiration from two meat / fish based recipes online, one from Jamie Oliver and one from the BBC website written by Anthony Worrel Thompson. I also looked at Dynise Baclavage's recipe in The Urban Vegan Kitchen, this recipe on the blog What The Hell Does A Vegan Eat Anyway and Liz's review of the Millennium Cookbooks Paella on her blog Cooking The Vegan Books.

As you can see I used a large skillet to make this because I don't have a paella pan but you could also use a wok. Do try to find something with a lid that fits though otherwise you'll end up in a strange double balancing lid situation like I did!

The actual paella recipe is very much a work in progress so I'm not going to post it today. I'd like to make some changes so that I'm happy with it first & being the unexperienced recipe writer that I am I'm probably going to need to cook it again before that can happen. Is this usually how this works or are seasoned recipe writers just intuitive enough to sense what needs changing? I probably wouldn't use the mock shrimp or chicken again, I quite liked them (Nick was oddly less impressed given that he usually loves mock meat) but the prawns didn't taste as sea-like as I'd hoped they would meaning that I wished I'd added more nori. Next time I think I'll use canned artichoke hearts, Chorizo Seitan Sausages from Viva Vegan and perhaps some homemade chicken style seitan.

I also don't think I steeped the saffron in the vegetable stock for long enough meaning that the paella didn't quite have it's traditional colour, that is until I remembered I'd brought this back from Mallorca...

...this definitely perked up the colour of the seitan & as far as I can tell it does't have a detectable flavour. I was thinking of using the annato infused oil from Viva Vegan to add the colour next time although I'm sure it would be far from traditional!

Whilst the paella wasn't perfect I think that this was a pretty good first try & I'm definitely looking forward to eating the leftovers tomorrow.

Random MoFo Thursday!

2011-10-06T19:46:00.002+01:00

Thursdays were always going to be pretty random on the blog during MoFo, I wanted to leave some unplanned days so that I could choose what to eat based on what I fancied that day & so that I could get through some of the inevitable leftovers. Today I've been inspired by peoples What I Ate Wednesday blog posts, so today is What I Ate Thursday!

I started the day with a plate of fruit & a slice of the Co-Op's fruit loaf, toasted & spread with Marks & Spencer Low Fat Dairy Free Margarine.

I followed with a late morning snack of the last Apricot Glazed Almond Cupcake that I made for the cookbook challenge on Tuedsay.

Lunchtime involved more leftovers, this time the last of yesterday's Leek, Bean & Rice Medley from 500 Vegan Recipes.

It might've looked better yesterday but it still tasted fantastic today.

Next I had a delicious bowl of Tyrells Sweet & Salty Popcorn as a mid afternoon snack whilst I was reading MoFo blog posts.

Whilst I was waiting for Nick to finish work I got hungry & ate one of yesterdays Beer Rolls (again from 500 Vegan Recipes) with some Marks & Spencer Low Fat Dairy Free Margarine.

I also hadn't forgotten that I'd promised to make the last recipe of this weeks cookbook challenge today after the rainy day laziness hit hard yesterday, the generator had picked the Quinoa, Tofu & Kale with Walnut Pesto from Color Me Vegan so that's what was on the menu for dinner.

I started by making the Walnut Pesto.

I'd planned to halve the recipe but it was too little even for my mini chopper to deal with so I made the whole lot & now I have pesto in the freezer for next time I fancy it. I always freeze portion sized amounts of pesto in silicone muffin cases & then pop them out into ziplock bags.

The actual meal was really easy to throw together & faster than the recipe suggested, the tofu & kale were done by the time the quinoa was finished & I had time to reconstitute & chop the sun dried tomatoes & toast my pumpkin seeds whilst all of that was cooking. The only change I made was to cut down the oil a little bit & to salt the kale whilst it was cooking rather than adding salt to the whole dish at the end as the recipe suggested.

I was really quite surprised how much I liked this, I love quinoa & tofu but I don't usually like sun dried tomatoes & I'm not the hugest kale fan but it all came together to make a delicious dish. What was actually the most surprising thing though is that Nick (my vegan but fussier-than-me husband) came home & ate some of it! I swear if he'd seen me doing 'weird' stuff like cooking the kale & rehydrating the tomatoes there's no way he'd have touched it! I'll definitely be making this again & I love the cookbook challenge for alerting me to another great recipe that I'd have otherwise skipped & for making Nick eat kale!

I can't promise I'm done with eating for the day so I'll pop back & update this if I end up snacking on anything new...I might just eat the leftovers from dinner though because they were really yummy!

Cookbook Challenge Day III

2011-10-05T18:30:00.000+01:00

After all of yesterdays sweet treats I was happy that the generator threw some savoury stuff at me today. First out of the hat was 500 Vegan Recipes & the page, 354, Beer Rolls. I've made some really delicious things from 500 Vegan Recipes before, the Seitan en Croute and the Caramelised Onion Tart with a Sweet Potato & Sage Crust really stick in my mind, so I had high hopes for the rolls.

I've never really made bread before today, I've made bagels & pizza dough but never actual bread, so I knew this would be a challenge. First off I had to seek some help from my American BFF to find out what the UK equivalent to sucant was (it's rapadura whole cane sugar btw) & then I had to work out what kind of beer to use. I went for Budweiser after checking my VeganXpress App in the supermarket because it was the only vegan American beer I could see! Whilst reading through the recipe I was a little surprised by how long baking bread was going to take but also by how simple it was, sure it takes a while but during all of the waiting I went to the gym, hung up the laundry, cleaned the kitchen & watched some Jersey Shore so it's the kind of cooking I can get down with!

To start I mixed together the dry ingredients, and then the wet - the wet ingredients included beer, hence the name, but also water that had to be 38 Celcius. That was quite a challenge as I kept getting distracted & letting the water drop in temperature. Next up was trying to find somewhere warm for the bread to rise, our house is currently a little chilly because our radiators aren't working but I solved the problem by taking the dough into the bathroom with me whilst I showered & leaving it there to let the steam do it's thing once I was done!

I was so excited that these turned out so well, look, they're like real bread!!

These rolls are really delicious, I'm eating my third right now & I made the first into a sausage sandwich...

...which was of course delicious!

The only bad thing about these rolls coming up is that bread was part of my 'New Foods Friday Challenge' for MoFo & now it'll feel like cheating so I need to come up with something else to go alongside the Paella, Pierogis & Tamales I'll be making. Any ideas?

Surprisingly the second name out of the hat was 500 Vegan Recipes. I guess I shook the hat too well... or not well enough! The generator picked me page 164 the Leek, Bean & Rice Medley. I like rice, beans & leeks so it definitely looked promising.

The recipe was really easy to follow and whilst it needed two pans you were't really using them at the same time so it's definitely an easy weeknight dish. The rice, both wild & brown, takes a while to cook so as long as you throw it in the pan when you get home you can still have dinner on the table in around an hour. I'm so glad this recipe popped up, it's full of gorgeous flavours & I'd never have thought to put pecans in a hot rice dish myself.

The more I cook from 500 Vegan Recipes the more I love it & I'm hoping it comes out of the hat again before the end of the month.

Now I was meant to make a third recipe today, the Quinoa, Tofu & Kale with Walnut Pesto from Color Me Vegan. I'm not particularly hungry after all of that bread and rice and beans though so I'm going to save it for tomorrow & spend the rest of the evening reading MoFo blogs rather than cooking.

Cookbook Challenge Day II

2011-10-04T18:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was the start of the cookbook challenge & I continued today with another three recipes. First out of the hat was Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Amazing. I was very pleased with this start to the day! The random number generator picked me page 107 the Coconut Lime Cupcakes but as I'd already made these (I've made quite a lot of recipes from VCTOW!) I had to pick again. This time the generator directed me to page 89 where I saw the recipe for Apricot-Glazed Almond Cupcakes.

This actually might not have been a recipe I'd have made if it hadn't have popped up in the challenge, I haven't had the best results baking with soy yoghurt in the past & I'm very much a chocolate girl when it comes to baking cupcakes for myself.

I'm so glad the recipe generator picked these cupcakes though. They're unbelievably good & I think I've actually been convinced that there is a cupcake better than a chocolate cupcake! These remind me of an apricot version of a cherry bakewell, one of my favourite pregan desserts that I still haven't gotten around to veganising...partly because a cafe just around the corner from my house sells a vegan version! I picked toasted almonds for the topping just because I thought they'd be more fun than regular almond slices & I really enjoyed decorating a cupcake with something other than buttercream for a change.

The second cookbook of the day was Kelly Peloza's The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur. This was shaping up to be a very good day indeed! The recipe the generator chose was the Vanilla Thumbprints & it looked like a great easy recipe. I also liked that the baking with jam theme was continuing.

This is one of my newest cookbooks & whilst I've spent a lot of time flicking through it & bookmarking recipes this is actually the first recipe I've baked from it. You can use any jam you like in the cookies & I picked raspberry. These cookies are so fucking delicious that I actually had to stop Nick eating them straight from the baking tray because I was running out of cookies to photograph! They're also super simple to make & don't use any complicated ingredients. The only thing I did differently to the recipe was that I pressed them down a tiny bit before baking the second tray because my first batch were a little rounder than the picture in the book.

I was amused when the third recipe of the day came up as the Prosecco Spritzer from The Urban Vegan. Apparently the universe doesn't want me to eat any real food today! Whilst I do drink alcohol I certainly do not drink expensive prosecco on my own on a Tuesday afternoon so I decided to make this drink with soda water & cranberry juice rather than the suggested prosecco.

Nick has the day off work today & he doesn't ever drink alcohol so the non-alcoholic option was a good way for him to join in with the fun too. I definitely like this drink, in fact I am about to pour myself a second, and I will happily make the alcoholic version one day.

Today has definitely been a fun day but I do currently have a bit of a sugar buzz after eating two cupcakes, 8 cookies & a glass of cranberry & soda water. I think I might need to go & find myself something sensible to eat! See you all again tomorrow!

Cookbook Challenge Time!

2011-10-03T21:52:00.000+01:00

It's Cookbook Challenge time! I'll be doing the challenge every Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday this month & I've been really excited about this part of MoFo. I ended up really enjoying it last year despite being nervous about posting my home cooking on the blog! I'd say I'm a better cook that I was last year, I don't rely on store bought meat & cheese substitutes anywhere near as much as I used to but I do still neglect some of my cookbooks; for example I've cooked around half of the recipes from Appetite For Reduction this year but their are other cookbooks sitting on the shelf untouched. Ridiculous.

For people who didn't read the blog during last years MoFo the Cookbook Challenge is where I pick the names of my cookbooks out of a hat (I even have a real hat this year!) & use a random number generator to select which recipes I'll be cooking. I also won't be cooking any recipes I've made before & I'll be choosing the weeks recipes at the start of the week so that I don't have to food shop every day. That'll also mean that the challenge isn't too planned out which is part of the fun.

The first cookbook out of the hat today was Color Me Vegan.

This is one of my newest cookbooks & it's the second one I have that's written by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I have actually managed to cook a few things from it & my favourite recipe so far has been the Swiss Chard Pie which I've made three times subbing spinach for swiss chard each time.

Today the recipe generator picked me page 130 Kiwi Banana Muffins. This definitely isn't a recipe I'd have picked myself. I'm not the biggest kiwi eater, I do like them but they're not something I often buy... I don't really know why!

I got my ingredients together.

I was surprised that all of the liquid in the recipe came from fruit, I usually bake with oil so using margarine was a bit of a change. The recipe came together quickly but I'm glad that the recipe included the amount of kiwi purée the fruits should yield rather than just the number of kiwis because the number of suggested kiwis actually made twice the amount of purée the recipe needed which would have resulted in incredibly soggy muffins.

I thought that the muffins came out a little strangely. They hardly rose & were quite heavy. These weren't dense as I suspected they might be when I pulled them out of the oven, they were actually quite moist but also a little gummy. I don't think I over mixed them but then again you never know. That said I doubt I'll be making them again because peeling & mushing the kiwis seems like a lot of effort for a just-okay muffin!

Next out of the hat was Please Don't Feed The Bears.

Now I have to be honest here, I cooked one recipe from this cookbook last year during the Cookbook Challenge, it didn't turn out brilliantly & I haven't actually used it since. The recipe the generator picked me was the Frankenbeans. This certainly looked very promising, I like all of the ingredients & the directions were just to throw them all into a pan together & heat them up.

I chose a smokey tofu hot dog for this recipe because it seemed that it would go well with the other flavours in the dish. I'd also never tried them before which fitted in with the challenge. The dish also included light molasses which I haven't ever been able to find so I used part molasses sugar & part maple syrup. These were really, really good.

Really good! Especially given how ridiculously simple the recipe is. This dish was great on it's own but I imagine it'd make a great beans & rice bowl with brown rice & smokey greens. You could even make this a much cheaper dish by making steamed smoky seitan sausages rather than buying expensive hot dogs. I'll definitely be making these again, in fact thinking about it they'd probably make perfect drunk food!

The third & final cookbook of the day was Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson. I've actually had this cookbook for about two years & I don't think I've ever used it. It was included in last years Cookbook Challenge but it never came up & I've always found it a little intimidating, probably because it's quite big & has no photos at all.

The recipe that came up was the Tuscan White Bean & Fennel Stew with Orange & Rosemary. This sounded promising, my only worry was that whilst I'd never actually cooked with fennel I'd decided after smelling it that I probably wouldn't like it. I do love stews though especially now that the weather has turned all Autumnal & tying new things is the point of the cookbook challenge so I soldiered on.

It was another easy to throw together recipe, not as easy as the Frankenbeans but I don't think anything ever will be!

I was pleased to realise that cooked fennel tastes much milder than raw fennel smells. I don't even think I could taste it in the finished stew. I loved the taste of fresh rosemary, I don't actually think I've ever cooked with it before but I'll probably make more of an effort to get fresh herbs when recipes call for them now.

What's your favourite recipe from Vegan Planet? I'd love some ideas of what to make from it once the challenge is over. Today's been super fun & I'll be back with more cookbook challenge fun tomorrow!

Football Food Sunday. Take 1!

2011-10-02T20:47:00.000+01:00

Every Sunday this month I'll be posting about Football Foods. Because I'm British you might assume that I'm talking soccer but nope, my husband Nick is pretty obsessed with American football! The games start here at 6pm which is the perfect time to dig into a huge plate of food or two.

I'm going to be cooking what I consider to be classic North American dishes every Sunday. Unlike the Cookbook Challenge I'll be choosing these dishes myself. Tonight I decided to make these Barbecued Seitan Ribz from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen and the Mac Daddy from Veganomicon.

Nick & I are both big mac & cheese fans but we've never eaten ribs in our lives. It's not really a thing here but I searched around a bit & settled upon the recipe from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen because it sounded easy to throw together and the pictures on the site looked great.

This recipe was definitely easy to make, the only challenge was getting the seitan to spread out & lie flat in the pan so that you could cut it into equally sized pieces. I was also momentarily panicked when I was reading the recipe through a few hours ago & it said to 'prepare your grill'. We don't really have grills over here but then I remembered one of my most recent kitchen appliance purchases, a Grill & Griddle!

I love this thing! So far I've used it to make panini's, toasted sandwiches, pancakes and now ribs. Nick also wants me to mention that he once used it to make a pocket pita panini pizza!

The actual seitan was crazy delicious. Moist inside and crispy on the outside thanks to the grilling. Nick & I are both fans of steamed or baked seitans & this recipe certainly didn't disappoint.

We chose the Mac Daddy recipe from Veganomicon to go with it because it seems that people in the US eat ribs with mac & cheese! The Mac Daddy was the first vegan mac & cheese I ever made & I love it. It's slightly healthier than some other popular mac 'n' cheeses (the New Farm recipe for example) and I love that it includes tofu. The Cheesy Sauce recipe is part of the Mac Daddy recipe & we often just make the Cheesy Sauce to throw over pasta. Sunday Night Football's a special occasion this month though so I made the whole thing.

This was a great dinner & I'll definitely be making it again. We went a bit easy on the BBQ Sauce because we were using store-bought & were unsure of how much we'd like it but I'd happily slather on some more next time.

I thought I'd also give you guys a sneak peek at my kitchen set up! I've mentioned on the blog before that my pictures can be less than perfect because I do most of my cooking in the evenings & my house is really dark but tonight I started working on a solution. Last weekend I actually made a pre-mofo practice Sunday night football dinner & the pictures were so terrible that I had to do something!

That's my kitchen with the main lights on. That's how dark it usually is! I've added the extra light which'll have to live somewhere else when I'm not taking pictures as it's clearly in the way. I'm no photographer but I think this has made my night time pictures a little better.

I'm going to show you what we ate last week anyway though because it was delicious...

We made Vegan Dad's Boneless Chicken Hot Wings and his Sweet & Sticky Sauce with a side of polenta fries.

As you can see the picture really didn't do this delicious food justice. I was also a little freaked out about making three new recipes for one meal so I'm glad that this was pre-mofo rather than today when it would have made me a little more panicky! Everything actually came together relatively easily. The first hurdle was that the seitan wings included chicken broth powder which isn't something you can buy here upping the new recipe total to four as I needed start by making Bryannas Chicken Broth Powder. This looked so easy that I actually outsourced the task to Nick who's not usually the chef in this house. We left out the soy protein powder, I would imagine that you can buy this in the UK but we didn't have any so out it went & it was fantastic anyway. I'll definitely be making this again rather than buying expensive chicken broth cubes from Vegan Essentials so don't be put off making this wing recipe because of the extra step.

The seitan came together really easily, the only real challenge was forming it into the 'wings' around the stick. We only used 1 cup of water (the lower amount in the recipe) & it was quite a wet dough so if (when! Seriously, go!) you make this add the water slowly. Also bear in mind that I'm no artist so I would suggest a trip to Vegan Dad's blog if you would like to see what the wings are meant to look like. This is some of the tastiest seitan I've ever eaten.

This thick sweet sauce was equally easy to make & I added a tonne more to my plate after taking that picture. I was worried that the sauce might be too sweet for me given that it contained ketchup, maple syrup AND brown sugar so we decided to serve it as a dip rather than pouring it over the wings & baking it that way but I'd certainly give that a try next time. Nick was incredibly excited about this sauce because the last step is to drain the onion, he hates onion & we often argue about whether it is or isn't necessary in recipes!

I'm actually unsure where I found the Perfect Polenta Fries recipe. It's something that I've had saved in my bookmarks for years but for some reason I've always had some kind of polenta phobia. I don't really know why but it meant that I'd never tried it until last weekend. This recipe was probably the most challenging of all because the directions in the recipe seemed a little off. It said to coat the polenta in cornmeal which I would take to mean it should be really well covered but after trying them (& having had to use a lot of extra cornmeal!) I would think that the recipe should have said that these needed to be sprinkled with cornmeal or perhaps thrown into a bowl & tossed with the oil & then the cornmeal. Whilst the recipe wasn't perfect (we had to scrape a lot of corn meal off off the cooked fries!) I am now a polenta convert though & will be making some polenta fries in the near future.

I think it's time for Nick & I to break open some Cleo's to stick with our American theme & I'm going to go & read all of the MoFo blogs that I have open in multiple tabs & windows! I hope you guys enjoyed Football Food Sunday I'll be back with more of the same next weekend!

Getting my MoFo on with an all you can eat vegan sushi party!

2011-10-01T12:10:00.002+01:00

Iiiit's Vegan MoFo time!! I'm really excited that it's finally here, I've been thinking about all of the things I want to write about for a while now & waiting until October first to put pen to paper has been quite a challenge!

I posted my MoFo Plan yesterday, Saturdays are going to be pretty random, a mish mash of restaurant reviews, my favourite products or whatever else I'm feeling like writing about that day. I've decided to start off this posi vegan blogging event with a write up of local sushi restaurant Moshi Moshi's excellent vegan challenge night.

This Redwood Foods sponsered event which was part of the Brighton & Hove Food & Drink Festival was held on Thursday & the whole restaurant turned vegan for the night. As soon as Nick (that's my husband for new readers! Hi!) & I heard about the event we knew we'd have to drop £25 each on the ticket, we're both big fans of Moshi Moshi anyway & the chance to try some new kinds of sushi & to get to take part in such a positive local event sounded way too good to pass up. Six chefs from local restaurants, both vegan & non vegan, including Aloka, Titbits Catering & Hotel du Vin each created a vegan sushi dish which we gave scores to.

On arrival everyone was given a free jug of hot sake and a Moshi Moshi tote bag containing a Moshi Moshi t-shirt, a Redwood Foods catalogue & a packet of their mock duck. We also each got a score card.

We were seated right by the sushi preparation area which was fantastic as we got to watch some of the chefs create their dishes.

What we didn't realised when we booked was that not only were we going to be eating all of the sushi's created for the competition but that Moshi Moshi would also have all of their vegan menu items going around the conveyor belt AND that we could eat as much as we wanted!!

It was essentially an all you can eat vegan sushi party which made us both very happy & definitely made the ticket price more than worth it. We munched on Crispy Vegetable Dumplings, Avocado Hosomaki, Inari Tofu, Salted Edamame, Vegan Cheese & Sun Blushed Tomato Maki and Inari Tofu, Celery, Red Radish, Lettuce & Campio Maki alongside the fantastic dishes created for the competition.

First out of the kitchen was an uramaki, or inside out roll, created by Moshi Moshi themselves.

This contained mock chicken & ginger & was surrounded by a plum sauce & black sesame seeds. We both really enjoyed this roll & gave it a 6/8 on our score card. I was surprised that I didn't find the ginger overpowering & I think that had to do with the pairing of it with the sweet plum sauce.

Second out of the kitchen was a creation by Aloka, a local cafe & raw food restaurant that I've written about on the blog before.

Now whilst I do love Aloka's cafe, they have a great buffet, some delicious raw desserts & they make my favourite mint chocolate chip ice cream they can be a little hit or miss. Sadly this was a miss. Myself, Nick & the diners surrounding us all agreed that whilst this was an incredibly beautiful & well presented dish it just didn't taste good. The sesame covered ball just tasted like Redwood Foods pâté! This would have been fine next to a plate of crackers but it certainly wasn't something you should put in your mouth whole. The thing next to it was also beyond strange, of course I put it in my mouth in one go & was pretty repulsed by both the taste & texture. I did enjoy the little fried thing that came perched on top of the pâté ball though so all was not lost & we gave this dish a 2/8.

Thankfully what came next was so amazing that it made us forget about the preceding dish. This vegan duck & avocado uramaki was fanfuckingtastic!

Alongside the mock duck inside this uramaki were red onions, sun blushed tomatoes & celery, it was topped with perfectly ripe avocado and came with two sauces; one plum & one strawberry, both of which were fantastic & complimented the sushi roll. I'm not going to lie there was almost some plate licking here & I actually ended up eating three of them & requesting that it be added to the menu on a permanent basis! At this stage of the competition this was the clear winner in my book & we gave it 7/8.

Next up was a dish very obviously created by local Indian restaurant Chilli Pickle.

I don't think this picture can possibly convey how spicy this dish was. It was delivered to us with a warning & after taking a small bite my eyes started to water & my mouth was on fire. This was definitely too spicy for me! Nick bravely soldiered ahead identifying the flavours. Alongside the chilli were coriander, cardamon & mango to name a few. This roll was filled with some mock duck that tasted the least like mock meat of any mock meat dish we'd ever tasted. We gave this sushi a 4/8 because whilst we aren't spicy food fans we thought it was great that they'd really put their own slant on the sushi dish.

The fifth dish of the evening from Hotel du Vin was something different.

This dark miso broth was filled with crispy duck, glass noodles, spring onions, kale, ginger & onion. We both enjoyed this dish, I especially enjoyed the fried noodles on top of the dish & the fact that they had used kale. We had a bit of a disagreement over how to score this one. I wanted to give it 5/8 and Nick 7/8 so we settled on 6/8!

The sixth dish to fly out of the kitchen was this pretty plate made by local catering company Titbits Catering.

There were two main elements to the dish, a wasabi beetroot topped, miso soaked & seed covered slab of vegan cheese and an avocado, cucumber & hijiki salad topped with nori coated almonds. I quite enjoyed the salad especially the hijiki flavour & the almonds were definitely my favourite part of the whole dish. In fact I wrote on my score card the they should be added to the menu as a nibble! Unfortunately I felt that the slab of White Cheddar Cheezly was a little misplaced. Not many people actually enjoy eating vegan cheese straight up like this, especially non-vegans & we thought that tofu or even a softer vegan cheese could have worked better in the dish. We gave this a 4/8. I would like to add that I've eaten Titbits Catering's food before at their Gourmet Girls pop up restaurant & I thought that the food was fantastic. I also just found out that they only had 24 hours to prepare for the competition after Terre a Terre had to pull out.

The last savoury dish of the evening was a beautifully presented crispy duck, mushroom & cheese dumpling served with butternut miso sauce, spicy chilli & ginger jelly and a cheese & wasabi foam topped with cheesy kale chips. This was by far the fanciest of all of the dishes & unfortunately I was so excited by it that I started to tuck in before snapping a picture. Blogging fail. I apologise in advance for doing this & I'll admit that I hate people posting half eaten pictures of food on their blogs but in my defence I'd only take a small bite...

Every element of this dish created by Cashew Catering worked beautifully together, I can't pick a favourite bit because it was all spot on. I love kale chips & the cheese & wasabi foam was an inspired idea. These guys definitely know how to create delicious & stunning looking food & we gave this dish full marks.

Last but not least we were served dessert. VBites contribution to the competition was a matcha sponge cake with a layer of chocolate topped with a light cream & dusted with matcha powder.

This was such a great end to the evenings meal. The cake was beautiful to look at & I enjoyed the matcha sponge part of the cake. I'm not the biggest fan of cream toppings but Nick was definitely a fan. We scored this a 6/8.

The whole event really was fantastic and Nick and I will definitely be attending next year. My favourite dishes were definitely the deep fried duck, mushroom & vegan cheese dumpling & the vegan duck & avocado maki. We waited to see which dishes were awarded places in the top three & the results were as follows...

In third we have Moshi Moshi with their vegan duck & avocado uramaki. In second Hotel du Vin with their crispy duck broth with glass noodles and taking the top spot was Chilli Pickle with their spicy sushi. I have to say that I was surprised that Cashew Catering's entry didn't place in the top three but I loved that the dish from Chilli Pickle came first because even though it wasn't to our taste they really put their own spin on it.

The only negative comment I have regarding the whole event would be that every dish contained a mock meat or cheese product. Don't get me wrong I like these things a lot but I don't think that they're necessary in vegan Japanese cuisine (as Moshi Moshi's regular menu proves) & I would not like that to be the impression that non-vegans left the event with. I would have loved to see some of the chefs using tofu or tempeh & I'd be interested to know if Redwood Foods sponsorship of the event was reliant on every chef using one of their products?!

That said I love that Moshi Moshi put on this event and that they're so vegan friendly. It makes me really happy to see a non-vegetarian restaurant showing a real commitment to being more ethical & environmentally aware.

Alllllmost Vegan MoFo time!

2011-09-30T18:53:00.000+01:00

It's almost MoFo time! Yay! Vegan Month of Food starts tomorrow and people from all over the world will be cooking, eating & blogging about vegan food as much as they can all month. The challenge is to aim to blog at least 5 days a week but last year I blogged every day & will be aiming to do that again this year.

Last year was my first Vegan MoFo and I really enjoyed participating in such a positive event. Last time I was away in Edinburgh for the first week of the month & in Paris for Paris Vegan Day at the end of the month; I have no trips planned this time around so it should be a little easier because I won't be attempting to write any of my blog posts on my phone!

Last year my most popular posts were during Cookbook Challenge week where I picked the name of a cookbook out of a metaphorical hat & used a random number generator to pick the recipes I'd be cooking that day. I discovered some great recipes this way so I'll be doing the same challenge this month on Mondays, Tuesdays & Wednesdays. This year I even have an actual hat! Here are some of last years highlights...

Learning to make stock from scratch. I'd never attempted this before last years MoFo & now it's something I do regularly.

Sparkled Ginger Cookies from Vegan With A Vengeance. I LOVE these cookies & they make fantastic Christmas gifts.

Apple Crumble from The Joy of Vegan Baking. This has become my go to crumble recipe! I would have passed this recipe by if it hadn't have been for the challenge.

When cookie recipes go wrong you can ask the PPK for help & them turn them into cake.

I really really enjoyed doing the cookbook challenge last year, I have far too many underused cookbooks & this is a really fun way to try some new recipes.

Here's my MoFo plan for this year...

Saturday - Random! Eating out, favourite products...whatever I'm feeling like that day!

Sunday - Football Foods. Cooking up some traditional North American cuisine & watching 'the game'!

Monday - Cookbook Challenge

Tuesday - Cookbook Challenge

Wednesday - Cookbook Challenge

Thursday - Random! Eating out, favourite products...whatever I'm feeling like that day!

Friday - New Foods. Foods I've been wanting to make for a while but that I've been too intimidated to try! Including Paella, Tamales, Bread & Pierogi.

Will you be taking part in the Vegan Month of Food this time around? What do you think of my plan? See you tomorrow!

Eating out in Mallorca.

2011-09-29T17:29:00.000+01:00

Before travelling to Mallorca I did some googling & searched Happy Cow to see which places near where we were staying might have vegan options. We were staying near Port de Pollenca & I discovered that there is a vegetarian cafe there called Bellavista.

Bellavista is situated on a little side street just off the main promenade & is actually part of a bed & breakfast. It's described as vegan friendly on Happy Cow so we were pretty optimistic. We were also excited to find that they have sections of their menu written not only in Spanish but also French, German & English. The vegan items weren't marked on the menu & it was quite cheese centric but it was quite easy to spot the vegan options. We sat in the beautiful garden...

...and whilst we were deciding what to order they brought us some bread, oil & olives.

The oil was filled with an olive tapenade & was covered in toasted sesame seeds. It was so delicious, I could've just eaten that for lunch & been happy!

We decided to order a couple of things to share & went for the the Hummus & Bread & a selection of tapas.

The Hummus & Bread usually comes with cheese but they gave us double the amount of hummus instead. One hummus was traditional & the other olive. They were both delicious but I think we both preferred the traditional flavour.

There was so much tapas that I was really glad we were sharing. These three dishes are seitan ham, tofu with blueberry compote and pepper, tomato and onion salad.

Then there was a dish of marinated mushrooms with a crushed tomato sauce & one of figs with caramelised onions...

...and tomato & nori salad.

Everything here was excellent & we were pretty stuffed by the end of our meal. I really really loved the tomato nori salad, it's definitely something I'll be throwing together at home because it's so simple but really lifts the flavour of the tomatoes. My favourite things were definitely the figs & caramelised onions closely followed by the tofu with blueberry compote. The figs & caramelised onions were really sweet & I'd love to know how to recreate the dish at home.

We decided to take a walk around the small town after lunch to see if we could find somewhere for dinner one night that would keep the entire family happy. We stumbled upon a restaurant called Los Zarzales that had a Vegetable Paella on the menu. I recalled my best GCSE Spanish & was ready to ask someone about the stock used in this dish when a waiter came over & started to speak to us in English. We continued the conversation in English as his was far better than my Spanish. He assured us that the dish didn't contain any animal products & he even told us that one of the owners of the restaurant was vegetarian. We booked a table then & there & went to eat there the next night.

This perfectly coked paella was filled with delicious vegetables and chunks of seitan. It was fantastic & I was really surprised that we'd found such a great vegan dish in an omnivorous restaurant especially when Spain isn't exactly renowned for being vegan friendly. My guide book pretty much said not to even bother trying to eat out which is just ridiculous!

I'll be back tomorrow with my Vegan MoFo plan & then again on Saturday with the first of my MoFo posts! I can't wait!

Mallorca.

2011-09-28T12:26:00.000+01:00

Nick & I recently went to Mallorca for a week with his family. We stayed in a villa near Port de Pollenca & it was one of the most relaxing weeks I've ever had. Normally I plan my travels around delicious vegan food meaning that I spend a lot of time in cities, which I love, but it was great to spend a week lazing by the pool & going to the beach.

The first thing Nick & I did after picking up our hire car was to head to the large Carrefour supermarket right by the airport to stock up on food for the week. We knew that there was a small supermarket nearer to where we were staying but we suspected that it was unlikely to have some of the things we wanted.

Caffefour had loads of fantastic seitan & tofu products. Nick loved both of these seitans & spent the week frying them up to eat on baguettes.

These Filetes de Tofu came in their own sauce & took minutes to cook. We had them for dinner one night with the Savoury Orange Rice from Viva Vegan.

I was incredibly excited when we spotted these Seitan Albóndigas. Albóndigas are a Spanish meatball that I remembered enjoying back in my pre-vegan days.

We snapped up two packets & one night we used them in a simple tomato pasta dish which we served with a side of homemade garlic bread.

Before we left I looked online to see what brand of dairy free margarine I should be looking out for at the supermarket. I saw Artura Corn margarine on a few vegan blogs & we were happy to find it in Carrefour. I ate it at breakfast time almost every day with jam, fruit & freshly baked baguettes that were delivered to the villa every morning.

The best surprise on this trip was the avocado tree that we discovered in the garden of the villa. I used the fruit from the tree to make some delicious salads like this one with salad leaves, tomato, cucumber, apple & avocado with a side of roasted aubergine.

After a couple of days we realised that we'd forgotten to pick up any chocolate on our Carrefour trip so we headed to the local Eroski supermarket where we picked up this great selection.

My favourite chocolate was definitely the Eroski brand almond chocolate whereas Nick much preferred the plain Lindt 52% chocolate. Neither of us really enjoyed the Eroski basic plain chocolate & a scary warning on the back of the Valor almond chocolate put me off eating it. The Valor chocolate was actually a sugar free diabetic chocolate that warned you not to eat too much of it in one go because it would cause diarrhoea! I am not a person who can only eat one or two squares on chocolate at a time so whilst this tasted nice I decided to pass on finishing the whole bar!

We also grabbed a couple of bags of peanut crisps at the store. You can find these kinds of crisps made by different companies all over Europe & I've never seen a non-vegan version. Be warned though that you will probably polish off the whole bag in one go.

We also stocked up on Corona because I'd managed to drink all of the beers we'd bought on the first shopping trip! If you are planning to visit Mallorca I'd recommend a trip to Carrefour to stock up on essentials, whilst the Eroski supermarket (apparently the second largest shop on the island) had great snacks there was no dairy free margarine, tofu or seitan.

On our last night I decided to make Nick & I some tapas, I'd have made it for everyone but nobody seemed to want to try the "scary vegan food"!

I made Garlic Mushrooms, Albondigas in tomato sauce...

...Mojo Oven Roasted Seitan from Viva Vegan & a tomato tofu salad.

We ate all of this with copious amounts of bread which was especially great to soak up all of the garlic oil from the mushrooms.

We also went to a couple of restaurants whilst we were in Mallorca & I'll be back with those reviews very soon!

Terre a Terre & WaiKikaMooKau.

2011-09-24T13:30:00.000+01:00

I know I said I'd be blogging about Mallorca next but as I mentioned in my last blog post it was mine & Nick's 7 year anniversary this week & we ate so much delicious food that I couldn't hold off on blogging about it any longer. We often use our anniversary as an excuse to travel to another city but this year we decided to spend the day hanging out in Brighton.

We started the day off with breakfast at WaikikaMooKau. I'd heard they'd added a new vegan dish to the menu so we had to try it out; Pancakes with Cinnamon Baked Apples, Bananas & Golden Syrup.

I'm ridiculously excited that you can fiiiiinally get vegan pancakes in Brighton! I really enjoyed this breakfast, the baked apples were especially delicious, but I wasn't a fan of the random mint that was sprinkled all over it. It seemed like an odd choice. Aside from that though I thought everything else went together really well. Also whilst I am a huge fan of golden syrup I'd be interested to know why they chose that to accompany the dish rather than the traditional maple syrup that comes with the non-vegan pancakes. I'll have to ask them next time!

After breakfast we went for a walk & spent some time on the Pier.

We payed A LOT of Skeeball & shot some hoops! The pier's awesome because you get to play the games which is fun but then you also get tickets to claim prizes which makes it doubly awesome!

After the fun of the pier we went for lunch at one of our favourite places, Terre a Terre. We decided to share a starter so that we could be sure to fit in dessert & we went for the classy option of a bowl of chips with a side of Smokey Mayonnaise.

These aren't just any old chips though, oh no, these are Hand Cut Truffle Chips. They come with a fantastic Caesar dressing but their Smokey Mayonnaise is so delicious that we had to get that as well.

I decided to branch out (from my usual Rosti) to try out one of Terre a Terre's new dishes for my main course, the Mai Fun Salad.

This chilled noodle & raw vegetable salad comes with toasted cured tofu, pomegranate beads & wasabi cashews. I'm a huge fan of raw noodles & I love that they were mixed in with the black rice noodles. The white miso & mirin dressing surrounding the dish was also excellent. I'd definitely order this again, I actually loved not being uncomfortably stuffed after my starter & main for a change meaning that I had plenty of room for dessert.

And boy I was glad I'd left room for dessert! This was seriously the most beautifully presented dish anyone's ever put in front of me.

This dessert, described on the menu as a Jammy Dodger, Jelly and Ice Cream, was so much more beautiful than I was expecting. The almond milk vanilla custard was so delicious, it was more of a perfect light foam than what I think of when I imagine custard. The jelly was bursting at the seams with fresh raspberries & was thicker & smoother than any jelly I'd ever tried before. The Jammy Dodger, a gluten free biscuit, was, of course, homemade, and the strawberry ice cream was much more like a sorbet than an ice cream which I was very pleased about as I'm not really a fan of ice creams that are not either nut or chocolate based. Another delight on the plate was a fantastic basil syrup, it complemented every element of the dish perfectly & was fantastically sweet. I really hope that this is still on the menu next time I visit because I can't stop thinking about it!

Just hanging out in Brighton.

2011-09-20T17:06:00.018+01:00

Today Nick & I had very boring plans to go shopping so he could buy a pair of jeans & a coat. I don't even like shopping for clothes for myself so I wasn't thrilled with this plan but we actually had a super fun day. After trying on every coat in Brighton we stopped for lunch at Aloka.

I was feeling pretty lightheaded after too small a breakfast & too much shopping so I dived headfirst into all of the carbs on offer at the buffet. I really enjoyed the potato salad, it had potatoes, peas and carrots & came coated in creamy Toffuti mayonnaise which had been seasoned with the usual salt & pepper but also nutmeg, yum. I also chose the beetroot & local apple salad, chickpea & sun dried tomato salad, and some brown rice pasta with roasted aubergines & leeks to accompany my lasagne. The lasagne was also made with brown rice pasta & came filled with pumpkin, lentils, red peppers, mushroom, leeks & onion. I think the chickpea dish & the apple & beetroot salad were my favourite parts of the meal which was a surprise as I'm not usually a fan of beetroot.

After lunch Nick "sneaked" off to a shop to buy "something secret", it's our 7 year anniversary tomorrow so I'm guessing he was picking up a card! I decided to use this time to do something useful so I popped around the corner to Italian ice cream store Boho Gelato to see if the rumours of vegan options were true.

As you can probably guess the rumours were indeed true! When I got there there was nobody in the store, there's a sign indicating that you should ring the bell because they're downstairs making the ice creams. I love that it's all made right there on the premises.

Boho Gelato always have a selection of vegan sorbets alongside their dairy ice creams & today there were four flavours to choose from.

Today's flavours were Pineapple, Pink Lemonade, Chocolate & Blood Orange, and Berry. Anyone who knows me or reads this blog regularly will know which flavour I chose...

...Chocolate & Blood Orange of course! This was a great sorbet, first you taste the rich chocolate and then you're hit with the aftertaste of sweet blood orange. I will definitely be paying Boho Gelato frequent visits especially as I've heard that they do a vegan Mojito sorbet! I was also really pleased that whilst the awesome girl working today was unsure whether the cones were vegan she happily got out the box so that we could check the ingredients. I really appreciate that kind of customer service as questions about vegan options are often met with a shrug & no further attempt to answer. Boho Gelato is located by the Pool Valley coach station & right around the corner from local veggie eateries Aloka & Terre a Terre. They have some seating inside so you should definitely pay them a visit even though summer's disappearing fast.

When we arrived home the day got even better because the post had arrived & there were packages. Nick laughs at me because I consider Ebay to be the best shopping experience ever. You get to buy things without having to get dressed which is really awesome. You often get to win things, I love winning! And then you get post & I really REALLY love getting post. Alongside a couple of Ebayed CD's (Sleater Kinney's The Hot Rock and Elastica's self titles album) there was this...

The Crazy Rumours Cola lip balm I had ordered from Super Smoocher. Obviously I was excited about the lip balm but it came wrapped in pink tissue paper & when I opened it pink glitter hearts fell out! Best. Thing. Ever! So if you're in the UK & you need vegan lip balm please order from Super Smoocher, they're lovely. I'd definitely recommend the Crazy Rumours cola too, they've got the flavour spot on & I've been reapplying it every 20 minutes because it smells so good!

I'll be back soon with a write up of the delicious food I found in Mallorca on a recent holiday & then it'll be Vegan MoFo time! Yay! I'm working on my MoFo plan at the moment & I'm getting really excited about all of the awesome things I'm going to be cooking, photographing & writing about.

London - Camden

2011-09-16T19:31:00.002+01:00

I've been visiting Camden a few times a year for about 10 years, I used to go up there to to go to clubs but these days I'm all about the food! Well that & a trip to All Ages Records! Inspiral Lounge is always top of my list for Camden eats, this all vegan joint does a mean lasagne & they make my favourite mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Last time I was in London Nick & I headed there for breakfast. I'm never one to say no to a Full English Breakfast & this one was no disappointment.

It's not often you get an English breakfast in the UK that comes with tofu scramble, in fact this was the first non-homemade tofu scramble I'd ever eaten. The sausages that came with the breakfast were very similar to their meaty counterparts, they had a skin on them just like a meaty sausage but of course they were filled with more delicious things! The mushrooms & hash brown were very enjoyable & the tomatoes were cooked correctly, not too mushy & not almost raw. The only thing I didn't like about this breakfast was the beans, they were too tomatoey for my tastes & there were far far too many of them meaning that I had to leave some & I hate wasting food.

On this visit I discovered that InSpiral make a darn good juice. This is their apple, pear, carrot & orange juice.

I'm not usually a vegetables in juice kinda girl but this was sweet enough that it hid the carroteyness which was a definite bonus.

InSpiral Lounge also make Cookies. Really REALLY good cookies.

I still can't decide whether I prefer the Chocolate Chip or the Double Chocolate Chip so Nick & I usually buy both and split them.

Thanks to InSpiral I also have a new obsession, kale chips.

These Cheesie Purple Corn kale chips are awesomely noochy & crunchy. I never really thought I'd be into munching on dehydrated veggies but these are SO good that I've been getting through two or three tubs a week. Thankfully they sell them in Infinity Foods which means I don't have to travel up to North London for my fix!

I'd heard about new (to me) vegan & gluten free bakery Cookies & Scream on Twitter & their baked goods sounded so great that we had to pay them a visit.

It took us a while to find the stand in Camden market because we were looking in the wrong place but they were well worth the walk.

We both decided to go for a brownie which I can assure you was fantastic. I did take a picture but it was so bad that it really didn't do this delicious treat justice. I don't often eat gluten or refined sugar free baked goods, not because I have a bias against them but because they're not something I often see, perhaps I'm not looking hard enough?! I will definitely be heading to Camden to visit the Cookies & Scream stand again & I would urge any London visiting blog readers to do the same.

Vienna

2011-09-15T18:49:00.002+01:00

I recently took a super short trip to Vienna to see The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a band I've wanted to see live for over 10 years. The show was SO amazing & the trip had the added bonus of getting to hang out with my awesome friends Carmen & Melanie & getting to eat some delicious vegan food.

It was ridiculously hot so we decided to meet up at Eissalon am Schwedenplatz, one of Vienna's famous ice cream houses.

They have 3 tubs of vegan ice cream to choose from, each has 2 flavours & they're all delicious. You can choose from almond/pistachio, raspberry/nougat or chocolate/hazelnut. I always go for the almond/pistachio, sometimes with a side of chocolate/hazelnut! Sadly I didn't get a picture of the the ice cream this time. It was so hot, I didn't want it to melt! Here's a pic from last year...

After our starter of ice cream we headed to new ice cream place Eis Greissler for our main course of more ice cream!

Eis Greissler is an organic & vegetarian ice cream store with a good selection of vegan flavours. As you can see by how melty this ice cream is it really was crazy hot in Vienna!

I managed to try something new at Formosa on this trip, I usually stick to my favourite Fish & Chips with a side of Calamari but after trying some of my friend Melanie's Pancake with Ham, Cheese & Fresh Herbs I made everyone head back there the next day so that I could have this dish all to myself.

It was so good! Just thinking about it now is making me wish that I was back there! The fresh herbs are cooked into the pancake & it's filled with sautéed carrots & cabbage alongside the vegan ham.

We also managed to squeeze in a visit to another ice cream place with a tonne of vegan sorbet options. Eissalon Armando is located in the 7th district & is definitely well worth a visit if only for their Mojito sorbet...

...Yep, that's right, Mojto sorbet!! The lime & fresh mint infused sorbet was out of this world & I loved having such an exciting flavour option. I had it alongside a scoop of Rhubarb & one of Lemon both of which I'd also order again. This was the perfect refreshing treat on a hot day. It's worth noting that the Mojito sorbet was in a freezer out the back on the day we visited so if you visit make sure to ask for it even if you don't see it.

I'm sure I'll be back in Vienna one day soon so if you've been let me know if there are any must eats that I've been missing out on!

London - Soho

2011-08-11T13:05:00.001+01:00

Nick & I spent last week in London. One of our favourite bands ever, The Bouncing Souls, were playing all of their albums, all the way through. They played two albums a night, it was seriously awesome & only made me love the band even more! As this is a food blog I'll get down to what else we were doing in London though and that's eating!

Soho wasn't where we were staying, or where the shows were but we ended up spending quite a bit of time there due to the high concentration of vegan eateries.

First off it's a great place to grab breakfast. We had a hard time deciding between Mrs Marengo's and Milk Bar but ended up choosing Milk Bar as Mrs Marengo's menu is similar to places we can eat in Brighton. Also Milk Bar has French toast, yep that's right, vegan French toast!

This French toast doesn't even need to be made vegan, I love it when that happens, I think it shows people that vegan food isn't weird! This wasn't the best French toast I've ever had, that award goes to The Gentle Gourmet B&B in Paris, but it was pretty damn good. Nick enjoyed it even more than I did but I think that was because I'm not so into banana unless it's in baked goods and this was very bananaey French toast. The French toast in Paris was served with baked apples which I love.

Milk Bar also serve fantastic coffee - I don't really trust my opinion on coffee but my caffeine drinking friends also agree! I went for my usual decaf soya latte & it was perhaps even better than the coffee at Red Roaster in Brighton which is really saying something.

Another must visit in Soho is Whole Foods, we found loads of vegan goodies.

There was also great selection of vegan cakes from Cat & The Cream bakery, we picked one Vegan Chocolate and one Vegan Banana Cashew Butter. The Chocolate was just straight up chocolate with chocolate frosting but the Banana Cashew Butter was more interesting.

This cupcake was a moist banana cake, almost muffin like, topped with chocolate cashew butter frosting, it was delicious. Cat & The Cream aren't a vegan bakery but keep an eye out for their vegan options in Whole Foods stores all over London.

Whole Foods also stock sides of cake, cookies & brownies made by Camden based vegan eatery InSpiral Lounge. These guys make some of London's best baked goods. Both the Chocolate & the Mint Chocolate brownies are delicious & their Chocolate Mousse Cake is one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. If for some reason you can only pick up one vegan treat in Whole Foods the InSpiral goodies are the way to go.

On our way home on our last day we decided to nip back to Whole Foods to grab a couple of quick easy things for dinner.

It was late & we were pretty tired by the time we got back to Brighton so hot dogs & boxed mac 'n' cheese was the perfect easy meal. I love the Amy's / Daiya Rice Mac 'n' Cheese but it's probably a good thing that I can't get hold of it in Brighton because I'd probably eat it every day!

Another must visit place in Soho is Mildreds. I've eaten there a couple of times before but for some reason I'd never managed to fit in a dessert, that may have something to do with how huge & delicious the vegan burger with sweet potato fries is. I've blogged about it before so there's no picture this time.... d'you like how I'm pretending that I hadn't scoffed half of it before remembering to take a picture?! I went for the dessert I'd heard great things about, the Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Truffle Cake.

This was seriously good, dark and creamy & full of fresh raspberries. This was so good that we tried to head to Mrs Marengo's later in the week so that we could get another slice but sadly we arrived only a moment after they closed at 4pm. Mildreds & Mrs Marengo's are run by the same people and they opened their second location to cater to the demand of Mildreds take away food.

If it's as hot in London when you visit as when we were there last week you'll be in need of some of the cold stuff. We usually head to Neils Yard Salad Bar for vegan soft serve (they only do chocolate or mango but you can get a chocolate /mango twist of that's your thing!) when we're in the area but this time we thought we'd try something new.

I heard about Scoop from a vegan friend on Twitter & I'm very grateful to them because this stuff is gooooood! Scoop are a luxury gelato store so they serve plenty of delicious milk, egg & gluten free fruity sorbetto's.

When we visited they had 6 flavours to choose from including Lemon, mango, Raspberry, Pear, Melon and Watermelon. I went for the mango...

I really liked it, it was perfectly smooth & there were no gross ice crystals, a pet hate of mine. Nick chose lemon and I have to admit I was a little jealous, it was refreshing, not too sweet and had just the right amount of tartness. I'll definitely be ordering it next time.

On our second visit there was no lemon but they had their wonderfully dark chocolate sorbet.

This was amazing and SO rich. Even I could have been quite happy with a scoop half this size! To help people with allergies Scoop have little logos for Milk, Eggs & Gluten so if you're vegan or gluten intolerant you just need to go for the sorbets without any of the logos.

Scoop are currently situated in Soho & Covent Garden and they're in the process of opening a third store in Kensington.

It's a bit of a stretch to say that this last place is in Soho, Tibits is in fact situated on Regent Street, but it's close enough for me. Tibits is Nick's favourite place to eat in London so we always try to visit when we're up there. We both really like their hot & cold food bar & they always have plenty of vegan options.

As I said in my last post about Tibits the buffet is pay by weight, I love this idea & it never seems to end up being too expensive. I also like that the roll is free, you just take it off the plate before you weigh it. This time I filled up my plate with a couple of pasta salads, a tofu & tomato salad, onion bhaji's, potato wedges, a quinoa & cranberry salad, an apple & ginger salad and an olive ciabatta roll. As always everything was delicious but especially the quinoa salad and the apple & ginger salad. Recently Tibits have started to make a vegan apple turnover which of course we had to try.

The pastry was perfectly flakey & it's apple filling was perfectly sweet . We loved it & if there had been more available we'd have gotten a couple more to take away.

If you're going to be visiting London make sure to fit in some time to explore all Soho has to offer, alongside all of this wonderful vegan food (and more that I haven't had the chance to cover in this post, Maoz, Vantra, Sagar & Beatroot to name a few) you'll find quirky shops, charming streets & a vibrant almost village like feel.

Moshi Moshi Brighton.

2011-07-27T17:10:00.000+01:00

I've been hearing good things about the vegan options at Brighton based sushi restaurant Moshi Moshi for a while now & after checking out the menu online & being super impressed that they had changed it to include vegan labelling I decided to pay them a visit. Nick & I went last night (which was a Tuesday for people not reading this the day of writing!) and didn't book a table but I would definitely suggest doing so especially if you are planning to visit from out of town. They definitely get busy & you will not want to miss out on this fantastic dining experience.

Now whilst Moshi Moshi Brighton is technically part of a chain they do have a slightly different & much more vegan friendly menu & attitude than their London counterparts. Moshi Brighton source a lot of their ingredients locally, both their handmade organic tofu & many of their vegetables & herbs come from people running small businesses just down the road in Lewes. I also had a chat with the manager last night whilst quizzing him about the vegan-ness of their desserts & he told me that Moshi Brighton are making a concerted effort to become more vegan friendly.

As is the way with sushi we ordered a lot of little things to share.

Avocado Handroll & Inari Tofu

I love how everything is made fresh to order, we sat by the open sushi preparation area & could see the girl working like crazy making all of the hand rolls, nigiri & maki. The avocado in the hand roll was ripe & fresh & we actually ended up ordering another plate of the Inari Tofu because we loved it so much.

Tofu Teriyaki Nigiri.

This hand formed sushi was delicious & even Nick, who isn't a huge nori fan, liked it. Apparently Moshi Brighton make their Teriyaki sauce by simmering fresh vegetables in soy for 5 hours, it was without a doubt the best Teriyaki sauce I've ever tasted.

Crispy Vegetable Dumplings.

We ended up ordering two plates of these as well as two plates of the inari tofu because they were so good. Perfectly deep fried, not at all greasy & bursting with vegetables.

Vegan Cheese & Sun Blushed Tomato Maki

I was really happy to see this vegan cheese maki roll as a stand alone dish on the menu & not just as something that can be made vegan on request so there was no way I could let it go unordered. I think that the cheese used here is the White Cheddar Style Cheezly, it's quite a mild cheese & it worked perfectly with the other flavours in this sushi roll.

Aubergine Dengaku (I totally just typed Eggplant! Do you think I read too many American blogs?!).

I'm sorry about including this terrible photograph but it really was delicious!

The Auberine Dengaku consists of pan fried aubergine with a light miso sauce. The aubergine in this dish was so beautifully cooked that it pretty much melted in my mouth, I can't stop thinking about how perfect it was!

We'd planned to order one of Moshi Moshi's hot seasonal dishes, the Duck Teriyaki, which is served over white or brown rice & is made vegan using Redwood Foods new Duck Style Pieces. Sadly they were out of the mock duck so we decided to try the Organic Tofu Udon instead.

We decided to try this because we both really, really love tofu so noodles in vegetable stock topped with grilled organic tofu steak & organic vegetables sounded way too good to pass up. The tofu they use at Moshi Brighton is fantastic, it's really soft without being crumbly or waterlogged & it had been cooked so perfectly. I often order the udon noodle / tofu / vegetable soup at Wagamama & I have to say that this far surpasses it. The broth had an amazing depth of flavour & I really loved that fact that the soup not only included 3 of my favourite veggies - green beans, broccoli & pak choi, but that all of the vegetables were perfectly crisp rather than the soggy offerings you often see in soups. One thing I will add is that sharing a bowl of soup if you are both right-handed & using chopsticks is hard, really, damn hard! I cannot count the amount of times Nick almost poked my eye out - romantic!

Of course I had looked at Moshi Moshi's menu online before heading out to dinner & I had noticed that none of their desserts were labelled as vegan or even vegetarian but I decided for the purposes of the blog to do a little more investigating! I asked the manager if anything aside from the fruit salad was vegan & I was incredibly surprised when he said that he thought that the Green Tea Brûlée & Green Tea Blancmange were both suitable. I was surprised enough to confirm with him that vegan meant no dairy, eggs or honey! He certainly seemed to know his stuff pointing out that the Chocolate Mousse definitely wasn't because it contained egg & that whilst the actual Mochi Rice Cakes were he couldn't verify that all the fillings were 100% vegan. He also went back to the kitchen & had a discussion with the chefs to make sure that he was right which I really appreciated. Once we were 100% sure that these were indeed vegan options we HAD to order the Green Tea Brûlée.

Yeah, I got overexcited & cracked the top before taking a picture! Terrible blogger!

Whilst I actually don't like tea of any kind green tea is one of my favourite flavours in a dessert. I absolutely love the Zotter Matcha / Soya chocolate bar & I cannot wait to try these delicious looking Matcha Coconut Chocolate Macaroons from fellow vegan blogger Seitan is my Motor.

I've never actually tried any kind of brûlée before so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect underneath the crispy caramelised sugar topping. I was very pleased to find a delicious smooth creamy green tea flavoured custard. This was such a beautiful light dessert, I think the custard was probably made with silken tofu rather than something nut based & I will definitely be ordering this wonderful dessert again.

Writing this blog post has a) made me want to run right back to Moshi Moshi to eat more of their delicious food and b) made me realise just how excited I am about Moshi Moshi's vegan options. After having another look at their menu whilst writing this I realised that I haven't even come close to trying half of their vegan options! Next time I definitely want to try the Japanese Mushroom Teriyaki Gunkan, the Mini Leaf Wafu Salad with Grated Apple and the Red Miso Shirumono Soup with abura-age tofu.

Brighton Bakery Operation Icing

2011-07-25T15:21:00.002+01:00

So, whilst I'm good at writing reviews of other vegan businesses & praising the brilliant cupcakes made by other people I'm not so great at blowing my own horn. My little business Operation Icing was featured on wonderful new blog Vegans On The Move today so I thought that it was about time I wrote about it here.

I quit my job last year, I'd been working as a body piercer for 4 years & I'd started to hate everything about it to the extent that it was making me really miserable so I decided that it was time for a change.

I'd wanted to work for a vegan business or an animal rights charity for ages but I also loved the idea of working from home so I decided to set up a not for profit bakery. I bake everything myself in my tiny kitchen & I love every minute of it!

I'm going to let the interview on Vegans On The Move give you the lowdown on the business & just let the pictures speak for themselves here...

Vanilla Raspberry Swirl Mini Donut.

Double Chocolate Dream.

Coconut Lime.

Sweetie.

Speculoos Caramel Cookie.

Bourbon Biscuit.

If you live in or around Brighton and like to eat cupcakes and donate money to wonderful charities then please check out my website!

Berlin Part V - Making the most of our last day.

2011-07-24T12:21:00.002+01:00

On our last morning in Berlin we took a walk around the neighbourhood we'd been staying in & stumbled upon a large health food store called Bio Company. As soon as we walked in we saw the fresh bread & cakes, of course I headed straight over there looking for any sign of veganess. I wasn't disappointed as they label their vegan options very clearly.

I wasn't sure what these little buns were but we picked one up anyway, sadly they turned out to be quite bland. They were soft & slightly sweet though so I think if you were in possession of something like a tub of Chocoreale they could certainly become something delicious. We also spotted vegan chocolate muffins & took one to go...

...from a distance it looked so promising but sadly this was probably one of the worst things I've ever put in my mouth. I wish things like this didn't exist as it makes people think vegans are crazy people who like dry, hard, hideous baked goods. If you're starving & this place has sold out of everything else vegan then maybe give it a go but don't say I didn't warn you!

Thankfully the store which is located in Friedrichshain on the corner of Rigaer Strasse & Voigtstrasse has shelves lined with vegan goodies from soya milk's & puddings...

...to mock meats of all kinds, ready to eat falafel, tofu's & spreads.

There are 5 or 6 Bio Company stores located in and around central Berlin so definitely keep a look out for them if you're on the hunt for vegan food.

For our last meal in Berlin we headed straight for Yoyo Foodworld. It happened to be en route from our apartment to the bus stop, perfect when you don't want to have to go to far with a bulging suitcase. Also, their pizza's are so good that I really wanted another one.

This time I chose the Hawaiian, this is the pizza I always make at home. I always used to think pineapple on a pizza was weird & gross but somehow since going vegan my taste buds have changed to allow me to enjoy the deliciousness that is warm fruit on pizza. Another bonus to this newfound love is that Nick still detests pineapple on pizza which means more for me!

After lunch we decided to pay Caramello Eis one last visit & I decided to go crazy & try something different from the usual chocolate praline soya ice cream that had become my regular order. Of course I stuck to chocolate but this time opting for the sorbet.

It was good but not as good as the ice cream. It was more refreshing though and it was a proper dark bitter chocolate which I certainly enjoyed.

I'd been waiting all week for Cupcake to make a chocolate cupcake so I was super excited to spot this beauty behind the counter when we popped in on our way to the airport. We'd just eaten all of that pizza & ice cream so we saved it for the plane.

For some reason if there's going to be an empty seat on a plane it'll be next to Nick & I. I don't know if it's our ridiculous hair or my tattoo's & piercings but I think people find us intimidating. I'm certainly not complaining but it makes me laugh because surely there's nothing less intimidating than a couple eating cupcakes & watching Gossip Girl!

Berlin Part IIII - Oh LaLa, Cupcake & Viasko.

2011-07-18T13:58:00.000+01:00

My birthday this year was always going to be an awesome one as we were spending it in Berlin but it was even better than I could have imagined! We started the day with a continental breakfast of 'ham' slices, Vegusto cheese, bread, banana bread & fruit juice.

This was swiftly followed by presents, it took a helluva lot of patience for me to wait until after breakfast!

I'd wanted the Veggie Burger book for ages & it's damn good. I've only made the Super Quinoa Burgers so far but I'll be making the Bacon Cheeseburger recipe very soon. The cute skillet mitts were a great hint towards the sneaky extra present waiting for me at home, a cast iron skillet! I'd wanted one for SO long & as Nick pointed out it would have definitely pushed our suitcase over the weight limit hence leaving it behind.

After a walk through a park near where we were staying that included the very grown up activity of playing on the swings we headed to new cafe Oh LaLa for lunch. Oh LaLa is a French tart shop which although not vegetarian does have plenty of mouth watering vegi & vegan options. We started with a couple of savoury tarts which I didn't really manage to take a decent picture of!

We had trouble choosing so we shared one tomato & one pepper. They had great thick flakey pastry & I liked that they both tasted different rather than just being the exact same tofu quiche with different toppings. I wished we could have tried all of the other flavours too, the day we were there there were 5 different flavours to choose from. Really though, we were there for the desserts! Little French tartlets - yum!

We were going to share our desserts too but once I saw this gorgeous raspberry chocolate tart I new I'd be keeping it all to myself.

Chocolate & Raspberry is my absolute favourite dessert flavour combo so this was a wonderful birthday treat. Silky creamy chocolate encased in buttery pastry topped with delicious tart raspberries & chopped pistachio nuts. Yum! Nick choose to have the treacle tart which is one of his favourite desserts so I think he was pretty happy with the new not sharing plan!

I did get a little taste because otherwise how could I have written about it here?! The treacle was gooey & incredibly sweet & I loved that it was topped with my favourite dessert nut, pecans. Is it weird to have a favourite dessert nut?! I'll definitely be returning to Oh LaLa for a tart on my next trip to Berlin.

After lunch we headed towards Alexanderplatz to walk around & look at the sights...

...before hopping on a boat to do some more relaxed sightseeing. Of course we planned ahead & took snacks! Brownies to be precise, this is the peanut butter chocolate brownie from Cupcake.

I think I've said it before but the brownies at Cupcake are some of my favourite brownies in the world, it's a closely run thing between them & the brownies from Strong Hearts Cafe in Syracuse, New York.

After our fabulous lunch at Viasko the previous day I decided that I wanted to head back there for my birthday dinner so that's exactly what we did! We ended up choosing the same starter as we'd had for lunch the day before, the Crostini Variation. Not knowing when we'd next be in Berlin I couldn't pass up the chance to eat their delicious almond cheese again. For my main I chose the Seitan Steaks with mashed potatoes, mushroom cream sauce, green beans & root vegetable crisps.

Oh my god it was SO good! The sauce was perfect, the seitan was amazingly tender & I was genuinely really excited to be eating a green vegetable after all of the fast food & cake we'd been eating on the trip. The mashed potatoes were the creamiest most delicious mashed potatoes I've ever eaten...I only wish I had the patience to mash my potatoes this well at home!

Nick went for the gyros plate, I don't think the picture does it justice... this thing was huge!

The plate included the soya gyros, homemade flatbread, coleslaw, tzatziki sauce & hummus. I tried a bite & it was really good, the bread was perfectly soft & I really liked the soya meat.

We were both pretty stuffed after our meals but when I heard that one of the desserts was an apple tart I decided that there was no way I was missing out!

This was well worth stuffing myself to breaking point for! The apples were perfectly soft & caramelised and the pastry was perfect. This was a seriously great end to a days eating!

I always get nostalgic (and hungry!) when I'm writing travel food posts because I want to be right back there trying more food or re-eating all of the fantastic meals I've eaten on the trip. Viasko is definitely one place that I really really wish was closer to me, thankfully I love Berlin so much that there's no doubt in my mind that I'll be back there one day in the not too distant future.

Berlin part III - Kadtler, Viasko & Nil.

2011-07-12T14:50:00.000+01:00

I woke up on the third day of our trip & wanted to try something new for breakfast so we headed across town to check out a kosher bakery called Kadtler. I'd read about it on Berlin-Vegan & had jotted down all of the possible vegan options so that I would know what to look for. Whilst we queued we spotted a couple of promising things & thanks to the lovely girl working that day speaking a bit of English & my (pretty terrible) German skills we decided to go for the Apfelkuchen.

It was a great pastry. I've always been a big fan of fruity pastries & as they're not something I can get in Brighton they're a real treat. Kadtler is located on Danziger Strasse & this is the sign to look out for.

After breakfast we headed off to a totally different part of town to stock up on goodies at Veni Vidi Vegi. I visited here the first time I was in Berlin back in 2008 so I knew that the shelves were full of Vital Wheat Gluten & loads of delicious mock meats. I was a little disappointed as they were out of stock of my favourite biscuits, a shortbread covered on one side with chocolate, but it was okay because they had Go Max Go bars!

Veni Vidi Vegi isn't far from Viasko so we decided to swing by and check out their lunch menu & boy were we glad we did! Viasko is an entirely vegan place & what the Brit's would call a Gastro Pub, like a pub with beer on tap but with table service which makes it a bit more fancy. I think I am actually in love with whoever cooks the food at Viasko! I wish that they would quit & move to Brighton & become my personal chef. The lunch specials were printed up on a separate menu from the dinner menu & you could choose either two courses for €7.50 or 3 courses for €8.50. I want to know what kind of people would only go for two courses in this situation? Not these people that's for sure!

We both went for the Crostini Variation to start. This is described on the menu as Olive Oil Fried Bread with Olive Cream, Pesto & Tofu and almond "cheese" cream.

It was seriously out of this world good. The little toasts were crispy but not dripping with oil or grease as fried breads often can be and the almond cheese, oh god, the almond cheese. I should have asked for the recipe!

For our main we both chose to have the Lasagne Bolognese. Nick & I have really similar food loves which is awesome when we're cooking at home but sometimes I wish we'd order different things at restaurants so that I could try even more food!

The lasagne was damned good, it had a perfectly baked slightly crisped cheesy topping & had a layer of spinach inside as well as the soya based bolognese. I'll have a hard time not ordering this again if it's on the menu next time I visit.

We managed to pick different desserts so I got to sample both the Peach Pie...

...and the Lemon Tart with a Blueberry Compote.

The desserts weren't on the menu but there was a choice of three different cakes of the day which I think is a pretty good selection. These were both delicious & I'd certainly order them both again. The only thing I was unsure of were the nuts (?) on top of the peach pie, I didn't quite feel they went with the other flavours in the pie but maybe they just weren't to my taste.

That night we headed to Sudanese take out place Nil for dinner & to meet up with Melisser. I'd visited the other Nil location on my first ever Berlin trip & had been dying to go back, even Nick was excited about their signature peanut sauce as I'd been raving about it for years. They have a menu in English & the vegan options are clearly marked which is great when you are unsure of what to order. I went for the Vegan Plate which consists of manioc fries, falafel, the legendary peanut sauce, a bean dish I forget the name of & salad. All for €4!

I'd also recommend the Madagascar tofu pita which is €3 for a huge sandwich, sadly the sandwich doesn't photograph well so you'll just have to use your imaginations. This place is a total bargain so if you're in Berlin & looking for a great budget lunch or dinner option this is the place for you. It's also great because Sudanese food isn't something you find in every city meaning that it's a great place to try something new.

There are two more instalments of our Berlin adventure to come, next time I'll be writing about what we did on my birthday*.

*hint, there's a lot of dessert involved!

Berlin Part II - Ice Cream, Cake, Yoyo & Vego Foodworld's.

2011-07-04T21:32:00.019+01:00

I really admire fabulous bloggers like In the Mood for Noodles who manage to blog about their trips whilst they're actually still on them, or even the many other bloggers who manage to put pen to paper as soon as they've unpacked their bags. Sadly I am not one of those bloggers, it's been just under a month since I got back from Berlin! Thankfully the memories of the delicious food haven't gone anywhere...

It was pretty hot when we arrived in Berlin so as soon as we'd dropped our bags off at the apartment we headed out for ice cream. I'd read on Melisser's blog that Caramello Eis was just around the corner from where we were staying so we headed straight there to get our ice cream fix.

Whilst the place isn't entirely vegan we were really excited by the selection as around half of the ice creams & sorbets on offer are vegan. Both Nick & I are huge chocolate fiends so the chocolate praline soya ice cream was the obvious choice. It was seriously the best ice cream I've ever eaten. Just a heads up, if you visit double check the vegan-ness of the waffle cone in my picture, the first three (yes, three! It was hot! I love ice cream!) times we went there we were told that the cone was vegan but on our last visit a different member of staff told us that it wasn't & gave us a different kind of cone. Sometimes this stuff's confusing when you don't really speak the language - I've just started taking online German lessons so I'll be able to communicate better next time I'm there!

After our ice cream we realised that we were hungry for carbs so we headed around the corner to Yoyo Foodworld. We'd heard that this wasn't the best in the chain of 'foodworlds' scattered around Berlin. There's Yoyo, Vego & Yellow Sunshine. Still, as it was the closest to us we decided to give it a try.

We were glad we did, we loved it! We had a ham pizza which came topped with chunks of vegan ham & a generous amount of Cheezly. It had been made in a proper pizza oven too which was great. The guy working there seemed a bit flustered as he was on his own both serving and cooking & the place was pretty busy but we didn't mind a bit of a wait.

After our pizza it was time for cake! We headed around the corner from Yoyo to Cupcake where we picked up these delicious vanilla raspberry cupcakes to eat at our apartment.

These were the same cupcakes Nick & I had when we were on our honeymoon in Berlin last year. The cupcakes were good & I loved the raspberry icing & the cute heart decorations. Cupcake always has options for vegans. Every day you can choose from a cupcake, cute mini banana breads, a chocolate brownie or a slice of apple pie. I wish they had two vegan cupcakes each day because I'm not a vanilla frosting fan & that was the cupcake option on two of the occasions that we visited. We picked up some of the mini banana breads to eat for breakfast the next day.

We'd also popped to Viv the previous day to buy a few breakfast essentials. Margarine, juice, bread etc, I also finished off the strawberries I'd brought to snack on on the plane. Viv is a great bio market with locations all over the city. The stores are full of vegan goodies like Nirwana Noir nut truffle Chocolate, cereals, Wheaty slices, pestos & soya milks.

After our breakfast we headed out to do some sightseeing. We hit up the Pergamon museum & walked around museum island...

...before heading to the Ramones Museum.

It was awesome to see all of the Ramones memorabilia but it was equally cool to see that loads of my favourite bands had visited & signed the wall. We'd built up quite the hunger by this point so we headed towards Prenzlauer Berg to check out Vego Foodworld.

We ordered pizza again because we wanted to compare it to the one at Yoyo & because, well, we love pizza!

This time we went for salami & we also ordered a Schnitzel burger and fries.

The burger's not looking so great in this photo because we removed all of the salad before I remembered to take the photo. Nick's not a salad fan and we decided to play it safe because of the E.coli scare, nobody wants to get sick on holiday! I found the burger bun a little odd, almost sweet tasting, Nick liked it though so I think it must just be me. I'd probably go to Yellow Sunshine next time I wanted a burger in Berlin though.

I couldn't resist ordering the calamari too. What? I was hungry! It was definitely the best I've had, perfectly rubbery & deep fried - yum!

We also picked up a snack for the road. These are delicious but I'm glad they're small because they're pretty sickly!

We were glad we checked out Vego Foodworld but aside from having a cheerier guy working there & perhaps being a little cleaner (but it was a less busy time of day) it wasn't incredibly different from Yoyo Foodworld. I'd definitely recommend them both.

I'm going to be splitting my Berlin adventures into a few posts so as not to overwhelm you, or me. Next time I'll be writing about our visit to a Kosher Bakery, the delicious food at Viasko & the awesome Sudanese food at Nil.

Brightons 1st Vegan Bake Sale

2011-06-03T15:10:00.000+01:00

We held Brighton's first vegan bake sale last weekend & it was awesome! We had donations from vegan businesses, Ms Cupcake & Titbits Catering alongside fantastic goodies from local bakers. Kip, Holley & I had loads of fun on the day & we ended up raising £480 to be split between Sea Shepherd & local charity the East Sussex Wildlife Rescue & Ambulance Service.

We set up our stall outside local cafe WaiKikaMooKau, I really appreciate them letting us take up so much of their space on a busy Saturday afternoon, our table ended up having to be double the size I'd agreed with them because we just had SO MUCH stuff.

I made this awesome sign, I have no artistic skills but I'm okay with a pair of scissors & some double sided tape. Is it just me or does it look like it was made by a 5 year old?

Below you can see our cupcake stand with cupcakes made by me & Ms Cupcake, in front of the stand are choco coco oat balls & red pepper, thyme & tofu mini filo pastry quiches made by Laura Dakin the head chef on Sea Shepherd's ship, Spelt Courgette Muffins that I made using the recipe from the Babycakes cookbook, Peanut Butter Banana Chocolate Chip Cake by a local baker, more cupcakes, my gooey chocolate brownies & gluten free banana breads - another Babycakes recipe.

On the stand at the back are cookies donated by a couple of local bakers. We had double chocolate, peanut butter choc chip & orange. Yum! We packaged some up all pretty...

Here's a close up of the cupcakes! We have Earl Grey Tea & Crunchie by Ms Cupcake and then Peanut Butter Bombshell, Sweetie, Double Chocolate, Candy Cane Joe Joe & Raspberry by my very new business Operation Icing...I think I need to write a whole new blog post about that don't I?!

In the bottom right corner of that picture you can see Kip's delicious Shortbread & the Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies she made using the recipe in The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur. Kip also made the Gingerbread Biscotti with a lemon glaze which we were calling "magical sticks" by the end of the day thanks to a suggestion by one of our customers.

Kip also made Giant Peanut Butter Cookies which were really popular & Baked Bean & Cheezly Cornish Pasties, I bought one as soon as I saw them come out of her bag & they were SO delicious. I want to hire her to live in my house & make these for me every day!

Talking of popular, all of the cupcakes were totally sold out by 1:30! Next time I'll make 6 or 7 batches instead of 4.

Sadly I didn't manage to snap any pictures of them but halfway through the day we received a double chocolate & jam layer cake & four, yes four, chocolate cakes to add to our selection of goodies. It was perfect timing as we were just running out of cupcakes.

I'll leave you with a close up of my brownies & a glimpse at my business cards...more about that next time!

Head on over to Kips blog to see more pic's from the day, she even has pictures with people in them!

Gourmet Girls Secret Restaurant.

2011-05-24T18:39:00.000+01:00

Last weekend one of my favourite dining buddies & I headed out to eat at Brighton's first vegan underground supper club. The secret restaurant is the brainchild of the Gourmet Girls, Sammy & Paula, who also run local vegan catering company Titbits.

The Gourmet Girls announce the menu on facebook & their website & once you book they'll tell you the location. I loved the excitement of not knowing where we were going to be heading until 24 hours before dinner.

Upon arrival we were greeted by the lovely owner of the house we were dining in & we were quickly handed a delicious virgin Pimms welcome drink by the girls. As is often the case in Brighton, it is a very small city, it turned out that I already knew three of the other diners but we also sat with some lovely people we'd never met before. I really liked the communal dining experience & it was great fun to chat to other foodies over dinner.

It wasn't long before the starters were served & I was excited to try some of this years first in season asparagus prepared by professional chefs.

This delicious asparagus came wrapped in an almond filo pastry & was served with a lemon scented butter bean puree & rocket oil. Everything about this dish was melt in your mouth delicious, I don't think I've ever liked asparagus this much before!

Next up was the main of Smoked Garlic & Mushroom Arancini. The arancini came nestled upon a bed of wilted spinach & they were served with a pine nut truffle cream, watercress, pomegranate & rawmesan salad & steamed broccoli.

I actually didn't know what arancini were until they arrived but I was very pleased to discover that they're a fried risotto ball, only in this case I believe they were baked not fried. I love risotto & covering it in bread crumbs only seems to be a winning idea in my book! I'm also a huge lover of broccoli, spinach & watercress - it was like they'd designed this dish with my taste buds in mind! I was also very impressed with their rawmesan - a vegan parmesan. It was excellent, one of the best I've tried for sure.

Last up was a Divine Chocolate Marbled Cheesecake with a chocolate, maca & orange sauce.

If you're a regular reader of the blog you might know that I actually don't like cheesecake, at all, but the rest of the menu looked so great that I decided I'd give cheesecake another try just this once. I loved the biscuit base & the chocolate orange sauce & whilst I didn't love the cheesecake it was certainly the best I've ever tried. All of the other diners were ooohing & aaahing over how delicious it was so if you have a normal taste in desserts I'll bet you'd have loved this.

After the meal everyone was served teas & coffees alongside some delicious handmade heart shaped raspberry truffles. I did snap some pictures but sadly it had gotten quite dark by that point & my photos are too terrible to post here. I can assure you that they were perfect, a lovely end to the meal.

If you're a Brighton local or if you're ever in Brighton & you want to take part in this new dining phenomenon then I would highly recommend the Gourmet Girls Secret Restaurant. They've just announced the menu for the next dinner which will take place on June 24th so why don't you head over to their facebook site to check it out?

In other local news Brighton's first all vegan charity bake sale is taking place this Saturday, check out the details here.

Brighton Vegan Bakesale.

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We're puttin' on a bake sale! It's Brighton's first time taking part in the WWVBS & our stall will be located outside the WaiKikaMooKau cafe on Kensington Gardens. The sale takes place on Saturday May 28th, which is just under two weeks away people! We'll be there from 10am & we're not going home until we sell out.

Here are the details on a fancy poster...

The money we're raising will be split between Sea Shepherd & one of my favourite local charities the East Sussex Wildlife Rescue & Ambulance Service.

We're still looking for people to contribute baked goods to the sale so please leave me a comment or e-mail me at jojo . huxster (@) me . com if you can help. If not, no worries, I'm sure we'll see you there!

So far we have had donations pledged by the lovely people at Ms Cupcake, The Home Cakery & Titbits Catering as well as this list of baked goods made by our individual supporters:

Sweetie Cupcakes

Double Chocolate Cupcakes (featured on the poster)

Candy Cane Joe Joe Cupcakes

Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies

Chocolate Cheesecake

Gluten Free Banana Bread

Zuccini Spelt Muffins

Quiche

I'm really excited, I've organised a gig for charity before but never a bake sale so I hope it goes well. Wish us luck!