Things I Love Thursday: A Few of Our Favourite Stores.

Ah, another American edition of Things I Love Thursday! What can I say, I'm in love with Austin. If moving was as simple as packing a bag and hopping on a plane we'd be there right now. Unfortunately things like immigration laws and visas exist meaning that for now Austin will have to exist without us in it!

I used Lazy Smurf's Austin Vegan Guide to plan a large majority of this trips eating schedule and one of the most exciting things we discovered was the breakfast taco. We'd never even heard of breakfast tacos, let alone tried them, before this trip and now they're heading quickly towards the top of our list of favourite foods ever.

Thanks to Lazy Smurf we heard that the best breakfast taco in town was to be found at Whole Foods so we headed straight to the North Lamar location to check 'em out. 

The breakfast taco options at Whole Foods include tofu scramble, potatoes, beans, rice, guac', all kinds of salsas, tomatoes and two kinds of Daiya. I went for scramble, potatoes, guac', Daiya and tomatoes almost every time. What a perfect combination. I'm so glad that we brought some tortillas home so that we can re-create these.

Another amazing thing about this particular Whole Foods is that it's huge! It's actually their flagship store and it's full of amazing things like these parfaits which even turned Nick into a food photographer!

We were particularly in love with the chocolate parfait although the peanut butter will always have a place in my heart after Nick dropped one face down, lid off, onto the self checkout causing much mess and mayhem!

One of our other favourite stores was Wheatsville Co-Op. Wheatsville have the nicest most amazing staff in the world. Everyone we came into contact with at every store, cafe, restaurant, food truck and bar in Austin was crazy friendly but the people at Wheatsville were extra special. One wonderful person even shared their vegan chocolate with me whilst we were going through the checkout!

Their deli is insane, if you go you have to try the Buffalo Popcorn Hero and if you can't actually handle spice at all then they'll even replace the Buffalo Popcorn Tofu with regular Popcorn Tofu so that you can experience the creamy deliciousness of their vegan blue cheese dressing without burning off all of your taste buds! The first time we went I chased mine with a Red Rabbit Co-Op doughnut and a root beer.

 

On the second visit I tried the Red Rabbit Apple Fritter. I have to say that this was my favourite of all of their baked goods, I'm a sucker for fruit and a sugary glaze, amazing.

One of our other favourite stores EVER is Toy Joy! 

More amazingly lovely people are to be found working here and as well as being an epic toy store (I spent a shitload of cash!) they also have a vegan ice cream parlour inside!! I don't have a picture of the delicious peanut butter chocolate soft serve we tried but trust me it was awesome. The other amazing thing about this place is that it's open 'till 11pm - it would be the cutest place ever to take someone after dinner on a first date, Nick took me here after dinner one night on what was probably our 8 millionth date and I thought that it was the cutest idea ever!

The incredibly lovely staff are also funny as fuck if this Insane Clown Posse inspired sign's anything to go by!

Austin Books & Comics is also up there on our list of favourite places, as well as this epic photo of me & Hulk I picked up a super rad screen printed Mars Attacks poster and some super cute Jeffrey Brown comic books.

We also loved the bar where you could play air hockey, skeeball and drink Lone Star. Perfect!