Summer Camping Trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the road again & headed for Groezrock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zurich

After driving across Austria & spending an awesome day going up a mountain on a chair lift & coming back down again on the worlds longest alpine coaster we ended up at a beautiful campsite near Lake Fernsteinsee.

We parked the van next to a stream at the foot of a mountain...

...and went for a walk to find the lake. We passed a small river & a castle...

...and then found this!

The lake was insanely beautiful! We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out there before heading onwards to Zurich bright & early the next morning.

Switzerland is just as stunning as Austria & this was the view from the motorway...

...I wish motorway's in the UK had scenery like this - it makes long drives much more fun.

We were a bit unsure of whether we'd like Zurich, we'd heard that it's pretty fancy & expensive and we are neither fancy nor expensive! We only decided to go there because it kept raining & we fancied being in a city rather than the countryside but it turns out that although it is indeed expensive Zurich's pretty awesome.

We arrived totally starving and headed out to Hiltl the parent company of Tibits which is one of favourite places to eat in London. Sadly, in comparison to the London restaurant the Swiss version has far fewer vegan options to choose from. We still managed to eat though which by that point was all I cared about!

The olive & tomato pasta salad was pretty good and I enjoyed the potato gratin, beans and steamed veggies but the highlight was probably the onion rings - awesome deep fried goodness!

Sadly there were no vegan dessert options at Hiltl but I was suitably sustained to go on the hunt for something sweet. We stumbled across a little health food store and found a vegan version of a mini chocolate magnum.

We ate the entire box sitting on a bench outside the store, we got A LOT of strange looks & I'm still unsure of whether it was because we were sitting under an umbrella eating ice cream or because you don't see many tattooed chicks on the streets of Zurich!

Dinner that day was one of the highlights of the entire trip, I'd read about Samses on Happy Cow & it was definitely worth the tram ride and surprisingly long walk from our hotel.

Nick ordered a tomatoey spaghetti dish and I satisfied my carb cravings with the mushroom risotto.

I definitely made the right choice, I love risotto and this one was perfect. For dessert we both opted for the chocolate mousse.

It was quite chocolatey but not too rich and full of crunchy bits of biscuit. I found it a little too creamy but Nick declared it to be the best dessert he'd ever eaten and managed to polish off 1/2 of mine too.

The food here was awesome & it was great to have so many options but the staff were also really friendly & seemed really excited to have two vegan guests! If you're in Zurich I'd say Samses is a must visit.

As promised I'll be back again tomorrow!

Camping, Infinity Cafe, Pompoko and a PPK meet up.

My boyfriend and I went camping again we only went for a couple of days this time and we went to a campsite that was only about half an hour away from our house but we just fancied being out in the countryside. Unfortunately it rained almost the whole time we were there so we spent most of the time hanging out in the tent eating.

We took a package of chreesy mash that I'd bought back from my trip to America with us, perfect camping food when served up with hot dogs!

We also made an awesome stir fry with Cauldron marinated tofu pieces, veggies and Sharwoods straight to wok noodles.

This weekend we had an awesome PPK meet up and I got to hang out with awesome bloggers Alien on Toast and The Messy Vegetarian Cook as well as three other lovely PPKers. We had a potluck in the park and there was so much food.

I made the Vegan Brunch quiche again, it's quickly becoming one of my favourites. I also adapted the Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World recipe for mint chocolate cupcakes and turned it into a layer cake filled and topped with mint Newman O's, mint icing, quick melty ganache and some mint chocolate skulls. I also couldn't resist making some Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World peanut butter cupcakes so I could use my super cute cupcake toppers from Bake It Pretty.

Everyone brought amazing food and below are The Messy Vegetarian Cook's Arabic mezze foods, holylopez's tempeh bacon and Alien on Toast's seitan sausages and peanut noodles, she also brought some delicious cookies which I didn't get a picture of.

Below are The Messy Vegetarian Cook's home baked pittas, holylopez's chocolate brownies, my Veganomicon Brooklyn Deli Macaroni Salad, interrobang?!'s quinoa salad and VCTOW jelly donut cupcakes and the_purple_peril's fruit.

It was loads of fun meeting all these awesome veggie ladies, hopefully we can do it again soon. I was lucky enough to have one PPKer Interrobang?! to stay for the whole weekend so there was time for more fun and food.

We went for dinner at The George on Saturday evening but it was too dark to take any pictures, we both had yummy George burgers though which I've blogged about before.

Sunday morning I made some tofu scramble which we had on toasted whole wheat English muffins with sausages on the side.

I used the vegan mom tofu scramble recipe from the Vegan Dad blog, I love this recipe because it's really creamy and I made it even eggyer by adding a 1/4 tsp of black salt.

We went to the Infinity Cafe for cake once we'd walked off the brunch strolling along the pier. I went for the coffee and walnut cake and it was totally delicious, really moist with a great coffee flavour.

Interrobang?! had the chocolate gateaux which also looked pretty yummy.

Then for dinner we met up with Nick and went to Pompoko where we all ordered my favourites from the time I went there with my friend Tabitha. The Yubamaki...

...and the Sesame Tofu Don.

All in all it was a great weekend and it's made me even more excited to meet up with old and new friends when I go on my next adventure to Vienna in October.

Cornwall

It was my birthday last week so I hit the road with my boyfriend and two of our friends to celebrate in a tent at the Ruthern Valley campsite near Bodmin in Cornwall. The campsite is incredibly eco friendly and full of wildlife, I saw loads of squirrels, cute tiny birds and even frogs. Before we left I'd decided that I had to have birthday pancakes so I packed the ingredients to just mix together on the day.


This was super easy and I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before. (In fact I didn't think of it this time I read about someone else doing it on the PPK!)


We ate them pancake day style with sugar and lemon - yum.

The birthday fun continued after breakfast with a trip to The Monkey Sanctuary . I knew I'd love this place and I was right! The all veggie cafe and the work they put into ending the primate pet trade accompanied with their anti vivisection stance makes them damned awesome, and that's before you even account for the amazing work they put into recreating natural habitats for the rescued monkeys to live in. I didn't take any monkey pictures as I didn't want to be invasive but I did manage to take pictures of the food served at the awesome Treetop cafe.


On The Monkey Sanctuary website they say that they have a vegetarian cafe but until I arrived I had no idea how vegan friendly they'd be, I was so excited when I saw the menu.


All the V's mean vegan and the ones with a star meant that the dish could be made vegan upon request. As I mentioned in a previous post if there's a burger that's what I'll always go for so here it is.


The burger was obviously homemade, it was packed full of nuts and seeds and came on a delicious wholemeal bun with fried onions and vegan mayo. As you can see it also came with two side salads covered in a yummy dressing, oven baked wedges and more of the vegan mayo. The only complaint I had with this was that I thought the wedges were too spicy but that's just because my pathetic palate can't handle spices, my dining companions said that they weren't actually the least bit spicy.

The cafe also sold the whole range of Whole Earth drinks alongside the local apple juices.


I was super surprised and excited to find out that all but one of their desserts were vegan and that they had gluten free bread and cakes available. I went for the chocolate cake and the boy went for the chocolate chip cookie so that we could try both. The chocolate cake was rich and moist with a fudgey icing, it was pretty perfect. I wasn't so impressed with the cookie, I found it to be a little dry and flavourless. In contrast to that cookie the vegan chocolate chip biscuits they sold in the gift shop were great.

The birthday fun continued after the sanctuary with a trip into Looe to hang out by the beach.


I even managed to get myself a vegan candyfloss. They're usually pink and made with E120 dye (which is made from crushed beetles - ewww) but this one was apple flavoured and made with green dyed sugar.


Look how happy I am, I get overexcited about birthdays and candyfloss so both together was a little too brilliant, especially after all the monkey and pancake fun earlier in the day. What a great day!

The next day we worked up an appetite on a walk in the countryside alongside a really beautiful river.


Afterwards we stopped off in a little town called Wadebridge to find some food, I was starving and a little worried as the day before my birthday we'd had a bit of a disastrous trip to a similar town where all I could eat was a bag of ready salted crisps whilst my friends munched on cheese sandwiches in a cafe where even the chips were cooked in the fryer with the meat, yuch.

As it turns out Wadebridge is pretty good for the vegan traveller. We stumbled upon an Elixir Health Foods store as soon as we got out of the car. They had a decent selection of Sheese, Panda liquorice, Redwood veggie bacon, Fry's products and vegan chocolate so I grabbed myself a raspberry panda liquorice to tide myself over. Everyone fancied getting food from somewhere we could sit down so we found Flo's cafe where they not only had Heinz baked beans but also yummy lemonade and they were happy do do me a jacket potato without the butter.


Granted it's not the most exciting meal but yummy none the less. Whilst we were there we also spotted a Co-op supermarket (the only supermarket whose toiletries are BUAV approved) so if you happen to be in Cornwall and need to find something to eat I'd recommend Wadebridge.

That evening back at the campsite I made some Sammy's italian pesto flavoured cous cous and roasted veggies.


Roasting veggies whilst camping is super easy and delicious, just pop the veggies in tin foil with a bit of olive oil and then stick it on the barbecue for about 15 minutes.

Amongst my super cool birthday gifts were some Dandies vegan marshmallows so for dessert we toasted these on our camping gas stove.



Dandies marshmallows are seriously great, my veggie friends were of course excited too as marshmallows are traditionally made with gelatin. I'm looking forward to cooking with these and I'm planning to make some marshmallow krispie squares. I'll be ordering more of these as soon as I can afford the postage to the UK.

I love camping, the boy & I are going again in July so hopefully I can think of some exciting new things you can make on 2 little gas burners and a disposable barbecue!

I also cannot wait to get back to The Monkey Sanctuary to try some more of their vegan options. If you're ever in the south west of England I highly recommend it as a great place for a day out. I'm hoping I can get enough time off work next year to fit in a few weeks voluntary work there.

I'm off to London tomorrow to see The Bouncing Souls and Black President and I'm intending on doing some eating so I'll be blogging about that when I get back.