Twenty Four Hours in Galway.

The final stop on our little tour of Ireland was Galway, we only had 24 hours in the city but we made the most of it even though it rained nonstop! We checked out the museum, the Spanish Arch and medieval city wall, walked the riverside walk to the cathedral and explored Galway's cute winding streets.

Our first meal in Galway was dinner at Da Tang Noodle House. We both love Chinese food and although this restaurant isn't veggie they had an impressive selection of vegan options. We were a little apprehensive before we arrived as nothing was marked with a V on the online menu. Veg friendly dishes were marked on the in-restaurant menu though and there was even a little something about accommodating vegans on there. We may have ordered so much food that we had to be moved to a bigger table!

We ordered the Smoked Tofu & Coriander Salad from the starter menu which I loved.

We hadn't quite expected it to be so heavy on the coriander but thankfully it's a flavour we both like and we really enjoyed it, I'll definitely be trying to recreate this garlic & rice wine vinegar dressed salad at home.

We chose two side dishes. The Stir Fried Pak Choi in a ginger and scallion sauce...

...and the Oriental Mushrooms and Tofu in a garlic black bean sauce.

We were surprised by the amount of mushrooms in the Pak Choi dish and the lack of them in the Mushroom dish! We enjoyed both, I liked the flavours of the Pak Choi's ginger and scallion sauce best whilst Nick preferred the garlicky black bean tofu. We ate rice noodles and white rice alongside our dishes as unfortunately the homemade wheat noodles at Da Tang are made with egg.

This next dish was kind of a mystery to both of us, we didn't really realise that we hadn't ordered it until it'd been on our table for five or ten minutes and by then we felt weird about sending it back so we ate it. We don't particularly like soup so unsurprisingly we didn't love it. 

If you do like soup and you're in Galway we're 99% sure that it's the Fresh Tofu Soup Noodles and it certainly wasn't bad, for soup. We think we got it instead of the Fresh Tofu & Mixed Vegetable Sauce Noodles we ordered which would have had a delicious yellow bean sauce. Damnit! We really need to work on our assertiveness! 

We also tried the Sizzling Vegetables described on the menu as "fried tofu and cashew nuts in a ginger and scallion sauce".

We both thought that this dish was just okay, not our favourite but certainly not bad. We really liked the way the tofu had been cooked and I loved the mushrooms.

If we'd have been in Galway longer we would definitely have made a return visit to Da Tang Noodle House. I would have loved to try the tofu & mixed vegetable noodles and I would certainly have ordered the garlicky pak choi and coriander salad again. I also just noticed that Da Tang have recently opened a takeaway specialising in Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysian and Chinese cuisines. Here's the menu, if you check it out let me know how it is.

The next morning after a lazy breakfast of leftover food from the cottage eaten in bed at the hotel we wandered around town in the rain. I was craving hot chocolate and we decided to check out Butler's Chocolate Cafe on the off chance that they'd have something vegan friendly.

Sadly no vegan hot chocolate was to be found but they did make me a great decaf soya latte with hazelnut syrup which kept my paws warm as we wandered around the Saturday market. 

We spotted some promisingly vegan friendly stalls like Govindas and a nearby falafel stall.

I just love how carrots look with their tops still on!

There were plenty of vegan options at this hummus, pesto & olive stall too. Every label had a full list of ingredients, perfect for the vegan traveller, and there were plenty of stalls dotted around selling wonderful looking fresh bread.

We took photos at the market rather than trying anything because we were working up an appetite for lunch at Quay Street Kitchen. We'd popped in earlier to ask about their vegan options and whilst we waited for someone to come over I spotted some very well worn copies of Veganomicon and Vegan Eats World! Just seeing these in an omnivorous restaurant gave me faith in their vegan options and unsurprisingly we weren't disappointed.

We both ordered the Vegan Wave Fish Fingers which were served with home-made tartar sauce, skinny fries and organic leaves.

This beautifully presented dish certainly lived up to expectations. The chips were fried until they had that perfect bite to them, the tofu was coated in a wonderfully crisp batter, the tartar sauce was tangy and I even ate the salad! The only thing I would have done differently was to up the kelp content of the beer batter as I could hardly taste it.

By the end of our main course we were stuffed but couldn't resist splitting a red velvet cupcake.

It was a delicious end to the meal, the cake itself was dense but light and the fluffy buttercream on top was beautifully sweet.

We really enjoyed our meal at Quay Street Kitchen and if we'd have had more time I would have loved to try their Vegan Burger, Vegan Breakfast or Wild Mushroom Crostini, yum!

To end our trip we went for a drink at craft beer bar Salt House. We mainly picked this place because they have a beer menu on the website meaning that I wouldn't have to be that annoying dithery person at the bar franticly typing drink names into Barnivore but it also turned out to be one of the cutest pubs I've been to in a while.

I drank a beautifully crisp pear cider from New Zealand which was an excellent choice although not a very Irish end to the trip!

I loved our Irish adventure! It seemed so ridiculous to have a country so close but to have never been there. I also loved getting to spend every day hanging out with Nick and excitingly it's only a month tomorrow that we're leaving for Seattle to begin my journey to Vida Vegan Con. I literally couldn't be more excited!

Connemara, Ireland.

After our whirlwind tour of Dublin we grabbed a rental car and headed west. We'd heard that County Galway was one of the best places to head towards if you wanted to see spectacular scenery so off we went. We rented a cottage (which was about twice the size of our house!) near Renvyle for a few days to do some relaxin' and explorin'. 

There were a few issues with the rental cottage all stemming from the fact that there was no information pack telling you how everything worked. If we'd known that the stove only lit with a match (and that only three out of eight burners worked) and that the water would come out a strange yellow colour due to the water in the area being coloured by local peat bogs we'd have saved ourselves a few hours of googling things, driving to the shops for matches and water and the first few hours would have been much more relaxing! 

All of these issues were thankfully made up for by the beautiful views and proximity to the beach.

We weren't sure if we'd be able to stock up on vegan treats and staples near where we were staying so we did a bit of shopping in Dublin just in case. We'd also packed some Vegusto cheese and sausages that we bought at Brighton Veg Fest.

We needn't have worried about not being able to find exciting vegan food though because a 15 minute drive away from the cottage was the Letterfrack Country Shop.

This place was chock full of awesome stuff from shelf stable sauces, pestos and polenta to Granovita sausage mix, Tartex spread and all manner of nuts, seeds and grains.

They also had an impressive range of refrigerated Alpro milks, yoghurts and desserts alongside hummus and juices.

I think I was most surprised and impressed by this stash of Fry's products in the freezer. In the UK a small store like this would pretty much exclusively carry Quorn, maaaaybe Linda McCartney, but this shop has chosen to make most of their vegetarian products vegan inclusive. Yay!

So, if you're headed over to Connemara I would strongly suggest that you skip shopping in Dublin, save yourself some cash and stock up here instead. The only thing I don't remember spotting was vegan margarine so maybe grab that from Down to Earth in Dublin.

Whilst we were driving around to buy the aforementioned matches and water we popped into Lidl and discovered these potato farls. A little googling told me that a potato farl is a type of bread made with potato flakes. The potato content varies from recipe to recipe and these were around 70% potato and 100% delicious! We served one with beans and the other toasted with just margarine. 

I preferred the straight up margarine one as it let the flavour of the farl shine through. I'm going to be keeping my eyes peeled for these in shops near me.

After all of our trips into various stores we'd amassed quite an impressive collection of biscuits. There were Bourbon's, Oreo's, Orange Creams and Fruit Shortcakes. I love biscuits! I hadn't had a Fruit Shortcake in years and I'd forgotten how much I liked them.

I also like stout and I was pleased to be able to pick up a few bottles of O'Hara's vegan stout in the Letterfrack Country Shop. Bottled stout isn't as good as on tap but it's infinitely better than no stout at all.

We spent our days walking up hills in the wind and rain...

...and our evenings curled up in front of the fire (do yourself a favour and buy a fire log from the store, making a fire from scratch is a pain), reading books, and watching movies. It was perfect.

After our sojourn in the countryside we headed to Galway which surprised us with its vegan friendliness, more about that next time!

St Patrick's Day in Dublin.

If I could give you one piece of advice about Dublin it would be this "Do not arrive in the middle of the St Patrick's Day Parade". You might think that this is obvious and wonder why somebody would do such a thing but we did. Going on this trip on St Patrick's Day was a total coincidence, we had some time to go away in March and I wanted to cross Ireland off of my 30 before 30 list so we just took our available dates and ran with it. It should have become obvious when we tried to book a hotel and everywhere was either fully booked or extortionately priced but, nope, it didn't dawn on us until after we'd booked the surprisingly expensive hostel! It worked out well in the end and after a bus that stopped halfway to where we wanted to go, lunch at chain restaurant Wagamama, and an uncomfortable taxi ride with an incredibly homophobic man we were finally ready to take on Dublin.

We originally picked Generator Hostel as our city base because of the aforementioned silly hotel prices but it was awesome. I'm a big fan of hostels, especially as so many offer private rooms, because really what else do you need apart from somewhere to sleep when you only have a short period of time in a city? Nick, up until now, has been less of a fan but I think this stay went some way towards winning him around to my scuzzier travel ideals!

After some exploring in the rain to look at the green-lit buildings...

...and a lot of sidestepping incredibly drunk people in Temple Bar we headed to Cornucopia for dinner. I'd read a lot of good things about Cornucopia and they definitely didn't disappoint. We ordered one of the meals from the blackboard, the Irish Stew, which came with two salads, your choice of bread & a glass of wine or juice.

The stew was filled with hearty root veggies, seitan and barley and I chose an orange and carrot juice and some Irish soda bread to accompany it. There were about 8 or 9 salads to choose from and I went for their signature potato salad and a broccoli salad with slivered almonds, red onions and a tangy orange dressing. The potato salad was my favourite part of the meal, the garlic mayo dressing was perfect and it was plumped up with amazing roasted hazelnuts. This is definitely something I'll be trying to recreate at home. The meal cost €14.95 which is definitely reasonable for such an enormous meal. We had leftovers which we popped into a takeout box and ate for breakfast the next day.

As we were in Ireland and it was St Patrick's Day I was determined to hunt down a pint of vegan stout. I used to drink the occasional Guinness before I went vegetarian but given how grim drinking something thats been filtered through fish guts is I went on a googling mission to find a suitable beverage.

The stouts I found that are definitely suitable for vegans are D'Arcey's Stout made by Dublin Brewing Co and O'Hara's Carlow Stout made by Carlow Brewing Co. Luckily Generator Hostel had O'Hara's on tap as well as a great selection of beers by Brooklyn Brewing Co and Fentiman's soft drinks. Cheers!

The next day we went back to Cornucopia as everywhere else I'd bookmarked was closed due to the bank holiday. I decided on something a little lighter for lunch and picked the wrap.

The Cornucopia wrap is stuffed full of carrot & diakon slaw, smoked tofu, cashew & coriander pesto and spring onions. It was genuinely the best wrap I've ever eaten, I loved the combination of flavours and the perfect crunchiness of the salad. It was also only €4.95, Dublin's a pretty expensive city so a filling meal for this price was great news.

For dessert I tried a piece of the Lemon, Blueberry & Coconut Torte.

These aren't flavours that top my list of dessert fave's but I really wanted something sweet and the fancy style of this slice jumped out at me. Overall I enjoyed it, especially the blueberry topping, but I find that coconut can be quite an overpowering flavour and I was left wishing that the flavour of the lemons had shone through a little more.

After lunch we headed to the Leprechaun Museum which was as ridiculous as it sounds. We learnt a lot about Irish Folklore, got to pretend to be leprechauns by clambering about on giant furniture, and ran through a rainbow to find a pot of gold! We decided not to go to Cornucopia for our third meal in a row, partly because we were planning breakfast there the next day and partly because we didn't want to look too creepy. I kid. Kinda.

As it was still raining, a theme in Ireland, we decided to go to the indie cinema to see Robot & Frank (we both enjoyed it, I cried a lot!) and as Milano, the Irish version of UK pizza chain Pizza Express, was almost next door it seemed like the perfect choice. Pizza Express isn't somewhere I usually get that excited about because I love me a cheesy pizza but on a cold, wet evening something about a tonne of dough and fresh tomato sauce really appealed.

At Milano, like at Pizza Express, the bases and sauce are vegan so you just need to omit the cheese and throw on whatever veggies you fancy. I went for roma tomatoes, mushrooms, artichokes, and, at Nick's suggestion, garlic oil, which I have to say elevated the pizza to a new level of awesomeness. We also got a side of dough balls to share. These usually come with garlic butter but they can switch that out for garlic oil which even my meat and dairy loving dad thinks is better!

The next morning we went to Cornucopia again to try their breakfast which is served until noon. The breakfast menu has some set breakfast options but we also decided to take advantage of the individual portions section to add some favourites to the meal.

From the set menu we chose the Scrambled Tofu with roasted peppers, onions & tamari which came with two slices of toast and a cup of tea or coffee.

We then added two veggie sausages, a portion of breakfast beans and another slice of toast.

This turned out to be just the right amount of food for two people. We enjoyed the mustard seed filled scramble and loved both the basil and granary toasts. The homemade veggie sausages were the standout from this meal though, upon seeing them I was a little unsure but as well as being super unusual they were super delicious and I loved the flavour and texture that the sesame seeds added. The only thing we were a little disappointed by was that the hash browns weren't vegan. This disappointment was eased pretty quickly when I spotted this Spring Onion Scone and I grabbed it to go for our road trip to the west coast. 

It came with a little tub of soy butter and a knife and it was damn good. I wish I was this good at baking scones! I can't wait to go back to Dublin to eat at Cornucopia again, everything we tried there was great, everyone we met working there was lovely and the atmosphere was really mellow. The place is also pretty big so even when it seemed ridiculously busy we were always able to find a seat.

Our final stop in Dublin was Blazing Salads, I'd been wanting to try this place for the whole trip but every time we walked past it was closed.

We grabbed a piece of the Tofu Pizza and a Spring Roll for the road.

I found the spring roll a little disappointing. Blazing Salads is quite a healthy place, with sugar free cakes and the like, and I think that I prefer my spring rolls deep fried. The tofu pizza on the other hand was delicious. Whilst it was a slightly challenging thing to eat in a car it was well worth getting slightly oily fingers for. The crust managed to stay crisp even after two and a half ours of the three and a half hour journey and the basil, tofu and veggie topping was great. Next time I'm in Dublin I'll definitely be re-visiting Blazing Salads.

As you can see eating out in Dublin was super easy, we also found plenty of vegan snacks and staples in the Spar stores dotted around the city. My next blog post takes us across the country to the west coast where we stayed in a cottage by the sea for a few days before heading on to Galway.