Groezrock Festival.

Last weekend Nick & I borrowed his dad's camper van & headed for Belgium. After last years disappointing experience at Groezrock we weren't sure whether to go back this year or not. The line up looked awesome as ever (Rancid, Anti-Flag, Bouncing Souls, Good Riddance, Hot Water Music, The Copyrights, Alkaline Trio, Lagwagon, Reel Big Fish, Motherfucking Refused!!) but remembering how annoyed we were at having to miss bands to trek to the van last year just so that we could eat and thinking back to having to buy crappy corporate water or bad beer was off-putting. After the festival last year I tweeted at & e-mailed the festival organisers to see what could be done about fixing the veggie food situation and after not hearing back from them I assumed that nothing was going to change...that was until we saw on Twitter that Just Like Your Mom catering were going to be there.

Just Like Your Mom are a vegan catering company who work closely with Alpro Soya to provide vegan food for festivals, events and touring bands. We knew they'd been catering for bands backstage at the festival last year (so close but yet so far!) and we were really really excited that we'd be able to eat this year. We booked out festival tickets immediately!

On arriving in the festival arena on Saturday morning we lined up to buy our food & drink tickets and then went in search of Just Like Your Mom. We spotted the stall with its large vegan food sign but they weren't open yet & there was no way to tell what they'd be selling...mysterious!

Their stall opened at 12 and when we went back there are 11.45 there was already a line, I was really happy to see that other people at the festival were excited about vegan food!

Once they opened their doors the crowd were visibly excited and soon it became obvious why. They had loads of Alpro Soya products for sale including Speculoos Soya Desserts and flavoured milks, Wheaty Chorizo Spacebars & a menu of delicious sounding hot food.

My eyes were immediately draw towards these delicious looking cupcakes. Chocolate with a whipped cream topping, a caramel swirl & chocolate chips. These were soft & muffin like and the frosting wasn't overly sweet meaning that they made an excellent breakfast. I couldn't believe what an improvement this was on last years sad (read, non-existent) veggie catering effort. Cupcakes at a festival! Amazing!!

There were loads of excellent savoury food options to choose from and we got started with some mock chicken nuggets...

...these crispy Alpro Soya nuggets came with a delicious homemade garlic dressing. They were perfectly crisp and to be served a homemade dressing at a festival instead of cheap ketchup was excellent.

Nick opted for a sausage roll...

...these seemed homemade which was brilliant and although I only got to take one bite (these were sold out when I went back to get my own!) I can safely say they it was delicious, perfectly soft flaky pastry encasing a delicious sausage, what more could you ask for?!

Last year at Groezrock the only beer for sale was Jupiler which although vegan isn't the kind of beer I like meaning that I stuck to soft drinks. This year Groezrock also had a 'Special Beer' section of the bar which sold Hoegaarden and my new favourite vegan beer, Hoegaarden Rosée. This sweet, unfiltered, low alcohol beer is perfect for a cider lover like me & I was happy to be able to spend my drink tickets on something nice. Unfortunately a bit of internet research tells me that this beer's only available in Benelux which I guess just means I need to plan more trips to those countries!

The next day Nick & I headed straight for the Just Like Your Mom stand for breakfast. We were contemplating more nuggets or sausage rolls but once we spotted these we quickly changed our mind!

These flaky chocolatey croissants were a great way to start the day. Also, vegan croissants at a festival is kind of ridiculous...ridiculously awesome! After catching Anti Flag's acoustic set we got back in line for more food and I finally tried a burger.

There were three burgers to choose from, the Crispy Burger, the Veggie Burger and the Eastern Burger. I chose the Crispy Burger and was very pleased to find that it was coated with a very similar crispy breading as the nuggets.

The Crispy Burger came on a soft warm bun with a great salad and the same garlic dressing as the nuggets.

Nick stuck with his festival favourite, the Veggie Burger.

This soyabean burger was filled with sweetcorn, carrot, peppers & onion and also came on a soft warm bun with a good salad.

Yet again we were incredibly impressed with the quality of Just Like Your Mom's food, these guys aren't like any other festival caterers I've ever encountered. The burgers came with two types of salad leaves, red onion, tomato, cucumber and grated carrot. The bread seemed freshly baked too & was nothing like the usual long-life-rock-hard crap I remember getting served at festivals as an omnivore many years ago. I really really hope that Just Like Your Mom will be at Groezrock next year...judging by the huge line at the stand every time we tried to grab food I'd say that they were super popular.

This year there's no doubt in my mind that we'll be revisiting Groezrock festival next year, wanna come?!

Gent Part II.

On our way home from Groezrock Nick & I managed to find the time to pop into Gent to grab some food. We visited Gent last year & had a delicious lunch at Avalon so we were excited to get to go back & see what other foodie delights the city had to offer. As it was Easter Sunday we were very happy that Lekker GEK was open but we arrived a bit too early & spent a lovely morning wandering around the park before lunch.

Can you spot me hidden amongst the trees?

Lekker GEC is located just opposite the train station in Gent & it is an all vegan cafe. They have a cafeteria style buffet option as well as menu items to choose from. The lady working that day was really helpful and happily translated the menu options to us and after a lot of um-ing & ah-ing we both went for the Seitan Stew with Chips because we love seitan & it's not something you often see on menu's in the UK.

This came with loads of delicious sides my favourite being the cous cous, almond & sultana salad which I think ended up being my favourite part of the meal, it was so delicious. The chips were good & the vegan mayo was great but we found the stew a little bland & thought that the seitan seemed a little too soggy & almost tvp like in texture. It was a huge plate of food though & we left stuffed & with dessert to take away.

The slice of cake was huge & the cake itself had a dense but moist crumb and a deep chocolatey flavour. The real star here was the rich fudgey icing - I could happily have just eaten a huge tub of that!

Hopefully I'll be back in Gent again one day, it's surprisingly close to Brighton & I really need to visit Komkommertijd next so that I will have been to all of Gent's totally vegan establishments!

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...

Brussels

Here's my final post from our European honeymoon adventure

We spent the last couple of days of our holiday in Belgium as we didn't want to end our travels with one hideously long day of driving. We ate a lot of frites, which were delicious.

This picture's more me than the pommes frites but hey, you guys know what chips look like!

Mirroring how we celebrated out engagement we had an awesome floor picnic at our hotel. We headed out to get food from the health food store under vegan macrobiotic lunch spot Den Teepot. We picked up a couple of spinach and tofu filo pastry rolls which reminded me a little of spanakopita...

...a sausage roll to share...

... and a couple of slices of pear tart...

The sausage roll was pretty unexciting but although simple the tofu & spinach rolls were delicious and the pear tart had just the right amount of sweetness.

We also snacked on random food we found at on our travels...

I was excited to find Speculoos chocolate and that Galler noissette praline bar is, I think, the best chocolate I've ever eaten.

The next day we headed for Calais and had one final breakfast in the van before heading home.

Our Honeymoon was SO awesome, I loved getting to spend three whole weeks of uninterrupted hanging out time with Nick, living in the van, getting to see so many countries on one journey & getting to eat so much amazing vegan food.

I'm taking part in Vegan MoFo for the first time this year, it starts on Monday! I'm really excited and I'll be posting more about my plans tomorrow.

Gent

So after getting married in February Nick & I finally went off on our honeymoon at the end of July!

We hired a VW van...

...and we drove it around Europe for three weeks. We visited Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Luxembourg and my next few blog posts are going to be all about our trip.

After a quiet first night at a campsite just west of Ghent we woke up bright & early and headed into the city for food and sightseeing.

Ghent's certainly a beautiful, that's me outside the cathedral but we were hungry and this is a food blog so I'll move onto the important part. As it was a Monday a couple of the places I'd like to have visited were closed but Avalon looked great so we headed there.

We were excited to see that they had a large garden and chose to take advantage of the lovely weather and sit outside...

...as it's not something you get to do too often in the UK!

After a quick look at the menu I knew I'd be having the lasagna, as I mentioned in one of my last blogposts I LOVE lasagna!

Nick was a little more unsure of what to go for but in the end decided on the broccoli pie...

Both meals were huge & came with side of bread and salad. The lasagna was our definite favourite, really tomatoey, loads of pasta and we liked the pesto dressing. Nick's pie was good albeit more quiche than pie, and whilst I loved the sides of broccoli in a creamy sauce, roasted butternut squash, carrots and onion and a bulgar wheat salad he wasn't the biggest fan and ended up polishing off a large chunk of my lasagna!

Even though we were stuffed dessert was a must especially after I'd noticed there was pie on the menu so we got a piece to share.

Apple pie, topped with strawberries & a vanilla sauce. Nick ate all the vanilla-ey bits, I ate all the fruit bits - perfect!

I definitely left wishing we were going to have time to go back there, maybe one day!

On our way out of the city we stumbled upon a little health food store called Ayuno. The store was really well stocked with tofu's, vegan milks and chocolate but we just stocked up on veggies for our dinner at the campsite and picked up these delicious treats.

So Yeah! chocolate ice cream, gummy fruits & gummy cola bottles. We enjoyed these whilst lying in a tiny patch of shade behind the van!

Next time I'll be writing about a flying visit to Cologne & our amazing weekend in Berlin.