Five Fave's: Store Cupboard Essentials

I love to read about other people's favourite things. Whether we're talking store cupboard essentials, food, restaurant experiences, make up, vegan products in general, I love it all! Given how much I love reading everyone's top five posts I thought I should jump on in there and write some lists of my own starting with my top five store cupboard essentials.

Nooch. Both Nick and I feel a little strange if we don't have nooch in the house and I always re-stock when I open the final canister in the house. This is our preferred brand and actually the only brand I've ever seen in the UK. I wish we could buy it in bulk here like you can in the US.

Pasta. Pasta always plays a part in my favourite quick and easy meals. Throw some canned tomatoes on the stove, wilt some spinach up in there and throw in some seasonings and you have a great, simple, healthy meal that takes little to no effort. I love white pasta for almost everything; I usually buy organic as the regular kind gives me more of a stomach ache when I eat a tonne of it... which I will because you use it to make mac & cheese and I refuse to think about portion control when I'm eating my favourite foods! I'm also partial to some rice pasta but wholewheat can get the fork outa my kitchen.

Canned Beans. I know it's lazy but I just cannot be bothered to simmer beans from scratch. I usually have cannelini, black, pinto and aduki beans in the cupboard alongside chickpeas which means I have a bean suitable for most recipes. Aduki may seem a little unnecessary but you use 'em to make my favourite AFR recipe, the Miso Stir Fry with Beans and Greens, and sometimes I really, really need to eat that!

Silken Tofu. As this is a store cupboard list regular tofu can't make an appearance but speaking as a lady with a tofu tattoo it's fair to say that I love it all equally. I use this to make omelettes, brownies, pies, Alfredo sauces and salad dressings. It's rad. My brand of choice is Mori-Nu and I always buy firm.

Stock Cubes. A lot of my favourite recipes use broth and I think we've all ascertained that I'm not the broth making type. I've done it once or twice but to me it's not worth the effort. I keep vegetable, Not-Chicken and Not-Beef in my store cupboard at all times. Some of my favourite broth containing recipes are the Mac Daddy from Veganomicon, AFR's Caulipots and almost any seitan recipe.

You actually can't buy these here yet but I order mine from iHerb where you can also buy Dandies, Clif bars and plenty of other great vegan stuff. The shipping to Europe's super reasonable if you order less than 4lb's of stuff & you can use my code JOJ321 to get money off of your first order if you'd like to.

Have you written a five store cupboard essentials post for Vegan MoFo? If so link it in the comments so I can check it out.

Travel Tip Tuesday - Zagreb

I'm in San Francisco right now but today I'll be taking you on a virtual tour of Zagreb's vegan eateries for Travel Tip Tuesday.

I was in Zagreb in late June with my friends Melanie and Carmen who both live in Vienna. We met up in Barcelona last year and I'm loving our fairly new tradition of meeting up in different European cities. 

Or first dinner destination was vegetarian restaurant Vegehop.

Vegehop have a large menu with a lot of vegan options but it didn't take me long to hone in on the Moussaka...

...which I ordered with a side of Greek Salad.

Honestly this tofu, chickpea and olive stuffed salad was so huge that it could have been a meal in itself but I had no issue polishing off both plates of food. The moussaka was filled with tofu, kale, mushrooms and zucchini and there's no doubt in my mind that I'd order it again.

On our second visit I ordered the Seitan Burger which I loved. It came in a seeded bun with plenty of mayo, some lettuce and a gherkin which I removed. 

This burger was huge, filling, flavourful and only cost £2.20, what more could you ask for?! 

The real highlight of Vegehop's vegan offerings are their cakes, specifically the Danube Waves. We ordered a slice to share on the first night and if I didn't love these ladies so much I may have stabbed them with the dessert fork and run away with the whole thing. Luckily I'm learning to share food but on our second visit I did the sensible thing and took home two pieces just for me.

The base of this insanely delicious cake is a vanilla sponge, like a pound cake in texture, interspaced with waves of chocolate batter and filled with sour cherries, next comes a not-too-sweet mousse-like layer and then the cake is topped off with a semi-sweet chocolate icing. It was crazy good and I love being surprised by unexpectedly brilliant desserts.

It took us until the third day of our trip to check out Zrno's brand new Bio Bistro on Meduliceva which only opened the day after we arrived. We discovered their fresh, healthy, lunch menu thanks to a recommendation from a friendly vegan chap at the health food store and we loved this place so much that we ended up visiting three times in three days.

On day one I ordered the Greenpeace Pasta which came with wholewheat pasta, seasonal leafy greens, and smoked tofu with vegan cheese and fresh basil.

I enjoyed this but I need to try to remember that I don't love wholewheat pasta, aside from that this dish was fresh and delicious and I loved the pesto.

On day two I opted for the Brown Rice Gomoku. I love brown rice and this short grain rice dish with mixed vegetables, seitan, tofu and a side of steamed greens was fantastic, filling and healthy.

I went a little fancier for our final meal and ordered the Seitan Cordon Bleu which was unlike any I'd had before. 

The crisp coating around this seitan steak was perfect and the steaks themselves went wonderfully with the steamed greens, tomatoey barbecue sauce and creamy tofu mayonnaise. This was definitely my favourite meal out of the three and if I lived near Zrno I would find myself ordering it again and again.

Something else I'd love to be able to order again is their Chocolate Temptation cake. This dense but moist cake was filled with perfectly fluffy chocolate mousse and toped with chocolate ganache and a chocolate drizzle.

We were all super impressed with how delicious this cake was, rich but not too sweet, and then we were really surprised to find out that it's sweetened with agave. I wish I was eating a slice of this right now.

Our final dine-out destination in Zagreb was Green Point, a veggie fast food spot located right in the centre of the city. I ordered the Grilled Seitan Burger which was totally delicious.

I love seitan and I love burgers so a seitan burger is always a winner in my mind. This one was especially delicious as it was well seasoned and came with a really delicious soya mayonnaise. It was also about £2.35 which is a ridiculous bargain.

We all had a wonderful time in Zagreb and I'll be back next tuesday to show you what else we loved so stay tuned.

Mac 'n Cheese Monday - San Francisco Edition

I didn't think I was going to manage a Mac 'n Cheese Monday post today, the two places I wanted to head to get my mac on (thanks to your awesome recommendations) were Homeroom in Oakland and Source over in the Design District. Unfortunately neither of these spots aligned with today's riding bicycles in Golden Gate Park plan. Soooo we did the next best thing, cheese picnic!

Yesterday we went to Rainbow Grocery and picked up a tub of Treeline soft French style nut cheese and a Dr Cow aged cashew cheese and today when we picked up our bikes we completed the trio with a tub of The Cultured Kitchen smoked cheddar cashew cheese. We also grabbed a Herb Slab, which is like a less oily focaccia, because cheese without bread is just sad!

This was one of the best picnics ever, not just because of the awesome setting and the huge appetite we'd worked up biking all over the park but because the quality of our cheese and bread choices were outstanding. The Treeline cheese is a tangy soft cashew cheese with lemony overtones, Nick enjoyed this one a lot whilst I preferred the Dr Cow which is a harder cheese. Our absolute favourite was the smoky cheddar cheese though, from a brand I'd ever heard of before this one was more like a dip than a spreadable cheese and was reminiscent of the sauce for one of my favourite mac & cheeses from Vegan Diner.

I think this was a super successful Cheese Monday even if there was no mac - I'll definitely be heading to Source and/or Homeroom this week though so expect a proper Mac 'n Cheese Monday post next week.

PS - My blog is insisting on time / date stamping my posts with the time in the UK so whilst it says I posted this on Tuesday 17th it is very definitely still Monday 16th here in San Francisco!

Football Food Sunday!

Hey MoFo's! This is gonna be a short one today, just some fun FFS pic's. We spent the morning exploring The Mission and now we're heading to Japan town before I hop over to Berkeley to meet a friend.

We started the day with a sandwich from Ike's place. We got the PeeWee which is stuffed with vegan turkey, poppyseed slaw and Swiss cheese. Their sandwiches all come with a hot sauce which we didn't realise until after we'd ordered - it was a good thing we didn't notice though because if we had we might have opted to leave it off and it was deeeelicious!

After the sandwich we headed to a classic breakfast location, Bi-Rite Creamery, for ice cream. The vegan flavour is chocolate coconut and we topped ours with Newman O's.

After this we chilled in Mission Dolores Park before heading to Valencia Street where we couldn't resist a taco from The Little Chihuahua.

Given my chilli issues I'm not 100% sure a Green Chilli Tofu Taco was a great idea but I can't resist tofu and despite the epic mouth burn factor of this taco we really enjoyed it!

Hope you're having a great weekend catch ya tomorrow for Mac & Cheese Monday - if anyone knows of a great mac & cheese spot in the Bay Area lemme know!

Saturday Snoozeday: San Francisco edition

Today wasn't much of a Snoozeday! The wonders of jet lag had me up and raring to go at 6:30am, but I'm not complaining because we're in San Francisco! Yay!

We headed to The Plant for breakfast because it was one of the only places in the area that was open early. I ordered the Basil Pesto Tofu Scramble which comes with potatoes, wholewheat sourdough toast and fruit.

I really loved the scramble, the tofu was kinda shredded rather than mashed or in chunks which was both interesting and delicious. I'll be trying this technique at home for sure. It was also full of tasty basil and tomatoes, yum. I love carbs so getting both potatoes and toast was always gonna be a win but I hate melon which made up over half of the fruit on the plate.

After breakfast we wandered around the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building and found Pepple's Donuts, I'd heard of this all vegan Oakland based donut co' before but I was surprised and excited by the amount of variety at their small stall. I picked up two donuts, salt caramel and chocolate cookie.

I ate the chocolate cookie donut almost immediately, the inside was chocolate too and the delicious chocolate glaze on the outside had just the right amount of sweetness. There was also a great looking juice place next to Pepple's which had 5 types of green juice as well as a tonne of fruity mixes. Hodo Soy also have a stand outside the building and we bought some delicious tofu egg salad from the rad dude manning the stall.

I'm gonna keep exploring the city now so I'll catch y'all tomorrow for Football Food Sunday!

Facsimile Friday - Blossom Benedict

Welcome to the second instalment of Facsimile Friday MoFo's. Last week saw me whipping up a noochy tofu scram from Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse in Austin and today sees me re-creating the best Benedict I've ever eaten. The Benedict in question is on the menu at Cafe Blossom on Carmine in NYC which is approximately 3473 miles away. 

The Benedict itself comes with house-made cornbread, ham and grilled asparagus and I described it in my review as both "Brilliant" and "One of the best meals I've ever eaten". High praise.

If I woke up and decided, what the hell, I'm having this for brunch, it would cost around £1556 including transfers and tips. This is obviously ridiculous so I decided to have a crack at making it at home instead.

My version includes home-made cornbread, bologna, grilled asparagus and a homemade hollandaise.

It is not as pretty as the one from Blossom neither was it as delicious but I think I had a damn good crack at it and it was obviously way cheaper to make than flying to NYC just to eat the original would be.

I used the Chipotle Scallion Double Cornbread recipe from Vegan Diner, Yves Bologna slices (fried in a little olive oil), a simple tofu "egg" recipe which involves dredging the tofu in equal parts apple cider vinegar and olive oil plus seasonings and then baking for 15 minutes each side, the Hollandaise recipe from Vegan Brunch was next and then I topped it off with braised asparagus cooked in a little oil, white wine, salt and pepper. We also coated the cornbread in breadcrumbs and fried that for good measure.

I'd say that I'd definitely make the egg, hollandaise and asparagus components again but I'd probably replace the Yves bacon with Redwood veggie bacon and the cornbread with a simple wholewheat English muffin just to make the whole meal quicker and easier which, at brunch, is important.