Facsimilie Friday - Bouldin Creek Scramble

I kicked off Vegan MoFo 2012 with post about Austin's Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse and in it I talked about the amazing noochy scramble they make. I didn't include this next picture in the post because it kinda sucks & it really doesn't convey how delicious this meal was. It was my favourite out of everything I tried there and I knew I wanted to recreate it as soon as I came up with Facsimilie Friday. Facsimile Friday is where I'm going to recreate my favourite dishes from my travels. The best place I've ever been is Austin, Texas. I love everything about that city - the vegan scene, the people, the weather, the amount of rad outdoor stuff there is to do, food carts, live music everywhere. It's just the best. Go! I could go on and on about why I love Bouldin Creek and Austin for hours but this is about scramble to I'll try to stick to that.

Also when I said I wanted to recreate it I meant I wanted Nick to recreate it. He's the resident scramble maker in this house - it's one of his specialities alongside pancakes, microwave cake and having the patience to whisk things until properly thickened.

As you can see the Bouldin Creek scramble is made up of steamed spinach, fresh local tomatoes, noochy tofu scramble and sourdough toast with a slice of lemon on the side. This means that my plate of food is also made up of those exact same things. That's how Facsimile Friday works people! I even managed to find an organic English tomato which was as close to good as British tomatoes ever get. I also fried my spinach with garlic because I freaking love garlic and because I couldn't be bothered to get my steamer out of the drawer it lives in.

As I mentioned Nick was in charge of scramble and he refuses to measure things or follow recipes properly so I'll try to give you a decent idea of what he did.

We always buy Taifun tofu in 400g packs, this makes 3 good servings of scramble. It's super extra firm (not a real thing) and you really don't need to press it. I would press any other tofu before making this recipe. He crumbled and smooshed the tofu in a bowl until it had the right still-chunky consistency and then fried it in 1 tsp of olive oil until it started to crisp up a little. This is not normal scramble practice in our house but it works in this recipe. He then added about 1/4 tsp of turmeric, 1/2 tsp of onion powder & 2 cloves of garlic smooshed in a press and fried for a further 2 minutes. He then added about 1 1/2 tsps of American style mustard before adding the best part, 1/2 of a cup of nooch. This got stirred in for a few minutes and then he seasoned the whole thing with S+P before adding 1 1/2 TBS of Alpro soya cream.

This didn't come out quite the same as the Bouldin Creek version and we think we needed to squeeze a little lemon into the scramble itself and fry the tofu for longer before adding any of the other ingredients, maybe 10 minutes rather than 5? I'm not sure. We're bad at writing recipes!

We love A LOT of nooch, you may not. If not this isn't the scramble for you. There are a million other scrambles out there so no worries, you'll find one you love.

Vegan MoFo 2013 - Thirsty Thursday

Thirsty Thursday is one of the themes we came up with in the Vegan MoFo workshop at Vida Vegan Con and I jumped on it because I love the idea of a no-cook day!

Today I thought I'd show you some of my favourite drinks, alcoholic and non. I recently got the book 365 vegan smoothies because I was trying to convince myself that I don't need a juicer!

So far it's not really working and the only smoothie I've loved enough to make again is the first one I tried. The Sassy Green Kick-Start is delicious and packed full of kale, banana, oranges, green grapes and lemon juice. I sub regular water for the coconut because, ew, I tried it a couple of times and I think it ruins everything it touches!

This next one is the best green juice I've ever tasted. It's from Chaco Canyon in Seattle and it's an apple, orange, spinach and mint combo that made my tastebuds explode. What can I say, I like my juices fruity.

I also enjoy a fancy fruity cocktail from time to time. I'm not a huge drinker but this Rhubarb G + T from Terre a Terre sucked me right in.

I also love the cocktail night that Boho Gelato put on in conjunction with Slice Sussex, this monthly event always makes half of the list vegan so that everyone can enjoy. If you're in Brighton the next one's tomorrow.

Green Juices are hard to come by in Brighton, although I've been tipped off recently that Guarana Bar on Sydney Street is the place to go, and when you can't go green go red! This strawberry, kale, broccoli and spinach combo is jam packed with vitamin c and more importantly it's delicious.

I'm also a big fan of peach juice, I hardly ever spot this so when I do I dive right in.

Cider has always had a special place in my heart, in my teens and early twenties I used to drink a lot of cheap dirty cider but now I have the occasional nice cider. Honestly my alcohol tolerance is low enough that just one of these Strawberry Lime Rekorderling ciders can push me over the edge!

Probably my favourite and impossible to find drink is lonkero, or, gin in a tin! It's Finnish and it used to be on sale at one of my favourite pubs, The Northern Lights. It's currently unavailable which makes me a little sad - do we need to have another protest?

I'm occasionally partial to a beer or two. Corona is great when paired with a burrito and a lime slice. 

My favourite beer of all is Lone Star, I'm not really a beer connoisseur so I can't really explain why. I think it might be because it reminds me of Austin!

I spent a long time researching vegan stouts before visiting Ireland earlier this year (wow, was that really only this year? That's crazy.) and my favourite ended up being O'Hara's. I hadn't drunk stout since going vegetarian many years ago and I really enjoyed reuniting with an old favourite.

My other favourite drinks are root beer (which is getting a post of its very own) and water which, lets face it, isn't something I can really blog about. Just in case you're fascinated by my water consumption I drink around 3 litres a day and whilst I like it fancied it up with a slice of cucumber on occasion I need you to keep your lemon slices well away!

Not all vegans are bothered about whether what they're drinking is vegan but I am. We're lucky in the UK because a lot of the big supermarkets including Sainsbury's, The Co-op and Marks & Spencer's label their alcohol as vegan in the same way that they label their food. That definitely makes shopping easier! I also use Barnivore and UK site Veggie Wines to do my research into branded drinks and, as I'm sure you can see, I'm not missing out on any fun!

What I Ate Wednesday - Vegan MoFo 2013 Edition.

I see a lot  of super fancy and super healthy days on What I Ate Wednesday posts but that's not what I'm all about. This is just a day in the life of a regular grrrl who's trying to clear out her fridge! I'm basically showing you what a slightly lazy vegan might eat on a day spent writing blog posts, reading blogs, masterminding MoFo giveaways and catching up with a weeks worth of Neighbours!

I started the day with an Alpro Fruity & Creamy peach yoghurt and a chopped banana with a glass of freshly squeezed OJ on the side.

I'm pretty fussy about yoghurts and the fruity & creamy style Alpro is the only kind I like, those and Sojasun but you can't buy them here.

Unsurprisingly I was hungry within a few hours of eating that so I made a sandwich and gathered some grapes and the last of the Dandies marshmallows from our Portland/Seattle trip.

My sandwich is made with Pizza flavoured Violife slices, margarine and a Warburtons sandwich thin. I think that anyone could probably make this sandwich! Violife sent me every flavour of their cheeses to review recently and I'm diligently working my way through all 10 packs before I write about them. Pizza flavour is definitely up there with my favourites.

A couple more hours passed and it was time for something a little more substantial, enter the baked potato.

I nuked this in the microwave for five minutes before letting it crisp up in the oven at gas mark 9 for 5 minutes each side. I heated up some Heinz baked beans and then fancied the whole thing up with a little of my favourite Vegusto cheese, the Piquant incase you're interested!

When dinner time rolled around I was starving again so I munched on a handful of Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Covered Mini Pretzels whilst I cooked. I'm down to my last bag so I'm extra glad I'm going to be back in the US at the end of next week.

Because I'm about to go away I'm trying really hard to clear out my fridge and for some reason I have a lot of leeks in my veggie drawer. I was racking my brain for leek based recipes when Nick (that's my husband for new MoFo readers. Hi!) suggested the Leek & Bean Cassoulet from Veganomicon. The man's a genius.

I had no suitable beans and I couldn't be bothered to make the biscuits so I subbed Soy Curls, pre-soaked in veggie stock and thoroughly squeezed, and made a stovetop version. This was delicious and it even used up all of our potatoes, I used to make this dish about fortnightly when my cookbook collection was smaller and I loved this reminder of an old favourite.

According to my MoFo plan today's WIAW was meant to show you guys what a British vegan eats on an average day. I've failed pretty miserably at that because I ate, um, three things that aren't available here at all and one that's only currently available via mail order! I'll try to be more British next week!

Travel Tip Tuesday - Research.

Hey, hey! It's Travel Tip Tuesday ya'll!

As regular readers of the blog will know I love to travel, if it was feasible right now I'd pack a backpack and be off around the world in a split second. Whilst I don't profess to be the worlds most experienced traveller I do travel pretty regularly and I've done the majority of my travelling as a vegan.

This first instalment of Travel Tip Tuesday is all about research. I'm sure that many of you are fly by the seat of your pants kinda travellers but I travel best when I have some vague semblance of a plan. I'm not talking about an hour by hour itinerary or anything just a few pre-trip ideas so that I don't end up missing out on the best a place has to offer. I thought it might be helpful to people planning their vegan adventures to get an insight into how I research my trips so I've put together these tips for ya.

• Find local bloggers, or bloggers who've visited your trip location recently, and read their posts. Get a feel for what's available in your planned travel location. You can also contact local bloggers for super up to date info or to get an answer to a specific question. I get plenty of e-mails asking about where my favourite breakfast's at (Infinity Cafe) or where to get a filling meal for under £5 (Planet India) and I love to help people out.

• Find out what the traditional accidentally vegan or almost-vegan dishes are in the country you're travelling to. Whether this is Spain's Paella or Moroccan Bessara it helps to know what dishes to look out for on the menus of non-vegan restaurants. I've found vegan paella all over Spain just by learning how to ask whether the dish is made with meat or vegetable stock.

Paella from Los Zarzales in Mallorca.

• Google is your friend! Often a quick search for Vegan + the name of the place you want to visit will reveal enough to keep you going for the duration of your trip. Of course this very much depends on where you're going "vegan + Portland" is gonna throw up more info than "vegan + La Palma". Google also has an obnoxious habit of searching for vegetarian instead of vegan, not the same Google, not the same!

• Use Happy Cow. Yes, sometimes places are missing or the information is out of date but it's our job as vegan travellers to fix that. You can always cross reference places on Happy Cow with a Yelp search to make sure the opening hours are correct. I love the Happy Cow app too, the location search function is great if you're in the middle of Ohio and want more than a Clif bar for breakfast - In that situation I used it to find a wonderful health food store where I picked myself up a delicious TLT. Score! One of my favourite things about Happy Cow is having real reviews to rely on when I'm working out what to order at a place I'll probably only get to visit once. This was super helpful when I was recently in Olympia for one meal, thanks to Happy Cow reviewers mentioning their favourite dishes I ended up ordering something amazing.

Vegetarian Almond Chicken from Saigon Rendezvous in Olympia.

• The Vegan Passport. Honestly, I am not the hugest fan of the vegan passport. It will only get you so far and it's quite rude to point a book at someone without attempting to converse in the language of the country you're visiting, another common language or at least frantic hand gestures. I'd say it's an acceptable last resort. 

• Another area where the vegan passport falls short is when you're trying to read labels. I've been making these little wallet sized lists of common non-vegan words and their translations for a while now and they're super useful. I love discovering fun treats like accidentally vegan cookies or chocolate when I'm travelling and it's definitely been very handy when sorting the vegan sausages from the egg filled veggie versions in Western Europe.

Exciting treats from Croatia and Spain.

Here's my vegan words template, you just need to use google translate to translate the words into whichever language you need. Here are the ones I've done so far in Swedish, Croatian, German and Spanish.

• Remember that your phone may not work abroad. I know this sounds super basic but the ability to look up a restaurant or health food store's location on your phone's map service is so ingrained that it can be easy to forget that it wont be an option abroad. I always print a google map of my location and mark the vegan dining options, stores and non-touristy places I'm interested in visiting. Make sure to include an actual address (cab drivers don't wanna see your scribbled on map!) and opening hours.

Maps from Zagreb and Seattle.

• There are options to access the internet abroad from your smart phone. For the US I have a T-Mobile pay by the day sim for my iPhone which costs $2 a day if I use it and nothing on the days I don't (It does need topping up every 90 days, or every 365 days if you top up by more than $100) This might not be practical if you're travelling on a super tight budget but it's really great if you'll be visiting somewhere repeatedly. We're looking into getting a mobile phone rental service for our trip to Japan next spring.

When it comes down to deciding where to travel, well, that's totally up to you! I'm sometimes a total food driven traveller, I decided to visit Austin specifically because of their food scene and I ended up loving the city so much that I now want to live there. On other trips I was interested in the city first and the food scene second. Neither of these styles is right or wrong and I've had pretty much equal success when it's come to feeding myself with both approaches - sure, sometimes the food's a little more exciting but I've never starved!

Next time we'll be covering packing and preparing which will include one of my favourite topics, snacks!

Mac 'n Cheese Monday - My Favourite Mac 'n Cheese Recipes

Mac 'n Cheese, or Macaroni Cheese, as we call it here in the UK, was always up there with my favourite foods before I was vegan and it's still right up there now hence my Mac 'n Cheese Monday theme.

As a student I used to eat the kind that comes out of a can and when I met my husband it was one of the only things he could cook so he made it for me a lot. When I first went vegan I avoided trying to make a macaroni cheese for fear of disappointing myself but once I threw myself into the nutritional yeasty deep end I realised I didn't need to worry, vegans can have cheesy pasta fun too!

Here are my favourite macaroni cheese recipes...

New Farm Cookbook Mac and Cheese

One of the first vegan mac recipes I ever tried and still up there with my favourites. This recipe is all over the internet and it's totally worth making.

Appetite For Reduction - Mac and Trees

Photo Credit: Kristen from The Noochy Noodle

I eat a lot, both when I travel and when I'm reviewing restaurants and eating out locally, so when I cook at home I sometimes eat more on the low fat / low cal end of the scale, y'know, for balance! AFR is by far my favourite healthy cookbook and the Mac & Trees is one of my go-to dishes when I need to make a fast healthy meal, I love the high broc content and easy to throw together sauce.

Veganomicon - Mac Daddy

Only the second Mac recipe I ever tried and still a favourite today. I love the creaminess of the tofu ricotta, the relative low fatness of the cheesy sauce and the overall creamy baked deliciousness of the recipe. I like to add peas to this one!

Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites - Five-Cheese Baked Macaroni and Cheese

This book, now known as Home Cooked Vegan Comfort Food, contains one of THE MOST EPIC macaroni and cheeses in the history of veganism. You really do need five cheeses to make it, Daiya (or FYH / Veganic Pizza Cheese), Toffuti Cream Cheese, noochy sauce, a tofu ricotta and walnut parmesan sprinkles. It's insanely delicious and totally worth the effort. If I had these ingredients to hand more often I would have made it many more times than I have currently. Edit: Joni just happened to post the recipe for this on her blog today! Here's a link, go make it!

Best Ever Mac and Cheese from Crafty Earth Mama

Photo Credit : Crafty Earth Mama

This recipe was posted during Vegan MoFo 2011 and it's genuinely one of the best ever mac and cheeses I've ever made, it's also Nick's absolute favourite. We'd eat it more often if laziness and bad planning didn't often prevent us from buying and roasting a red pepper!

Cheezy Mac - Vegan Diner

Similar in style to Crafty Earth Mama's mac this creamy cashew based sauce gets the majority of its flavour from smoked paprika rather than roasted red pepper. It's delicious and one we come back to over and over again.

There are a whole load of mac's I still haven't gotten around to including Isa's Chipotle Mac & Cheese with Roasted Brussels Sprouts (minus the chipotle's!), Isa's Mac & Shews, Allyson Kramer's Smokey Butternut Mac and Cheese and VegNews' Vegan Macaroni & Cheese.

As well as those recipes I also need to make this Mac-Shroom Sandwich from Vegan Sandwiches Save The Day and this epic looking Creamy Mac & Cheese Pizza.

Next Mac & Cheese Monday I'll be making a brand new to me mac and I haven't even decided which one yet. Help me out, which recipe is your favourite? Maybe it'll make an appearance next week.

Vegan MoFo 2013 - Football Food Sunday

Wow, Vegan MoFo is kicking off and I'm bringing back an old favourite for ya, Football Food Sunday. It's still only pre-season but that's not gonna stop me from throwing down with some epic football food.

Yesterday my friend Sal and I went to Clapham's Venn Street Market to check out some of the best Football Food London has to offer. New kids on the block The Mighty Fork opened their stall with a bang earlier this summer and they've been doing a roaring trade in vegan hot dogs ever since.

*Sadly The Mighty Fork has now closed*

When we rocked up yesterday lunch time this was the only stall at the market with a queue and we couldn't wait to join the line and get ordering.

I went for the Sauerkraut Dog which comes topped with, you guessed it, sauerkraut, as well as ketchup and American mustard.

Sal ordered The Big Chilli which comes topped with black bean chilli, jalapeños, diced red onions and American Mustard.

Both dogs were delicious, we loved The Fork's use of 9" tofu wieners rather than a heftier seitan sausage and the choices of toppings were great. They also make a Brew Dog with hot beer sauce, sautéed onions, jalapeños & American mustard as well as a Yasai Dog which is topped with Japanese yasai curry sautéed onions, wasabi mayo and spring onions.

These inventive flavours alongside fast and friendly service are sure to make The Mighty Fork a huge success.

Venn Street Market hosts two more totally vegan stalls on a Saturday, Ms Cupcake...

...and the Vegan Soda Bread stand who sell the most delicious chocolate mud cake in London, if not the world.

We ended our day out with a couple of drinks at a craft beer bar opposite the market. What a rad day and I even made it home in time to lose a quiz!

I am well and truly back in the MoFo game over here and I can't wait to continue with Mac 'n Cheese Monday tomorrow.