Flicking the Vs

One week cooking from Simply Good Food

2012-02-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

This is my fourth 'one week cooking from' post - the fourth time I've cooked from one cookbook all week.

There's not much in the way of photos this week, because this week's recipe book - Simply Good Food - didn't deliver as much as some of its predecessors.

As the title would suggest, the recipes were simple. They were definitely food. But good? Not always.

First up, Seed Bread. I like making bread, but I'm a lazy bugger. I can't often be bothered to wait for it to rise and then work up a sweat with the kneading. The seed bread didn't need too much of either handily enough, and still rose like a dream, ended up being light and flu and tasted not half bad either.

The same couldn't be said for the Gougere of Caramelised Vegetables. (The choux wasn't vegan, so I substituted a recipe from the Vegan Boulangerie instead.) It was, like most child actors, a bit too sweet and a little weird. Winter veg are sweet enough without the sugar that the recipe called for, and the end result was soggy and sugary. Not a great combo.

I also made Sweet Baked Beetroot. The fact that I can't remember if it was a hit or not probably tells you what you need to know about that.

Savoury Filo Triangles were like a vegan spanakopita - spinach, tofu in place of feta, and a bit of spice. Yeah, they were alright. If you'd told me they came from an Iceland £1 a pack range, I wouldn't have been surprised. Yep, I'm now the vegan Kerry Katona!

Savoury Pancakes though, they were alright. Well, the pancake batter was really watery and needed loads of flour before it could be made into crepes. So, not alright then. Still, post flour surgery, the pancakes filled with veggies and baked in the oven under a big blanket of tomato sauce were pretty nice.

But you know what's good right? Chocolate and amaretto and biscuits, that's what. What's that you say, Simply Good Food? I could combine these ingredients into a Apricot Chocolate Refrigerator Cake? I could bring some of it around to a friend, who practically wept with joy at its magnificence? And it made me forgive you all your trespasses against veganism? Yes, yes you're right. Apricot chocolate refrigerator cake couldn't have been any better if it have made itself and brought itself to me with a cup of tea. Apricot chocolate refrigerator cake, I love you.

Tibits restaurant review - Or, it's only wafer thin

2012-02-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

I have for some time resisted going to veggie restaurant, bar and takeaway Tibits. I don't know why.

I think it's the name - the irksome loss of the second 't' that it's so clearly crying out for either weird marketing reasons or reason prudish reasons grates on me.

Still, this Thursday, my boyfriend was in possession of a Taste card and a hankering to use it. A quick search of veggie places that are available on the Taste card found Tibits, and we were off.

The Tibits schtick is basically a huge buffet (renamed a 'food boat' for the squeamish) of hot and cold dishes that you pick from yourself, and then take to the counter to be weighed. It's £2.20 per 100g, or half that if you've got a Taste card.

They serve beer and wine, cocktails and puddings, and all is handily marked vegan, gluten-free etc where appropriate.

I love buffets. I think it's the glorious feeling that greets you when a hotel buffet breakfast is laid out before you - no waiting, the freedom to mix jam with hash browns if you feel like it, and the sheer open invitation to gluttony it offers.

While the pay-by-weight scheme means gluttony comes at a price, the fun of getting to try a bit of everything and create random and possibly noxious combinations is still there and, unlike a few of the dodgier buffets I've visited in my life, the food really is quite good.

There's some stodge (potato wedges, samosas) and loads of healthy salady bits to balance it out with, along with some dishes that you could easily make a main out of on their own (thai green curry and rice) along with dips, sauces, breads and all sorts of other bits and pieces.

The highlights for me were the salads - a couple involving green beans were phenomenal - and the samosas, which were a cut above the lazy jobs you normally get in restaurants.

There was only one pudding in the form of sticky toffee. It wasn't sticky toffee in any traditional sense of the word - it wasn't hot, there wasn't a sticky toffee sauce - but for a nicely fruited and spiced iced sponge, it wasn't half bad. And, thanks to having landed in Buffet World, I stuck a bit of fruit on the side, so I could pretend my pudding was healthy.

So you don't end up with the prettiest plate of food (see above) - you do end up being able to eat one dish or try 20 of them. And if you go for the latter, remember you can always put a piece of pineapple on the side - it's only wafer thin...

Tibits
www.tibits.co.uk/
14-18 Heddon Street
London
W1B 4DA
020 7758 4110

One week of cooking from the Step-by-Step Vegetarian Cookbook

2012-01-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

The latest lucky cookbook to get my 'week cooking with' treatment is the Step-by-Step Vegetarian Cookbook. As the name implies, when I do a 'week cooking with', I pick one recipe book and cook different things from it all week.

This week, it's the Good Housekeeping Institute's take on veggieness.

I've had this book for longer than I care to think about - I think my parents gave me it as a present not long after I went veggie back in the late 1990s.

It's not a very vegan friendly cookbook: while it does mark vegan recipes with their own animal-free symbol, it's quite subtle. There's not much in the way of any deliberate attempt to court vegans elsewhere either - a lot of the recipes involve dairy or eggs somewhere along the line.

It's fair to say that I didn't look forward to this week of cooking as much as some others, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. In your face, judging a book by its dairy-heavy cover!

First up was the Barbecued Aubergine Baguette. Yeah, I was starving when I eventually got this bad boy on the plate, so it probably rated higher than it otherwise might have, but the homemade BBQ sauce was good for not much effort and the crispy aubergine got the thumbs-up.

Onto the Spaghetti with Leeks, Peas and Saffron Cream. This one generated scepticism when dished up to my poor guinea pig. You can't blame him - I had no vegan cream to hand, so went for yoghurt substitute instead.

Yeah, that was a bit like asking Usain Bolt to run the 100 metres on his hands - it was never going to be a winner. Substituting rich, fatty goodness with a wholesome, virtuous equivalent was a daft idea, but I wouldn't remake the recipe with cream anyhoo - this dish was too much of a damp, yoghurty squib.

As much as the spaghetti was a surprise disappointment, the Spiced Chickpea, Rice and Carrot Pilaf was an equally unpredicted success.

The recipe does that thing where it asks you to add water, put the lid on the saucepan and, like Lot, don't turn back, just have faith things will turn out good. And, to my wonder, they did - no soggy rice, just good, subtly spiced pilaf. Nice.

White Bean Stew with Tapenade didn't have to trouble itself to succeed. It had broccoli, it had beans, it had olives - it could only have had more of my favourite things if it involved kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string. The lemon zest and rosemary combo - what could go wrong? Nothing, that's what. Not a darn thing.

Which is funny, because Vegetable and Bean Stew with Rouille should have been a similar walkover, what with being based on a beans/veggies/random crap axis of awesome.

It wasn't a walkover, alas - hey, it had a hard act to follow but it rather ended up looking like the white bean stew's 'before' picture in a makeover show. The rouille was great though - I'll be making that scamp again.

So, one week on, would I recommend you buy Step-by-Step Vegetarian Cooking? Nah - you're a vegan, go buy a vegan cookbook. But if, like me, you've already got one at home, it might just be worth a second look.

Bibimbap restaurant review

2012-01-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

If I find myself out in Soho with a hunger and a tenner in my pocket, I'll often head to Bibimbap - a Korean restaurant that serves the rice-plus-topping combos the restaurant is named after.

There are five veggie bibimbaps on offer, and if you count the Dol-sot dish - the one that features on the restaurant's logo - without the egg, then there are five vegan bibimbaps on offer too.

A bibimbap is basically a large mess of white or brown rice, with veggies and tofu on top and served in a sizzling hot bowl. There are two sauces on the side - one chilli, one miso - that you pour on top of the dish, then stir the whole thing up. That's one of the joys of bibimbaps (the dish) - that you're encouraged to mix it up to your taste. Don't like chilli? Leave it out. Like chilli? Pour enough on to kill a small elephant.

Normally I go for the tofu or the kimchi choices - they're lovely and won't set you back more than £7 or £8. More importantly, they'll keep you going for hours - you'll find yourself filling up before your bowl empties.

The restaurant is an informal, plastic-chairs-and-tables type place. The service is a bit brusque, but who cares? The food is cheap and good - go try it out.

Bibimbap

11 Greek Street

London W1D 4DJ

020 7287 3434

Bangers and mash pie recipe

2012-01-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

This isn't a precise recipe but it turned out so well that I thought I better post it before I forgot all the nuts and bolts of it.

This, quite simply, is a tribute to the beautiful marriage of sausage and spud in pie format. Oh yes, it may not be classy, but if the weather outside is frightening, get stuck into this.

The titular mash is in the potato pastry (I used the recipe from Step by Step Vegetarian Cookery with vegan margarine instead of butter). It's the first time I've cooked it, and it's a surprise winner - lighter and fluffier than normal shortcrust, but still just as stick-to-your-ribs warming.

If you've not got the book (and why would you? It's not the most vegan friendly tome out there) then don't worry, there's a few wartime recipes for potato pastry knocking around the intertubes that look like they could do the job.

Bangers and mash pie
Ingredients

One recipe of potato pastry
Seven Linda McCartney's sausage
One brown onion
One small leek
One rib of celery
Two cloves of garlic
Oil
Two teaspoons of dijon mustard
One heaped tsp flour
50mls of stock
Salt and pepper

How you do it

Take the sausages out of the freezer and leave somewhere to defrost.

Make your pastry and leave it in the fridge while you crack on with your pie filling.

Preheat your oven to 210 degrees centigrade.

Finely chop the onion, leek, celery and garlic and fry in oil for ten or so minutes until softened. Take the veggies off the heat and set aside.

Chop up your now defrosted sausages into small chunks (as small as you can be bothered to) and stir into the veggies.

Stir in the mustard and the flour.

Pour the mix into a pie dish, and add the stock.

Take the pastry out of the fridge, roll out, and lay over the pie filling.

Chop off any excess pastry so the edge of the pastry is flush with the edge of the dish.

Bake in the over for 40 minutes, or until the pastry is browned.

Serve with gravy, and green veg.

New Year nibbles

2012-01-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

Our New Year's was a quiet one this year - a few drinks at home, followed by a few down the pub.

Despite having overindulged on pretty much anything that could be overindulged in over Christmas, we still felt dutybound to see in the New Year with food and fizz (our booze was a few bottles of prosecco that bore more of a resemblance to Sauvignon-Blanc-gone-through-a-Soda-Stream than Moet).

I knocked up some spicy nuts from this Guardian recipe (subbing the honey for maple syrup) and boy, they were good. We started off a with a pound of nuts and ended up with a clean bowl.

Nuts = good. Roasted spicy nuts = double plus good.

A late Christmas post

2012-01-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

I'll be taking down the Christmas decorations today while a hangover gently tugs at my brain and I have to put away all things Noel for another 12 months.

I love Christmas, with its sparkly lights, parties, bonhomie and complete reckless overindulgence, and now I have to say goodbye to it until next December.

Before I do, though, I'd like to raise a glass (of water - this hangover's not been kind) to the Christmas dinner - a fine feast in the middle of one of the year's most charmless months.

This Chrimbo, I went for the Vegetarian Society's Smoked Bean Curd Bakes with Shiitake and Walnut Stuffing (don't worry, it's all vegan - not a whiff of dairy or egg to be had) with pigs in blankets made from Redwood Rashers and Taifun cocktail sausages, along with carrots, parsnips, roast potatoes, sprouts and gravy.

I'd been planning to make this recipe for vegan Sticky Toffee Pudding but was so full after Christmas dinner, I just couldn't manage it.

I need to be cooking this sort of heavy, rich, belt-busting wonderfulness on a regular basis. Note to self: Christmas dinner is too good to do just one a year.

One week of cooking from Veganomicon

2011-12-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

You've got loads of cookbooks right? You don't use them as much as you should? Yeah, me too. So in the mood to make use of all the recipes in my dirty great cookbook stash, I've had a crack at cooking all week from Veganomicon.

First up, gumbo - Smoky Red Peppers 'n' Beans Gumbo, to be precise.

I've never had gumbo in any form apart from a cookbook or two, so I've got nowt to compare it to - does gumbo taste like this in the Deep South? Who knows? In South England, it tasted just fine, but seemed to be crying out for a fist-fight with an angry bottle of hot sauce.

Still, it meant I got to use okra and black beans, neither of which I cook often enough and if memory serves, do something good for you. Lots of calcium? Shiny coat and a wet nose? Again, who knows? I defer on this to someone that knows what they're talking about.

I also had a crack at making White Bean Cassoulet with Biscuits. Daft sod that I am, I didn't look at the recipe's yield and ended up with a portion big enough to feed me and my other half for a few days. Maybe I'd have liked this recipe with its comforting, in the bleak midwinter-y, pub food-ness if I hadn't eaten it for several days on the trot. Alas, due to my own stupidity, it recurred with a worrying frequency for lunch and dinner and by the end felt more like a persistent rash than a treat. My bad. Don't let me put you off - just maybe make half portions first time around.

The next recipe that got a going over was Samosa Stuffed Baked Potatoes, served with 5-Minute Mango Chutney and Sauteed Spinach and Tomatoes.

When I told my other half I'd be cooking a mixture of curry and spud, he practically did a dance with joy. He was right to.

Potatoes are always a winner in curry, and turns out curry is a winner in potatoes too. The spinach and chutney also get the thumbs up - a happy mix and not an awful lot of effort for a good deal of reward.

Another recipe I cooked was Chickpeas
Romesco - a mix of chickpeas, ground almonds tomatoes and a few flavourings.

Other half is an avowed almond-eschewer, but even he had to admit grudgingly, after a few teaspoons, that this was all kinds of good.

I took this to work and a couple of co-workers commented on how good it smelled. I didn't share. Bad Flicking the Vs.

It does look a bit like it came out the wrong end of a digestively-troubled mammal, but beauty is in the eye - or in this case, the stomach - of the beholder. And I found it beautiful.

Cheater Baked Beans also got a couple of curious looks from my colleagues, but maybe it was because I left the dish in the oven too long and ended up with oddly blackened baked beans. Bit sweet for my liking, but the molasses and beans combo kidded me into thinking I'm doing well on hitting my RDA of iron. That, and my RDA of iron still tasted pretty nice with a couple of vegan frankfurters.

By now, we're onto the weekend. Normally a hot breakfast for me is a couple of Linda McC sausages in a bap. Still, it's Veganomicon week and I've promised to cook up some pancakes - welcome, Blueberry Corn Pancakes.

The eagle-eyed among you - and, let's be frank, the myopic too - will spot the distinct lack of blueberries. I didn't have any in the fridge so I substituted it with what I did have, bananas and pecan. Alright, so we're not talking identical twin pancakes, but forgive me, Isa, I couldn't be arsed to go to the shop.

The end result, apart from some pan-sticking (turns out that's why you don't put sliced banana in pancakes) it was one damn fine breakfast.

I didn't love everything I made from Veganomicon, but I loved making it all. When it worked, it worked cracking, when it didn't, it still gave me a recipe base I'd tweak and use again in future. Not a bad investment that Veganomicon.

Heston Blumenthal's Dinner: Restaurant review

2011-12-01T13:29:00.001-08:00

While Heston Blumenthal hasn't got the same veggie-hating rep as Gordon Ramsay at his most scenery-chewing, I would never think of his restaurants as places ready to welcome flesh-dodgers with open arms.

As I've mentioned before, I sometimes get invited interesting places that I normally wouldn't get to visit thanks to my job. So, when an invite to be taken to lunch at Blumenthal's new restaurant, Dinner, crossed my desk I felt duty bound to sign up.

Dinner's schtick is serving dishes based on those in English cookbooks of centuries ago - it's apparently known for its signature dish of meat-fruit (yes, that's a simulacrum of fruit made of meat), which is based on a 16th century recipe. When friends asked me what Dinner would serve a vegan, I told them I hoped it was fruit-meat - a fake pork chop made of banana maybe.

No such luck but the meal kicked off with a choice of two - count 'em, two - vegan choices: lemon salad or mushroom broth, both based on recipes from 1730.

I opted for the latter and got the high point of my meal - a freakishly complex broth that after every spoonful I'd have to ponder for a minute all the interesting flavours racing across my palate.

The rich broth was studded with all sorts of fascinating veggie nuggets - tiny cauliflower florets with a garam masala tang, micro pickled onions, radishes and other goodness. It wasn't a fruit-meat, but it was still an absolute stunner and pretty as a picture to boot.

Equally almost enough to bring me to tears was the wine - I know nothing about wine, but I knew this shiz was good. As in goooooooooooooood. If I was every going back on my own dime (highly unlikely given my wage packet) I would do so just for the wine.

The main course (no choice here, alas) was another 1730 dish - braised celery with chanterelles, pickled walnuts and cider apple. I wanted to love it - I'm fond of all its constituent parts - but the whole thing just seemed a bit, well, average. There's only so much you can say about celery at the best of times, right? It was all perfectly cooked, but the only flavour that stood out was the vinegar tang of pickled walnut.

I know in 1730 cooks didn't have the same luxury of ingredients we do today, but if its absolute authenticity they're after, surely the restaurant should have a starter of black plague followed by open sewers and public executions? Authenticity yes, but not at the expense of a good feed.

Side note: while my host had ordered a series of veggie side dishes, none of them turned out to be vegan. Lovely server raced off to fetch something Flicking the Vs-compatible and returned with a dish of butter-free, olive oil-doused green beans.

Pudding - mandarin frozen ice with rosehip jam, barberrie granite and redcurrant - also suffered a bit for its art. Sugar would have been a hard to come by commodity in 1590, when the recipe originated from, but in 2011, the ice was crying out for a bit of sweetening.

It was followed not too slowly afterwards by a palate-cleanser (or something of that ilk) of another sorbet - cherry and plum maybe? - served on freeze-dried strawberry pieces. It was beautiful to look at and rampant with flavour, but again in need of a bit of sugar.

The whole experience was an interesting one - top marks to the place for its service, for atmosphere and for making a vegan feel like a normal customer not a burden - but I ended up feeling like I had to suffer for Dinner's art.

I came to Dinner wanting to love the place, but I just couldn't manage it. I loved the wine, the service, the decor. But the food? We're just good friends.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park

66 Knightsbridge

London

SW1X 7LA

020 7201 3833

Amico Bio restaurant review

2011-11-28T09:30:00.001-08:00

As FatGayVegan and others have noted, vegetarian restaurants are not always as vegan-friendly as you think they might be - FGV mentions The Gate as one example of the phenomenon, while Vanilla Black doesn't seem to offer any vegan options without pre-booking. Quite why they should wish to exclude a part of their market is beyond me, but if I'm thinking of heading out for dinner to a vegetarian eatery, I make a point of checking how well they'll accommodate vegans.

While the vegan menu options listed on the website of Italian vegetarian restaurant Amico Bio didn't exactly fill me with joy, when a Groupon for a discounted meal at the place came up, I thought I'd give it a whirl nonetheless.

Luckily enough, as the restaurant changes its menu seasonally, there was a far more interesting array of options on hand when I visited. Go winter!

Living with a brassica-fearing boyfriend, I felt duty bound to give cauliflower fritters a go for a starter. and I'm glad I did.

They were light and crisp, but with large enough chunks of cauli in the middle to give them an illicit tang of welcome-to-the-deep-fat-fryer. The relatively bland fritter coupled with leaves that were dressed with, as far as I could tell, nothing but olive oil (although very nice olive oil) did leave a big dip shaped hole - something spicy on the side would have finished it off a treat.

My boyfriend's polenta and cannellini beans was a surprise hit - normally polenta can be a bit of a making-up-numbers plate filler, but not so this one. Instead, it set off the beans and herby tomato sauce off nicely.

On to mains - I went for a potato and cabbage cake with lentils. A greasy, crispy spud patty came my way, run through with irony greens and served with a thick puy base. Very enjoyable, but the huge swathe of carrot ribbons seemed a bit of a pointless addition though.

Boyfriend's gnocchi had an excellently tasty tomato and basil sauce, but alas with a portion of pasta that nudged the stingy side of the spectrum and ended up a bit too far on the chewy side as it began to cool.

Still, we'd enjoyed ourselves enough to opt for a pudding, in the shape of a pear poached in red wine with vegan chestnut ice cream. Poached pears were one of those dishes that went out of fashion in my childhood - a shame really, given how good they are, if this one was anything to go by - run through with spot-on mulled wine spices. And the chestnut ice cream? Just gorgeous.

(A side note on dessert options - a cheese board was listed as being available as a vegan option. I can't help wonder what that might entail - just the board?!)

Top marks for good, friendly and prompt service too.

My only complaint would have been the size of the portions relative to pricing - if I'd have been paying full price, I would have felt a little jibbed. That said, given the economics of Groupon (Amico Bio only gets 50 per cent of the coupon value - about £9 for two starters and two mains in our case), I'd forgive them if they decided to scale down the size of meals for coupon-toting diners.

Equally, if the restaurant's Groupon plan is to offer the discount meals as a way of encouraging diners to come back and pay full price, congratulations to them - the meal was interesting enough, and more than vegan friendly enough, that I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be back.

Amico Bio
http://www.amicobio.co.uk/
44 Cloth Fair,
City of London
London
EC1A 7JQ
020 7600 7778

The leaning tower of pikelets

2011-11-18T08:32:00.001-08:00

Do you know what a pikelet is? If you answered "a baby pike", you may well be right - I've got no idea to be honest.

But of course, if you said "a baby crumpet", you'd be spot on, for that is just what they are - think of the beautiful offspring of an illicit tryst between a crumpet and a drop scone, and you have a pikelet.

For some reason, I think of them as a northern English foodstuff - you don't tend to find them in supermarkets in London and the South East, but during my few years in Sheffield, they were more than plentiful.

I stumbled across a recipe for parsley pikelets in a folder of recipes-I-meant-to-cook-one-day-but-have-since-forgotten about and decided to revisit this most interesting of baked goods.

I used the Dan Lepard recipe from The Guardian (in digging out that link, I noticed I must have put the recipe aside in 2008 and forgotten it til now. Oh dear.) I swapped the egg Lepard uses for a tablespoon of olive oil and an extra teaspoon of baking powder.

Other substitutions: the batter seemed a bit thin, so I added a couple of extra handfuls of flour, and I ended up using wholemeal rather than white. That wasn't a culinary decision, just the result what was in my cupboard!

And quite clearly and for obvious reasons, I didn't use the bacon either. Instead, Linda McCartneys sausages were called into action. A breakfast of champions, indeed.

The end result is, as you see below, the leaning tower of pikelets. It took me a while to get the quantities right to produce the crumpet-like bubbles on the surface, which is why the pikelets are stacked up like that - all the duff ones are hidden underneath!

Cooking Shojin Ryori at Atsuko's Kitchen

2011-11-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

The second cooking class of last week was another repeat visit to Atsuko's Kitchen.

Having been there for a number of classes - beginners and advanced Japanese cookery, bento making and Japanese teatime recipes - when I got the email that there was a Shojin Ryori class in the offing, I felt duty bound to sign up.

The Grocery Cafe, home to Atsuko's Kitchen

Shojin Ryori is the vegan temple food of Buddhist monks in Japan, and Mary Fuji, an authority on the subject and the author of The Enlighted Kitchen was in town to show us how to do it.

Having taken another of Mary Fuji's Shojin Ryori courses at Atsuko's Kitchen last year, and found the food interesting rather than lip-smacking, I was hoping for something more a mix of the two this time around.

Happily, that's what I got. Like the cooking course at Bath's Vegetarian Cookery School that I took earlier this week, I went away with far more recipes than I'd expected to and itching to cook everything I'd learned as soon as I could.

The Shojin Ryori meal was one made of many tiny dishes - my little contribution was brussel sprouts in a peanut sauce. Made with just three ingredients, the sauce was punching well above its weight.

Also on the menu was taro root with dengaku sauce. Having cooked with taro to disastrous affect before, I approached it with all the trepidation of James Murdoch at a select committee. I was pleasantly surprised - not the slimy travesty I was expecting, taro had become a gently creamy wonder root.

Radishes pickled in ume-vinegar became delightfully tart chrysanthemums, while daikon steaks - a salad veg to me - got brought to life under the tender ministrations of traditional Japanese seasonings, kombu, shoyu, mirin and sake.

Unsurprisingly, tofu figured on the menu - this time, mixed with shiitake, seaweed, carrot and a ginko nut, tucked away like a coin in a Christmas pudding.

gammogoki before deep frying

And, for good measure, there's a was sesame and turnip miso soup and rice with Japanese mushrooms to go with it.

Here's the meal plated up:

And gorgeous it was too. Only, gorgeous as it was, it wasn't the most gorgeous thing I had that evening. Oh no. It was this - matcha tiramisu.

What I found fascinating about this was the simplicity - even austerity - of the ingredients. Tiramisu is meant to be rich and heavy and sugary and creamy. That's what defines it. This tiramisu was none of those things, based as it was on walnut bread and green tea. It was light and interesting and still every bit as delicious, only without the perilous blood sugar afterwards.

And what made this evening even more fun? I got a chance to hang out with some other vegans, including the lovely The Vegan Ronin and Alessio is on Fire. What more could a vegan ask for?

Atusko's Kitchen

http://www.atsukoskitchen.com

The Grocery

54-56 Kingsland Road

City of London E2 8DP, United Kingdom

020 7729 0713

Vegetarian Cookery School in Bath take two - Southern Indian Thali

2011-11-14T12:52:00.001-08:00

I have been truly indulging my cooking demons - last week, I enjoyed not one but two vegan cooking courses.

Recidivism was very much the order of the day for the first of them as I hauled myself down to Bath for the Southern Indian Thali course at Vegetarian Cookery School, a venue I went to once before earlier this year and enjoyed so much - the food was great, the teachers were cracking - I reckoned a repeat visit was necessary.

I've been to Delhi once in the course of my work and gloried every day in the Indian breakfast - thin rice and lentil pancakes called dosas served with masala potatoes, coconut chutney, a thin lentilly dhal-style dish by the name of rasam, and idlis, roughly akin to savoury sponge cakes.

Idli molds and steamer

The thought of gaining the secrets of the Indian breakfast was pretty much what persuaded me to get my sorry self down to Bath and I've been congratulating myself on that most wise decision ever since.

After being taught how to make the all-important Indian spice mixes that would be used in a couple of other dishes through the day, and observing the secrets of idli and dosa making, we sat down for our first meal of the day.

I think I ate my own body weight in idlis and curried spud - if the course had just included learning to make those dishes, I would have gone away happy.

Handily enough, there was more good gorging to be had as we knocked up an Indian yoghurt dessert full of interesting flavours - rosewater and saffron giving each other a snog - which was later brought to the dinner table as a delightfully pretty pot of subtle wonder. (As the only vegan there, and so the only one eating soy yoghurt, I got double quantity - result!)

The students then split up into pairs to cook a dish for the thali we would all be sharing. Me and my partner got bhindi masala: okra and tomatoes cooked down and brought to tasty life with the spice mix we'd been shown how to make earlier.

Another pair got chow chow and methi curry - a coconut milk based dish that I tasted during the cooking and found meh. Only, when it got to the table at the end of the day, some curry alchemy had transformed it from ugly sister to Cinderella.

Another couple got to make the star of the show - aubergine curry (with cheese for the dairy eaters and curd-denuded for the dairy dodger, me). In another act of transformation, simple ingredients became a meal fit for a maharaja thanks to one of those magical spice mixes.

Having finished creating our okra dish, me and my partner got the chance to knock up some puris, a type of bread where the chief binding ingredient was mashed banana.

The banana puris were the surprise win of the day - a subtle banana taste with some chilli meandering around in the background - and all for hardly any effort. That's the kind of ratio I like.

While we busied ourselves with the carbs, mango chutney, spiced yoghurt and a dahl were all being magicked up out of nowhere by our teachers.

Cooking over, we got to toast our efforts with a glass of prosecco to celebrated (as if gorging on delicious Indian food wasn't enough) and test out some of the shelves of homemade gin and vodka on the cookery school shelves (quite unfeasibly good) before cracking on with second round of eating.

More wine, more chances to marvel at what we and others had wrestled into existence. Wonderful.

I also learnt that the cookery school has a vegan cakes and baking day planned for early next year. Whenever that is, my last two visits have convinced me - there's definitely going to be a hole in my diary.

The Vegetarian Cookery School
http://www.vegetariancookeryschool.com
6 Terrace Walk
Bath BA1 1LN
01225 427938

One week cooking from Vegan Soul Kitchen

2011-11-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

Phew! It's been a bit hard getting back into the saddle after the blog-frenzy that was VeganMoFo, but cooking is like crack, and you soon notice when you've left it too long before topping yourself up.

For this month, I thought I'd challenge myself - and the patience of anyone reading this blog - to cook from all the vegan cookbooks that are taking over my bookshelf.

You know how it is, you buy a book, you drool over the recipes, you make mental notes on which ones you're going to make, and maybe you do make a couple. Then the next cookbook starts fluttering its eyelashes and the cycle starts all over again.

No more! Never again will a cookbook be left behind in the Flicking the Vs household. You will all be cooked from, and appreciated.

First up is Vegan Soul Kitchen by Bryant Terry.

My first attempt at fooling around with Mr Terry's work was not a success: the Roasted Potato and Mixed Greens Gratin. I love potatoes, I love greens. What could go wrong?

Cooking times, that's what. After the potatoes were baked for 40 minutes and the green boiled, they were both insulted with 45 minutes in the oven and came out a slodgy, disappointing mess.

And yet, if you could get beyond the swampy textures and concentrate on the flavours, you couldn't fault it. If only doing so wasn't so much of an effort.

The Crisp Green Beans with Roasted Shallots and Walnuts were a bit of a misnomer, as I used hazelnuts, but more because of being decidedly uncrisp after a rather too long spell in boiling water. Again, if you could gloss over that, the dish was spot on flavour-wise - sharp and, thanks in no small measure to its thyme quotient, interestingly complex.

Next up, a take on one meal I've been overly familiar with this year - rice and beans - in the form of Red Wine Simmered Seitan with Red Beans and Brown Rice.

More unrestrained thyme, more loveliness. The red wine seitan wasn't as red-winey as you'd expect from its judicious boiling, but when the beans, rice, beans and other bits and bats came together, it wasn't half bad. Add the recommended hot sauce - has ever a recipe footnote managed to transform a dish? Not in my experience - and it's not just not half bad, it's suddenly all goooooood.

The week also yielded the quite frankly astounding Molasses-Vanilla Ice Cream with Candied Walnuts. Having recently been won around to molasses, it managed to completely 180 my previous opinion thanks to its starring role in this frozen pudding. Quick - go make it now. You won't regret it.

And for a finale, a spot of Blackened Tofu Slabs with Succotash Salsa.

This meal was my absolute favourite of the whole experiment - the creamy pillow of tofu wrapped up in a kidney punch of spice, and a salsa that gave the Extreme Makeover treatment to butter beans: 'Why, butter beans, you're beautiful! How did I not notice before?'

Being an Englishwoman that's not visited the Deep South, I've no idea what Soul Food is and I've definitely no idea what good Soul Food is. That said, thanks to Mr Terry, (brace yourself, pun coming up) I'm now totally Souled on it.

VeganMoFo: A happy Hallowe'en dinner

2011-10-31T15:15:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

It's the last day of VeganMoFo and it's Hallowe'en - both deserve a bit of celebration of the gluttonous kind. And a bit of silly mood-setting - I'm going for a Wicker Man kind of thing here, albeit a bit half-heartedly.

We decided for our Hallowe'en meal to go for a combo of swamp soup, witches' fingers and chalices of blood-red wine. Oh, and then a bit of pudding.

Here's the witches' fingers (yeah, we didn't have much in the way of props - did you spot that?) recreated from pastry:

And swamp soup (assuming your swamp was full of avocados):

And parkin (oh alright, it's normally a Bonfire Night thing, but who's going to quibble? It's like the lovely bastard offspring of gingerbread, sponge cake and a flapjack and should be eaten every day of the year, in my opinion.) If you want the recipe, the original is on The Guardian website and easily veganisable.

If you fancy making your own swamp soup (you could just call it leek and avocado soup when it's not Hallowe'en, I won't tell) you'd do it like this.

Swamp Soup/ Leek and Avocado Soup
Ingredients

Oil
Three cloves of garlic, finely chopped
One large leek, cleaned and cut into 1cm rounds
One or one and a half large avocados, chopped into dice
500ml or more* of stock
The kernels from one corn on the cob, cooked
Two tomatoes, cut into small dice
Salt, pepper and mustard if you fancy

How you do it
Fry the leek and garlic in a little oil over low heat for 10 minutes or so. If they catch the pan and caramelise a little, that's no bad thing.

Add the avocado and stock. Cover the soup, bring to a simmer, then turn down to a low heat and cook for 10 minutes more. *Add the amount of stock depending on how thick you like your soup. If thin, you can go up to 600 or 700mls. If not, 500mls, even 400mls, should suit you.

Liquidise the soup in a food processor or with a stick blender.

Add the sweetcorn and tomatoes, and cook for another five minutes. The tomatoes should start breaking down about then.

Add salt, pepper and mustard if you fancy. Serve.

And that's it - here endeth the last VeganMoFo post of my first VeganMoFo. I enjoyed it and would love to do it again.

Happy Hallowe'en and happy VeganMoFo!

VeganMoFo: Vegan cupcakes - they just keep getting better and better

2011-10-28T00:42:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.
Are you sitting down? I have some astounding news.

I have previously sung the praises of the divine Ms Cupcake whose beautiful vegan cupcakes are the vegan baked goods of your dreams - a riot of buttercream in candy colours take you back to the best kids parties you've been too - and sometimes there's even a cherry on top.

I didn't think there could be another vegan cupcake as good.

And then, to my shock and awe, there was.

Yes, the Cat and the Cream is just as good. It's a different proposition to Ms Cupcake - if Ms Cupcake is a unicorns and rainbows, then Cat and the Cream is an orchid and an espresso. Or something.

It's a more restrained, arch cupcake - less sweet, with layers of bitter chocolate chips and fresh fruit - but with the traditional fluffy mound of icing on top to please any cupcake connoisseur.

If you want to get your hands on these cakey joys, you can find them at several branches of Wholefoods (including the one in Soho, where I found this banana walnut wonder)...

...And this fine, fine pear and hazelnut example of the species.

If you fancy cheating on your usual cupcake with something new, I can think of no better recipient of your affections.

Whole Foods Market

wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/soho/

69-75 Brewer Street
London

W1F 9US

VeganMoFo: Loving Hut review or, how I lost that loving feeling

2011-10-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

It was my last night in San Francisco. I wanted to end an excellent holiday with an equally excellent meal. Instead I ended up at this mediocrity hole - Loving Hut.

Loving Hut is a chain of restaurants across the US and beyond - 400 of them globally, according to Loving Hut's website - which, as far as I can tell, sell all different types of food depending on where they're based.

They're all vegan, which is great, and they promote veganism in each branch - also good in my book.

Well, it would be good, had not the video shown on TVs in the restaurant I visited (the branch in Chinatown, San Francisco) been aiming to show how great animals with You've Been Framed-style clips of animals doing tricks. Parrots riding bicycles, dogs shaking hands, you get the idea. Err, are vegans not meant to be against animals being used for that sort of thing?

Onto the meal itself: my first mistake was ordering a drink. Yep, you would have thought there wasn't much to go wrong with a drink, but no. The Coke my other half, Flicking the Vino, ordered tasted oddly of disinfectant. The Thai Iced Tea I chose tasted also of disinfectant - I'm all for unusual tastes and trying new things, but this was a step too far - and bonfires. Not so nice.

The food was just as underwhelming. We ordered vietnamese rice paper rolls to share, and for me, a main of fragrant claypot rice, and for Flicking the Vinos, cashew chickenless bites.

The rice paper rolls were actually not bad, but seemed mainly composed of rice noodles wrapped in rice paper. A bit light on flavour, but pretty enough.

The cashew chickenless bites were cack-handed, some of the vegetables still almost raw, others sporting burnt corners. The soy chicken was decent - I felt kind of sorry for it, forced to keep company with poorly-cooked, underflavoured veggies.

Mediocrity also reigned with the fragrant claypot rice. The soy protein, tofu, shiitake, black fungus, cabbage and vermicelli promise in the claypot rice were heavy on the rice and vermicelli, light on the rest.

And the fragrance in the fragrant clay pot? There was also no fragrance to speak of. There was no flavour to speak of. I could taste a little soy sauce, but that was it. A disappointing way to spend $8.

While the service was fine, I can only take my hat off to the efficiency of the operation - why not get ahead in the closing up process by starting to wash the floors while customers are still eating?

And they don't sell booze. In the case of fellow booze-eschewers Golden Era, you don't mind going without alcohol because the food's good. In the case of Loving Hut, the boozelessness is cruelty itself - the quality of the food is poor enough to drive you to drink.

Loving Hut Chinatown
http://lovinghut.us/sanfrancisco/index.html
1365 Stockton Street
San Francisco, California 94133
(415) 362-2199

VeganMoFo: Golden Era restaurant review, or hooray for second helpings

2011-10-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

Recently, I was in San Francisco for work. Then, lucky sod that I am, I got to stay on for a bit and enjoy the city.

I'd have been mad not to take advantage of a city that's brimming with vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants so my stay in San Francisco was peppered with visits to animal-free eateries, including Herbivore and Gracias Madre.

One place I got to eat at twice was Golden Era, an Asian restaurant that serves entirely vegan food.

We ended up eating here twice - once because we hunted it out, once because we were too tired, hungry and lazy to bother finding somewhere new to eat.

I'm glad we were feeling lazy, hungry and tired that second time - the first time, I made some dodgy menu selections and left thinking it meh. The second visit, however, I lucked out and picked some crackers.

My dodgy menu choice first time around was Ocean of Love, a dish I picked purely because the name amused me in the most childish way. Alas, the joke was on me - it was wranging.

The main problem was the ocean part - fake shrimp. Clammily fishy, rubbery and oddly realistic to look at, I ended up trying a couple of the shellfish simulacra and then pushing them to the corner of my plate in favour of the water chestnut, courgette and cashew combination around it. The sauce and veggies were a tasty mix of soy and slightly sweet, but I couldn't escape the grimness of the shrimp winking back at me.

My dining companions both made better choices. The standout was lemongrass deluxe - a chewy, savoury chicken-substitute and broccoli dish on a bed of fresh lettuce, shredded courgette and carrot.

My other co-diner went for the Spicy Szechuan, which turned out to be a little spicier than expected - after accidentally swallowing a chilli, my co-diner coughed like he'd lost a lung and then temporarily lost the ability to speak, but not the ability to throw drink after drink down his neck to try and douse the Golden Era fires. Despite the crashing chilli disaster, he still pronounced the plate fine.

On our second visit, me and Flicking the Vinos (who'd suffered at the hands of the Spicy Szechuan) were feeling greedy and went for a starter, choosing Vietnamese Crepe.

Along with the juicy yellow joy you see below, the crepe came with its own big platter of mint, coriander, lettuce and dipping sauce, so we could make Vietnamese spring rolls with lettuce instead of a rice flour wrapper.

I've no idea what the crepe is made of, but it made such a light, fresh filling to the rolls, I could have eaten only that and not have felt hard done by. I could also have got away with having only that, given the size of the portions - splitting the crepe between two as a main would have been a good-sized dinner if you both weren't starving hungry.

Alas, we found that out after we'd ordered, and having scarfed down the crepe, both still had mains to come.

Mine was the wonton vegetable noodle soup, and despite my fullness, I damn near crammed the whole generous soup down my gullet.

Perched on a mountain of noodles in light, if a bit inoffensive, broth were dumplings, vegetables and three types of tofu: age, atsuage and yuba. Aside from the dumpling wrappers jonesing for a bit longer cooking time, the whole was a busy but proteiny wonder.

On my second visit, my only complaint was that I was too full to try the interesting list of desserts that Golden Era has. Almond pumpkin cheesecake, you say? Maybe a third visit is needed...

Golden Era

http://www.goldeneravegan.com/

572 O'Farrell Street

San Francisco, California 94102

(415) 673-3136

VeganMoFo: Vegan clafoutis recipe with figs in wine syrup

2011-10-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

A while back, I saw this recipe by Dan Lepard on The Guardian for wine-poached fig clafoutis and rashly proclaimed on Twitter that I'd veganise it.

I then promptly forgot about said daft promise until I saw some figs on special offer and snapped up eight of the glorious purple beauties, stuck them in my fridge - and then pondered what exactly to do with them.

Of course, the clafoutis was calling - a slab of fudgy French dessert loveliness.

The recipe is Lepard's, only veganised, but in the interests of keeping things simple, I'm going to post a list of ingredients here.

Wine poached fig clafoutis
Ingredients
For the figs
300mls vegan red wine
100g sugar
8 figs

For the batter
125g self-raising flour
150mls soy or other vegan milk
50mls soy or other vegan cream
75g caster sugar
Seeds of half a vanilla pod
60mls water
60mls vegetable oil
2tsp baking powder
1tbsp white wine vinegar or lemon juice
Vegan marge for greasing the dish

How you do it
For the method, head over to the original Dan Lepard recipe. The only change is, when you're making the batter, combine all the ingredients except the vinegar/lemon juice. Add the vinegar/lemon juice just before you're about to put the batter in the dish and cook it.

You should end up with something like this. It might be a little on the stodgy side, but it's so sweet and lovely, I couldn't hold it against it.

It might look like this:

Or this, once you've cut it up and added the syrup and a bit of soy cream:

VeganMoFo: The sweet treats of San Francisco

2011-10-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

I've mentioned it before and damn it, I'll mention it again - I've just spent the last couple of weeks eating my way around San Francisco.

I've never been confronted with such an array of vegan sweet treats in such a short amount of time. Here are the highlights from my San Franciscan festival of gorging.

Japanese Tea Garden

A lovely spot to stop for a cup of Japanese tea and a vegan dessert.

I went for the Dango, a skewer of mochi-like rice balls with a sweet soy sauce with some genmaicha tea.

The soy sauce as sweet treat won't be to everyone's taste, but it's definitely worth a go if only to sit down for a while in the beautiful surroundings.

Pepples Donuts

Oh Pepples, how I grew to love you in San Francisco, and made several stops at your Ferry Building location to feast on the crazy array of flavours.

Salted caramel, I love you. Coffee, I'm just flirting with salted caramel, you're my one true love.

Two of these kept me going for most of a day. And at $3 a pop for such staying power, you can't go wrong. Just don't forget the coffee.

Cafe Nook

I found this place by accident when wandering around with a couple of work colleagues.

We'd been on something of a march to walk off a gut-bustingly large breakfast. Then we realised we needed a beer to recover from the leg-bustingly long walk. We stopped at Cafe Nook.

Not only did they have a few good beers, they had a few awesome vegan cakes. Including this one, which even my omni colleagues couldn't keep their hands off. Cafe Nook, we salute you.

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

More Japanese sweet treats, this time at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco: more genmaicha tea and a mochi for good measure. Sure, it's not the best mochi in the world, but a winner for when studying centuries of art has left you in need of a sugar fix. The cafe also had, as far as I could tell, a good few vegan dishes for lunch too. Go museum!

Alternative Baking Company

A vendor of vegan baked goods you can pick up in whole foods markets (and at the Warming Hut near the Golden Gate bridge) rather than a destination in itself, the ABC is worth mentioning as it supplied me with one of the best biscuits I'd had in a while, in the form of its lovely Pumpkin Spice cookie. The spice mix was anything but run of the mill and generously sized (ie enough for a greedy vegan), I'm still hankering after another of them now.

Trader Joe's

Sure, it's not somewhere to put your feet up with the Sunday paper and a cuppa, but there's no shortage of veagn goodies at Trader Joe's. I tried about four different types of biscuit, and only wish I could have tried more. The vegan chocolate chip cookies kicked ass royally.

VeganMoFo: Vegan churros - are there any finer words in the English language?

2011-10-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

(Oh alright, in the English and Spanish languages, you pedants.)

You like sweet things, you say? You like sweet things that have been deep fried even more, you say? You like sweet things, deep fried and dosed in cinnamon the best?

Brace yourselves, vegans of London or visiting the capital, for I bring good news.

When your sweet tooth next starts calling, get yourself down to the Real Food Market on Southbank. There, tucked away in one corner, is Garcia Churros.

The nice people at Garcia Churros will swap you four English pounds for a cupful of churros, fried in a massive pan in front of you.

They might look a bit like this:

And they'll be all vegan friendly too, if you sack off the chocolate they also serve with them. Look:

And they're lovely. Crisp, sweet, not-greasy, and the perfect antidote to the cold weather that swallowed up the capital of late.

Go on, treat yourself.

Real Food Market

Southbank Centre

Belvedere Road

London

SE1 8XX

VeganMoFo: Little Bird Coffee House review, or live and let Daiya well alone

2011-10-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

Here's another vegan-friendly place I stumbled across in my recent holiday in San Francisco - the Little Bird Coffee House.

The Little Bird won my heart for two reasons - it was in stumbling distance of my hotel in SF, and it has some gorgeous breakfast options.

My first foray into Little Bird's brekkie was the vegan breakfast sandwich. For but $5, you get yourself an English muffin with tofu scramble, Daiya cheese and your choice of hummus, vegan pesto or tapenade.

This was the first time I'd made a foray into Daiya too - I was rather excited about my breakfast ahead of me, given the praise I've seen dedicated to this particular cheese substitute in the past.

And then it only went and arrived to shatter my illusions. Sorry, Daiya lovers, it's disgusting. Sure, the texture is more like the meltyness of actual cheese than fake cheeses have managed in the past, but the taste is that same sweaty-sock whiff that all cheese substitutes seem to possess.

Thanks to the Daiya, the breakfast was lost. The tofu scramble-muffin union would have been spot on, only then Daiya only went and fouled up the whole lot, forcing me to drown it in mustard to get my breakfast down my throat.

All the while I was cursing Daiya, Flicking the Vino was tucking into vegan blue corn waffles. So good did they look, I made him go out for breakfast the next day at Little Bird so I could have some too.

As well as being blue, which makes any breakfast awesome straight away (how many blue things does a normal person get to eat in a day?), the waffles were pitched perfectly in terms of sweetness (and came with some maple syrup on the side for those of a more sugary disposition) and were heaped with banana, almonds and ripe strawberries. Heaven.

And for even more vegan-loving, the Little Bird sells other animal-free goodies - Pepples doughnuts and Sugar Plum vegan cupcakes and whoopie pies. And the coffee's pretty good too.

Little Bird = a stone-cold breakfast win.

Little Bird Coffee House

835 Geary Street

San Francisco, California 94109-7217

(415) 440-2165

VeganMoFo: Where to eat in Monterey, California

2011-10-20T12:44:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

For a not inconsiderable chunk of VeganMoFo, I've been away from home - first for work, then for a holiday.

As a result, I've been questing for vegan-friendly food in California, both in San Francisco and then Monterey.

Happily enough, both have stepped up to the proverbial plate and despite its relatively small population, Monterey has ample vegan options - here are a few of them.

Ambrosia Indian Bistro

First up and worth a mention is the Ambrosia Indian Bistro.

After witnessing an Anglo-American argument about whether the US has any decent curry restaurants the day before my visit, and whether the UK's currys are overrated, I approached Ambrosia with a bit of trepidation. Luckily, it managed to emulate both the good and bad bits about England's finest.

Good: poppadums and chutney arrive whether you want them or not. You always want them though.

Bad: well-intentioned if a bit chaotic service.

Good: vegan friendly. In Ambrosia's case, there was a separate vegan menu. The server also asked if we were vegans and made sure we knew what to avoid. Hurrah! Only it does make you wonder what they do to the white rice, but not to the brown rice, to make it not vegan

Bad: Enough oil to make the Exxon Valdez blush.

Good: Lots of veg, well spiced and accompanied with a delicious aloo paratha.

Bad: Enough salt to put the world's slug population on edge. Seriously, more salt than the Dead Sea. I kept troughing away, forking the veggies into my gullet, but the salt was winning and eventually I had to down the fork. A real shame, because I'd been enjoying it up til then.

Ambrosia India Bistro

http://ambrosiaib.com/

565 Abrego Street
Monterey, California 93940-3229
(831) 641-0610

Trader Joe's

If you're from the US, this won't in any way surprise you, but Trader Joe's has all sorts of vegan-friendly items - like these tofu spring rolls to my left here.

While I was out in Monterey I spent a lot of time walking and carrying picnics with me - at which point, Trader Joe's kicked ass.

It kicked ass not only because it had, by and large, a decent selection of readymade picnic options but because the shop trumpeted proudly what was vegan and what wasn't, so you could pick up your picnic without all the usual microscopic label checking.

Trader Joe's

http://www.traderjoes.com/

570 Munras Avenue
Monterey, California 93940-3014
(831) 372-2010

Maha

Not somewhere we ate while we were in Monterey, but worth mentioning because of the fact the restaurant seemed to be aware that vegans exist and are happy to cater to them.

Maha, a Lebanese restaurant, has a lunch buffet for $9.95 with a selection of vegan items (so says the promo on the front of the building) as well as a good few mezze items that look vegan but aren't marked so on the menu. Given Maha seems to know what a vegan is, I reckon they'd be able to point out just what is vegan and what just looks that way without too much trouble.

Maha

470 Alvarado Street
Monterey, California 93940-2717
(831) 372-8999

Farmers' Market

While I was in Monterey, there was a farmers' market going on in one of the town's main streets, with a few vegan-friendly items on offer.

Yep, there were a huge amount of stalls selling amazing-looking fruit, veg and nuts - the strawberries to the left were a farmers' market purchase - but there were also a couple of meal options.

While we were there, there was a sushi stand with a few veggie, and more than likely vegan (I didn't have a chance to quiz the stall owners), items. Maha also had a stand selling what looked like some vegan scran too.

If you're jonesing for some farmers' market goodness, it's there every Tuesday afternoon come rain or shine, apparently.

VeganMoFo: Gracias Madre restaurant review or, where's my wedding invite?

2011-10-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMofo, click here.

I've been in San Francisco recently, eating my way around the city. The absolute highlight for me was this place - Gracias Madre.

Gracias Madre is an all-organic, all-vegan, all-awesome Mexican food place in the Mission district of the city.

After arriving at the heaving venue and taking a gander at the menu, I was massively tempted by a starter of what can only be described as cheesy spuds - or papas al horno if you'd rather: potatoes baked in olive oil and garlic with cashew nacho cheese.

We asked our waitress would we need a starter? We'd been foxed in previous dinners out by portion sizes and over-ordered. The waitress gave it a negative - people don't usually finish both, she said, and have to take the remainder away in a doggy bag.

So, much to my greedy chagrin, we skipped the starter and proceeded directly to mains: nopales for me, tacos for Flicking the Vinos.

I don't often get to eat nopales so I don't have much to compare Gracias Madre's offering against, but I couldn't keep the smile off my face as I waded through the generous rice, refried beans, salsa and prickly pear with cashew cheese sauce. Yep, it was that good.

Bonus points too for the corn tortillas, which put me in mind of my recent Central American wanderings - and which show up flour tortillas for the dull plate-filler they really are.

Flicking the Vinos went for tacos, choosing squash, aubergine and poblano peppers as his taco filling of choice. I only got to try the squash and peppers - he'd inhaled the aubergine before my questing fork could head there. No wonder - if the smokey peppers and crisp, almost batter-like squash were anything to go by, I'd have inhaled the lot too.

We may not have needed starter but did we need pudding? Well, no, no one needs pudding - but we got one anyway.

After wrangling with whether to opt for a vegan flan - a delight I've never yet made the acquaintance of - the Mexican wedding cookies won out.

I've never been to a Mexican wedding before, but after scarfing down the walnutty glories at Gracias Madre, I'm on the hunt for a wedding invite to some Mexican nuptials.

Oh, and the ice cream was wonderful too - imagine a taste of burnt sugar, powerful but licoricely good, doused in creamy goodness, and you're there.

If I had a complaint - there's always one, right? - it would be that $8.50 seems a bit steep for two cookies and one scoop of ice cream, but I loved it so much, I forgave the wallet mugging.

Maybe those wedding cookies are helping the chef to save up for a honeymoon somewhere. Being able to knock up such good food, they're not going to be short of proposals.

Gracias Madre

http://www.gracias-madre.com/web/

211 Mission Street
San Francisco, California, 94110-1811
(415) 683-1346

VeganMoFo: The wonders of mile-high vegan eating

2011-10-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about Vegan Mofo, click here.

There are only two things that can help distract you from the grim reality of air travel - being trapped in a metal tube, with a foot of legroom and in uncomfortable proximity to any number of strangers, sleeping, drooling and farting for several hours - and those two things are food and films.

Only if you're a vegan, you've just got films to look forward to. Because if you're a vegan, as far as the airlines are concerned, you must have had your tastebuds disconnected and you might just as well lick your paper antimacassar as attempt to enjoy the plastic-wrapped crap that will turn up in front of you.

Let's examine the four horseman of the vegan airline meal in an attempt to see why it's just so fricking terrible: the salad, the main, the dessert and the roll and butter.

The salad: you can expect undressed leaves. This will seem particularly odd in light of the fact that your co-air-travellers will also be tucking into a salad - a salad that if you take out the cheese, would easily be vegan. There maybe some nuggets of taste winking at you from your neighbour's plate - olives, red onions, herbs - but don't expect the same to be gifted to you. No, dry leaves are for you, my animal-free friend.

Perhaps, if you travel with British Airways, you will receive a pot of salad dressing with your vegan meal. Likely as not, despite being included in a vegan meal, it won't actually be vegan and when you point this out to the airline, they will say you are making it up. You are not. You saw both milk and egg ingredients listed on the packet. Nice one, BA. Give your vegan passengers non-vegan ingredients, then when they inform you of your mistake, insult them.

The main meal: this will be either pasta, cous cous or curry with rice. This won't actually be too bad. It won't have much taste, and will be oddly sweet. You'll be forced to add industrial quantities of salt and pepper to try and make it taste of something. Your doctor won't be pleased.

The dessert: this will be fruit. It will never be anything else. There will definitely be melon and apple, and possibly orange. All of these will be given to you as tiny cubes or slices. You'd rather just have an apple or an orange. You will nonetheless think 'well, this could be worse' as you eat it. Then you will think 'Would it kill them to give me a cookie? The veggies and omnis get cake. Would it be a terrible imposition to source a measly sodding vegan biscuit?' You may, on extremely rare occasions, get that biscuit. You will then wish for fruit instead.

The roll and spread: you will be aware that you're eating this only because the nerves in your mouth tell you there is matter there. You won't know because of the taste, because there isn't any. Also, you have a 50-50 chance of having vegan spread if you're flying BA or Virgin - you're just as likely to have a milk-containing spread put on your plate. Would the airlines consider putting steak on the plate of a vegetarian? Of course not. But you, dear vegan, won't be granted the same consideration.

Sure, airline food is shit. Everyone knows it's shit - it's the standard of crap stand-up comics across the western world. Don't think I'm asking for gourmet food - it's just that vegan food on airlines is shitter than the normal shit, we don't even get the same quality of shit as everyone else, we get shitter shit.

The annoying thing is that I always feel pathetically grateful for what turns up - because half the time, no vegan meal turns up at all, and with a shrug of an air stewardess' shoulders, I'm consigned to 11 hours of a grumbling stomach.

I've been mithering the airlines about their vegan options - specifically about whether they'll be improving them and actually making them 100 per cent vegan, 100 per cent of the time - feel free to join in.

In the meantime, if you want decent scran on your plane journey, just bring it yourself.