Birthday

It was my birthday in November (5th November to be exact), and because I had to work on my birthday this year, we decided to take a few day trips the weekend before instead.

The first place we went is Sheffield. If you read my blog often enough, you will know I'm a bit obsessed with Yorkshire, and I really love Sheffield.  The first place we visited was Steel City Cakes for a spot of dinner and cake (of course!). It's a bit of a trek from the train station, but the fact that this place has an entirely vegan food menu made up for it,

I was ecstatic when I discovered that they also did vegan milkshakes, so I went for a chocolate milkshake and a BBQ tofu toasted sandwich.  The lovely waitress who was wearing an awesome Griffidor t shirt "persuaded" me to get chips with my sandwich.

I loved the chocolate milkshake.  I've always been a milkshake fan and it makes me sad that I can't have them anymore, this one came with chocolate syrup which made it even more special. The tofu sandwich was OK, nothing to rave about but I was trying to avoid anything too filling.

We just about had room for dessert and although the cake selection wasn't entirely vegan, the majority of them were. In fact there was one case of cakes plus two cake stands of vegan cakes compared to one case of non-vegan cake.  However when they told me their vegan cheesecake of the day was mint chocolate I was sold.

This was uber rich and chocolatey, and I couldn't managed to eat the huge slice I got served but they gave me a box to take it away and it made for an indulgent breakfast the next day.

We ended the day with a visit to The Red Deer, which is a real ale pub that serves a variety of vegan ales and drinks as well as vegan food. When we walked in, we were hit by the wonderful smell of their homemade mulled wine and apple juice.  Although the mulled wine wasn't vegan, the barmaid suggested adding a shot of spiced rum to a glass of their mulled apple juice, which worked very well!

The next day we decided to visit The Globe pub in Glossop for lunch, which is a vegan friendly pub with an entirely vegan food menu (not all their drinks are vegan so you make sure to check). I chose the hot dog with curly fries and The Boy went for their hot dog rolls- which are vegan sausages wrapped in pastry and then deep fried, along with more curly fries.  We also got a portion of black peas, which were polished off before I remembered to take a picture.  As usual we got huge portions at an extremely reasonable price.

Although the main was tasty, it wasn't the reason I wanted to visit- they also make their own vegan cakes and ice creams that come in a variety of flavours.  Last time I went for the butterscotch cake with maple and walnut ice cream, but this time I opted for their ginger cake with "After Nines" ice cream, which is like After Eights in ice cream form. The Boy went for butterscotch cake and bonfire toffee ice cream.

Both were really nice (of course I tried both cakes and ice cream, it's not often we get to share food!) however I don't think I would get the after nine ice cream again, I much preferred the maple and walnut however there are so many others to try!

After polishing off our meal, we did the walk from Glossop train station to Hadfield, which ended up with me stepping in a huge puddle of mud going through a farmers field.  I was not happy, as I was wearing my brand new trainers which got covered in mud.  However, we did get to see some majestic peacocks on the way.

Orchard Pig Cider

Recently, I tweeted the lovely people at Orchard Pig to inquire if their their cider was vegan. When they confirmed it was I decided to be a bit cheeky and ask for a few samples to review for the blog and was delighted when they agreed!

A couple of days later I came to find a case of Orchard Pig Cider waiting for me, along with a premium chewing straw.

The case included two bottles of dry cider (Truffler) and a bottle of their medium cider (Reveller). They also do a third cider, Charmer which is another medium cider.

The Boy and I started on a bottle of the Truffler between us, whilst watching Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (it's a bit of a tradition to watch the box set on the lead up to Christmas however I got too excited and started a bit early this year).

We both really liked this cider, it had a lovely crisp taste with a tinge of sweetness and wasn't too fizzy.

As we were sharing a bottle between us, we were able to crack open the bottle of Reveller.  Again, this was a nice cider, not as crisp as the Truffler and a bit sweeter.  Although we both agreed we preferred the Truffler, we still really enjoyed this one.

I would definitely buy these ciders, and I would like to try their Charmer cider as well.  You can now find their Truffler cider at Wetherspoons on their Craftwork menu- a great choice after you've finished your free drink that came with your veggie curry for Curry Club on Thursday ;-)!

Disclosure: Orchard Pig sent me three bottles of their cider to review, I was not required to write a posiive review and opinions expressed are my own.  I have not be paid or asked to include Wetherspoons in this blog post- I just really like their curry night!

Vegan MoFo- Day 30

I totally failed to take any photos for What I Ate Tuesday.

So instead here is a tea I took a photo of ages ago and was totally awesome.  I can't remember what burgers they were but I had them with sweet potato chips and sweetcorn.

Monday Bakes- Blueberry Lemon Drizzle Loaf

This weekend I made the blueberry and lemon drizzle loaf from Ms Cupcake for my friend's birthday party.  However, it went a bit wrong and when I went to tip it out the loaf tin it just fell apart!

So I salvaged what I could and put individual pieces in muffin case in an attempt to make it look like I intended to serve little pieces of cake!

Despite them being a bit of disaster, they went down really well and someone even commented that they could tell they were vegan- WIN!

The best part? I put the little bits of broken up cake in a container just for me :-)

Seitan Sunday- Seitan Roast Pork Stuffing joint

This week's Seitan Sunday, and last one for MoFo is courtesy of my Uni friend, and fellow Vegan blogger Flash Gordonette.  When I saw her post for this roast pork and stuffing joint last week, I knew I had to try it!

I pretty much stuck to the recipe, except I could find my jar of sage (I swear I have some, somewhere!) so I used mixed herbs.

It was pretty difficult getting the breadcrumbs and crushed walnuts to stick to the roll and eventually I gave up and just dealt with the odd bald patch. I served it with plenty of roast potatoes, leftover stuffing, peas and gravy.

My slice fell apart a bit, but the others seem OK.

It was really yum, and I have plenty left for lunches throughout the week.

Vegan MoFo: Day 27

Sorry!

A very late post for Day 27 of MoFo, as I was out at a friend's birthday party last night. It was a cheese and wine event, and although I was assured that there would be vegan food available, I just wanted to make sure I wouldn't go hungry so we went to Nandos.

The vegan option at Nando's is a veggie pitta without the mayo (all marinades are vegan) and I went for a side of peri peri chips (obviously) and corn on the cob.

As usual, it was really yummy,

There were some things at the party I could eat, mainly hummus with carrot and cucumber sticks and some olives. The hostess's Mother is gluten and lactose intolerant and made some vegan friendly gluten free chocolate flapjacks for dessert, which were amazing.  She also made us some super cute micro mitts (for getting things out the microwave) as an engagement present.

Barcelona Friday- Day 3

Our last day in Barcelona, or the day of many desserts as I like to call it started off with a failed hunt for breakfast pastries.  Eventually I gave up and decided I could hang on until lunch so we made our way to Veganotecha to pick up some treats for the journey home.

As the name suggests, this is a 100% vegan shop selling lots of different mock meats and cheeses amongst other things.  If I wasn't so spoilt working in Manchester City Centre and therefore having easy access to shops like Eighth Day, V Revolution and Unicorn, I probably would have been more excited. I did end up getting a croissant and some amazing biscuits with a chocolate centre, but I missed out on getting some Jeez as I’d convinced myself it was what we call Violife!

We were originally going to go to a hotdog place called The Dog Is Hot for lunch as they sold vegan hotdogs, however they were closed so we headed back to Gopal.

Being disappointed about not being able to get a vegan hotdog, I went for their frankfurter sandwich, and I spotted a delicious looking chocolate cake that I couldn't pass up. Besides, I’d had no breakfast so it was fine.

This picture really doesn't tell you much!

The frankfurter sandwich was lovely, however either I didn't spot or they failed to mention that the sandwich comes with mustard, I was relieved it was Dijon mustard (I think?) because I just can’t handle English mustard and it would have totally ruined the sandwich.  I took the cake back to the hotel  to eat after we had done some souvenir shopping.

I was so glad that this cake lived up to expectations, I’d heard so much about Gopal and their amazing cakes but when we had cake from there before the cinnamon roll and carrot cake didn't really blow me away. But this was everything you would ever want in a chocolate cake- it was light and chocolaty with a mousse-like buttercream. It was a huge slice as well, and my cake belly was very satisfied afterwards.

Most of the day was spent looking for souvenirs and visiting a couple of more places before heading to Vegetalia for tea.  Vegetalia is situated a couple of doors down from Gopal in George Orwell square and does vegetarian and vegan food. 

We went for a sharer plate to start which came with hummus, pittas, tofu and mushroom nuggets and vegetable spring rolls- basically every starter they serve!

I loved the pittas and the hummus, the pittas were so soft, but the rest of the starters were just OK, I wasn't wild about the tofu nuggets.

For drinks, we spotted that they sold Sangria (when in Spain..!) and after confirming that it was vegan (they looked very bemused by the question) we ordered a jug, which was lovely.

For mains, I decided to be healthy and stick to tradition, so I ordered the brown rice paella despite the fact the burgers were calling to me!

The paella was OK, it was a bit too dry and I would have liked some more slices of lemon to drizzle over it although they did given me some flavoured oil which I used a bit of.  I was a bit disappointed, however on reflection the fact I ate a healthy and light tea was probably a good thing given what I ended up eating later on!

We decided to skip the dessert at Vegetalia as the only vegan dessert was carrot cake, and I was a bit sick of eating carrot cake, so we went for a wonder around the area near Cat Bar.

I’d read about a traditional European bakery in Barcelona that some vegan items, but I never took an address or details of where it was, so I was very excited when I happen to stumble across it!  They were selling vegan carob cake and gingerbread, and after a bit of deliberation, I opted for the gingerbread.

This was very erm, gingery! It was very different to the gingerbread you usually see around and was not as sweet, however I did like it, but it just didn't satisfy my need for dessert. So I was very excited and surprised when I was walking around and spotted a gluten free ice cream shop called Gocce Di Latte. This caught my eye at first because I didn't really consider that ice cream had gluten in! Then I noticed as well as saying gluten free on the shop window, it said lactose free and vegan!!!

The lady behind the counter seems quite bemused!

Not believing my eyes that I’d found an ice cream shop other that Gelaati Di Marco that potentially sold ALL vegan ice cream I went in to check that what I read was true.  I was ecstatic when the lady behind the counter confirmed that all flavours were vegan.

Ice cream modelled by The Boy

I went for a scoop of salted chocolate with almonds and a scoop of pistachio. And OMG! The pistachio was A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.

I tried the check this place out since coming back and it isn’t on Happy Cow, I did find out that they have a main shop just round the corner which sells ‘normal’ ice cream and this is branch out of the main shop.  I didn't find any kind of reference to this place being specifically vegan, but I did find reference to it being lactose free. I'm just hoping that the lady in the shop was right, and I’ve not accidentally eaten lactose free dairy ice cream!!

We ended the night by visiting some monuments around Barcelona at night, and also discovered this beautiful train station- I wish we had some more stations as stunning as this.

Apple Thursday and Macmillan Coffee Morning

Every year my work take part in Macmillan's Worlds Biggest Coffee Morning, and I always like to take part.  Last year, I had the same problem as this year- having more apples than I know what to do with and so I made this apple cake, which I've mentioned before. Although it got compliments, people tended to go for the more decadent cakes.  So this year I decided I need to make something more exciting to stop the crowds going for the shop bought cakes people donate (don't even get me started! I think it should be illegal!).

Just to show you what I kind of volume of apples I'm talking about, The Boy's father decided to come round and pick some of the apples off the tree this week as I never get round to it. After getting rid of the rotten ones, these are all the apples I have in my kitchen at the moment (there are still more on the trees):

Keeping in mind that I had all these apples and that my work colleagues really like their chocolate cake, I decided to make these chocolate orange cupcakes which uses grated apple as a binder. However I let out the marmalade so that they were plain chocolate cupcakes and topped them with some vanilla buttercream and mini oreos.

I chose one of the ugly cakes (I always have a few of them) to test and I'm pretty impressed. I hope they go down well tomorrow.

Wrap It Wednesday- Slow Cooker Lentil and Quinoa

When I did my first online shop at Real Foods last week, I decided to treat myself to some quinoa.

One of the main reasons I wanted to get some, is so I could make this slow cooker lentil and quinoa taco filling (we use tortilla wraps instead). Part of the reason I love this recipe is that apart from chopping and crushing some garlic (and even then I bet you could potentially use garlic powder) it is easy to throw together and pop in a slow cooker for 8-9 hours.  Which was perfect last night when I made these, the change in seasons is making me feel a little drained.

I usually put everything in the slow cooker the night before and then turn it on low in the morning before I set off to work but this time I cooked it overnight and switched it off in the morning. When I came home from work, I just put some in a bowl, grated some Violife pizza cheese on and zapped it for 1-2 minutes in the microwave. I served it with the avocado, salsa and some Really! Not Dairy roasted garlic mayonnaise.

Yum! The cheese and garlic mayo really took it up a notch. I managed to be restrained and resist eating them all at once and managed to save some for a wrap for lunch tomorrow.

What I Ate Tuesday

As usual, the day started off with a coffee.  I’m trying to do Martin Lewis’s downshift challenge, so I downgraded my soy milk further, and went for Sainsbury’s basic unsweetened soy milk.

It doesn't taste that bad, I still prefer almond milk but I think I’ll stick to this unless almond milk is on offer.

Breakfast was Alpro vanilla yogurt, with raisins, dried cranberries, linseed mix and nutty muesli in my new Hello Kitty tub.

I usually sub soya yoghurt for sour cream in wraps so I usually get the plain one and this was the first time I’d had the vanilla. I really loved this flavour and I’ll definitely get it again.

Recording what I've been eating over these last few weeks has made me realise just how rubbish my diet has been lately.  So this week I'm trying to be a bit healthier, today's lunch was a salad with radishes, olives, spinach, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and some leftover sweet potato and lentil loaf from Sunday’s roast dinner. I served this with the carrot and ginger dressing from Appetite for Reduction.

Snacks through the day included some carrot and cucumber sticks with hummus (another Appetite for Reduction recipe) and a nakd bar.  

As The Boy went to Scarborough today, I was cooking for myself for tea.  So I had the last of the sausages I made for Seitan Sunday with left over garlic and rosemary roasties, peas, sweetcorn and gravy. I was running out of gravy granules so had to be a bit more reserved, usually I use far more gravy than this!

After eating all that, I felt pretty stuffed. But then I remembered we still had lots of snickerdoodles left and suddenly I didn't feel as full anymore. So I had one. OK, I had two.

Monday Bake- Snickerdoodles

I'm not too good at baking cookies, when I tried making them before going vegan I never spaced them out enough and always ended up with giant monster cookies that broke up as soon as I lifted them out the tray. 

However, I recently bought a pack of Orgran no egg so I thought I'd have my first go at making vegan cookies. After having my first ever snickerdoodle at January's Cake Liberation Front meet up I thought I'd give the snickerdoodle recipe in Ms Cupcake's book a go.

All was going well, apart from not having quite enough brown sugar but that was no biggie, I just made up the full amount with more caster sugar. I made them into balls, rolled them in sugar and placed them on my brand new large baking trays, ready to go in the oven. 

The trays were too big for the oven.

Damn.

So I put them in my two roasting trays. Only problem is I have one large baking tray which I managed to fit nine cookies on, but my smaller one could only fit six. Which left me with raw cookie dough. Mmm raw cookie dough!

Eurgh! I really don't like raw snickerdoodle dough, it's far too sickly. Plan B- take out the first batch and use a pizza tray to cook the the rest of the cookies.

The results were OK, the cookies on the large roasting tin were quite big and I did have some merging. But I could easily separate them and they didn't fall apart when I moved them.

The ones on the small roasting tray had merged, but again separated easily.

The best results were the ones on the pizza tray. For this batch I'd read the instructions more thoroughly and instead of flattening the balls of dough before I put them in the oven, I put them in rolled up in a ball. During cooking the naturally spread out, and tapping them on a work surface when taking them out of the oven made them flatten out. Leaving perfectly round cookies!

They tasted delicious with a lovely crunchy outside but were beautifully soft inside. The cinnamon taste really came through and I will definitely be making these on the run up to christmas and serve them with a nice cup of hot chocolate or mulled wine.

Seitan Sunday

For this week's Seitan Sunday I made Simple Italian Sausages using this recipe from PPK.

I subbed butter beans for the navy/great northern beans that the recipe suggests, because I have tons of butter beans in my freezer from when I decided to cook and freeze all my dried pulses. And also because I haven't a clue what navy or great northern beans are, and I doubt I'll find them in ASDA.

I also subbed smoked paprika for the sweet paprika, as thats what I had in.

Other than that I just stuck to the recipe, which was pretty simple to follow.

I decided to put half of one on last night's pizza and ate the rest whilst waiting for the pizza to cook. It had quite a strong aniseed taste, and I'm not the biggest fan of aniseed. Knowing this, I should have really either left the fennel out or subbed it for something else, but I'm a bugger for just following recipes!

However, on the pizza the aniseed taste was masked by the other flavours and it didn't taste too bad.

I also had another half of one on a tofu omelette I made for breakfast this morning. I also added some Violife pizza cheese, a decent amount this time- look how melty it is!

Again, mixed in with other things the aniseed taste wasn't too strong.

I definitely would make these again, but I would perhaps replace the fennel with crushed cumin seeds.

Pizza Saturday

I'm doing quite well with my themes this week! After all the activities of the beginning of September this is the first week I've stuck to the plan. I'm super impressed that I've managed to do a post a day, although I think next time I need to be more organised and do stuff in advance. I feel that some posts lack quality because I've been trying to do them after a busy day, with lots of other stuff I need to do as well.

Anyway, it's pizza day! 

The boy is working a 12 hour shift today, which means it's pizza for one.  The Boy's speciality is pizza, and he makes his own pizza dough.  I on the other hand have no patience with doughs or pastries, so I get the ready made ones.  Home Bargains sell Napolina pizza bases and recently it was on offer so I stocked up. It does make me laugh that they describe these as large pizza bases, but maybe I'm just greedy.

I was never really that crazy about cheese, however I like cheese on a pizza purely because it helps to keep toppings on.  For today's pizza I'd treated myself to some Violife pizza cheese.  I LOVE their cheese slices however I hadn't tried the pizza cheese but I'd heard it melted well so I was very excited!

For the pizza sauce, I used this recipe, I'd made this before and it's super easy. You just chuck it all in a blender for a few minutes, the most labour intensive part is peeling and chopping the garlic. You could leave the garlic out or use a smidge of garlic powder if you wanted to be really lazy. 

I love to load my pizza with toppings, I was never a fan of the boring margarita.  Today I used all my favorite pizza toppings- green olives (black would go better but I didn't have any), red onion (home grown), pineapple and sweet corn. I also added some seitan sausages I made for Seitan Sunday (recipe and review to follow tomorrow).  

I thought I'd put a load of cheese on, but when I took it out it didn't look very cheesy. I doubt this has anything to do with the cheese itself as I tend to underestimate the amount of cheese I need on a pizza. 

See what I mean about these bases not being large- they don't even fill the pizza tray!

The garlic veganaise I had at Cat Bar in Barcelona, had reminded me how much I love garlic mayonnaise. So when I did a Real Foods order this week, I added this Really! Not Dairy roasted garlic mayonnaise to my order. I love it, it tastes just like garlic mayonnaise. I thought it would go great on the pizza.

The base was OK, I prefer The Boy's homemade bases and we do them nice and thin but this one was neither a pan or thin and crispy base.  I really loved the Violife pizza cheese and I thought it melted well and tasted pretty creamy and authentic. I would say that black olives would have tasted nicer but I'm more of a green olive fan so a jar of black olives would have been wasted. However overall, this was a pretty good pizza and I was getting pretty stuffed by the end.

Barcelona Friday- Day 2

On the first day, after having tea at Cat Bar we wondered over to George Orwell Square to get cakes from Gopal.  Initially I just wanted one of their chocolate donuts that I’d heard so much about,  however when we got there, I could resist getting a cinnamon roll as well and The Boy spotted the carrot cake.  Being too full to eat them there and then, we got them to take away but by the time we got back to our apartment we were both too drained from a long day to eat cake.

Luckily, eating cake for breakfast on holiday is OK.

The chocolate donut lived up to expectations, however the cinnamon roll was just OK and neither of us was keen on the icing on the carrot cake. 

We spent the morning visiting all the Gaudi buildings and we did plan to visit Park Guell however you have to buy tickets now and they only allow up to 400 visitor per 30 minutes.  The queue to book tickets was HUGE (with no guarantee of getting a time slot for the day) and it was far too hot to be queuing.  Instead we just wondered around the open parts (it’s only the central area where the house is etc. which is restricted) and took some pictures from the outside.  When we go again, I'm definitely booking tickets in advance.

For lunch, we headed to Maoz Falafel. Basically, you order either a falafel wrap or salad and you get given the falafel in a pitta or bowl plus lettuce. You then help yourself to other fillings- all but one are vegan.  We went for the falafel wrap meal, which came with a wrap, drink and fries. We didn't really think of how we going to hold all three at once, and I kind of panicked a little and ended up not putting all the available fillings on which was a mistake.

The Boy described this as the best falafel wrap he'd ever had, and I’d agree. The only criticism I have is that the olives still had stones in, and I really don’t get the point of that. 

In the afternoon after making our second trip to Gelaati di Marco, we visited Montjuic, which is the area of Barcelona where the 1992 Olympic Games were held. There was a lovely garden nearby with millions of fountains, and we took outdoor escalators to the top and took in the stunning view over Barcelona.

For tea we went to Rasoterra, which is a vegetarian tapas restaurant with clearly marked vegan dishes.  This was definitely the most upmarket place we went in Barcelona, however neither of us were that impressed.  We placed our order with the snooty waiter (the chef seemed very friendly though), I ordered patatas bravas (obviously) , tofu and vegetable gyozas and carrot and tempeh balls.  The Boy ordered two vegetarian dishes along with some vegan tomato bread.

Out of all the dishes, I would say the tempeh balls and bread was my favourite.  It was my first time trying tempeh and I really loved the texture, it’s a shame it’s so hard to get hold of here.  I wasn’t expecting much of the bread, however it was well flavoured with tomato and a hint of sea salt and tasted very fresh.  The gyozas were a bit meh and the patatas bravas at Cat Bar were better.

Overall I didn't rate this place, the atmosphere felt hostile and it was a bit pricey side especially since there are so many great places in Barcelona with nicer food and a friendlier atmosphere.

For dessert, we head to Pasteleria La Estrella which according to my research sold Lujuria Vegana vegan cakes and pastries.  It’s on the same road as Guell Palace and is a bit further up. I was happy to find that they did indeed sell vegan cakes, and had a dedicated fridge.  However, as we went a bit late on they seemed to have sold out of a lot of stuff.  I ended up going for another carrot cake, which this time I did eat as dessert!

This was a lot fancier (and pricier) than the one from Gopal. And I preferred the lighter icing however the cake itself was just OK. I feel like a right carrot cake snob!

And that was the end of the second day. Next Friday will be my write up of our last day, and also the last Friday of MoFo- it's gone fast!