Vegan in Gran Canaria- Part 1

I recently went away for a week to Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria with The Boy and family. Despite it being windy, we had a fab time and thanks to checking Happy Cow before booking, I managed to eat pretty well!

We arrived at our hotel in the evening, and having dropped off our stuff we headed out to grab some tea.  I was fully expecting not to be able to find much to eat on the first night, so was setting my sights on a cheese-less pizza from an Italian, or chips.  However, it turns out we were very close to Natural Burguer, a burger place which sells both meat and veggie/vegan options.  They do various soy burgers, hot dogs and "meat" pieces.   I managed to confirm using my limited Spanish that the soy burgers and fake meat pieces were vegan but I'm not too sure about the soy hot dogs. The menu is done in pictures and you can see what is in each of the burgers making it easy to determine what was vegan and what wasn't. The tables were also pretty cool, as you can see.

Due to it being so close to our hotel, I ended up eating here four times.  The best thing was definitely the "chicken" pieces, which were pretty convincing and reminded me of popcorn chicken, and the chips were also a firm favorite. The drink choices were impressive, you could order various fruits in the form of juices, lassis (not vegan, contains yogurt), regular and soya milkshakes. The best drink I order was a strawberry soya milkshake.

We stayed the Astoria Hotel (nothing to do with the Waldorf Astoria!), and breakfast was included in the price.  I wasn't holding out much hope, but I was pleasantly surprised that I did managed to eat a breakfast that wasn't just fruit, even if it was the same each day.  They also had churros and palmitas daily and although these are usually vegan, I didn't want to chance it and I didn't trust my Spanish enough to ask, something I plan to work on!

The next few days mainly consisted of Italian, Indian and more Natural Burguer, whilst we figured out what was what, but eventually we made our way to the town centre, where we visited Zoe Food.

Zoe Food is an vegetarian cafe, with a branch in Italy. Just a note- if you try to locate this place via Google, you'll have a long walk as it will try and give you directions to the one in Italy! Find it via Happy Cow and use the directions on there.

The place itself wasn't what I was expecting- I'm so use to veggie cafes being a bit underwhelming (with a few exceptions) and looking like a canteen but this place was very cute and airy and felt very Parisian!

We decided to go for the daily menu, which was around 11-12 Euros and included pitchers of pink lemonade, water, coffee and flatbreads and hummus. For starters we went for vegan Spanish tortillas, various kind of mini bruschetta type things and a vegetable soup (not pictured)

I have never been a fan of any type of omelette and I only chose it because where else are you gonna find a vegan Spanish omelette? Therefore I wasn't too crazy about mine, but don't let my option put you off! I managed to nick some of The Boy's bruschettas and was kicking myself for choosing the wrong thing. I was delighted when he didn't like the one with the smoked tofu on and gave it to me.

For main, I went for stuffed cabbage leaves, stuffed with various things, including tofu.  Language barriers meant that we thought that we were getting stuffed courgette, but I was pretty pleased we got the cabbage instead!

As you can see taking a picture was bit of an after thought! I got a bit panicky when I saw the cream, but our waitress assured me it was vegan. I really enjoyed the main, I love cabbage and it sounds silly but I'd never thought of making stuffed cabbage leaves before, and I'll definitely give this a go. The tofu inside was subtly smoked, unlike some of the other smoked tofu I'd have before that reminded me of smoked mackerel!

Dessert was not included in the daily menu and was around 3-4 Euros extra.  However, being aware this was probably the only time I would get a dessert on this holiday I decided to splurge.  All the desserts, apart from the ice cream was vegan.  I couldn't resist the chocolate and coconut cake, and my other dining partners went for the carrot cake.

The cakes are all gluten free and nice and light, which I was quite pleased with as I was feeling quite full anyway.  The Boy's Mum is a bit obsessed with finding out how to stop vegan cakes falling to bits and was pleased with the structure of these cakes.  So much so she asked our lovely waitress how she does it, and she kindly wrote down suggestions on a business card!

I really loved this place, the people were friendly and the food was all high quality.  I  wish I'd had the chance to visit more than once because the regular and breakfast menus looked lovely.

We found another vegan friendly place nearer by our hotel, and I also found some interesting supermarket finds, but I'll leave that until next time!