Vegan MoFo: Whimsical food always tastes better....

There are all kinds of vegan cheeses on the market these days - from Vegan-Rella to Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet to Sheese, Teese, to Dr Cow and and Daiya Cheese, the sheer range is often bewildering. We really do seem to have gotten beyond the necessity of stealing the milk from baby cows to make our mozzarella!

And so with that in mind, there is no longer any reason to omit cheese from that one dish that seems to demand the gooey stuff: pizza! Unless, of course, you are eating a pie like this one:



This beautiful pie was just loaded with mushrooms, baby spinach, fire-roasted red peppers, zucchini, and tofu riccota and was good beyond words. My savvy little sister managed to snag this baby off the menu when My Beloved and I visited her in London earlier this year to celebrate our mother's birthday. The pizza was her choice from the menu of the Root-Master - a retired London double decker bus which now serves as a fantastic vegan restaurant.

Healthy, delicious, cruelty-free and whimsical...what more could you ask for?

Stay vegan, friends!

On Being The Vegan in the Room

You may, or may not, know that I am a member of Curves. Well, our club recently changed ownership and the new owner, Bonnie, held a potluck today as a way of getting the members together and celebrating our new start. So, accompanied by My Beloved (yes, spouses were specifically invited), I went armed with some great vegan offerings. The general theme, being so close to Valentine's Day, was Romance - with a capital 'R'!

So, having taken this to heart - ho ho! , we sped up to Northampton with a vegan heart-shaped pizza, topped with heart-shaped peppers of various colours, egglant, tomoatoes ('love apples'!) and no cheese...well, that's heart-healthy! And three trays of quinoa with eggplant, peppers, onions, green and yellow squash, corn and edamame. OK, I'll hold my hand up and admit that I somewhat overdid it on the amount of quinoa, but I hate worrying about there not being enough. Especially when I'm being 'the vegan in the room' if you know what I mean! Oh, the pressure to perform....!

Anyway, to finish it all off, there was also a blueberry and orange bundt cake - the second one I've made this week, as it happens and it met the self-same fate as its predecessor. Of course, this was from The Joy of Vegan Baking and was - without any shadow of a doubt - the very highlight of the potluck. If I was asked once, I was asked a couple of dozen times what was in it and how the heck it could be so good if it was 'vee-gun'.

I just smiled and explained how the silken tofu took the place of the eggs, bypassing all of the cholesterol and battery chicken hell. The sweetly seductive scent of freshly squeezed oranges, 
the still warm pop of the whole blueberries, the lightly moist crumb, the fine dusting of powdered sugar....Suffice to say, not a single slice came home with us! 

Naturally, having spent so much time baking and cooking (I was at it at 08:30 this morning, and as you know I am not a 'morning person' - especially not at the weekend!!!!), no photos exist of this bacchanalia. I left My Beloved in charge of the camera and he was waaaaay more interested in slicing the pizza than in performing his 'documentary' duties. So I guess you'll simply have to take my word that these wonderous things happened.

But they did. Oh yes, indeedy!

Stay Vegan, Friends!

An Interesting Few Days

On Friday last week, My Beloved and I visited a place we don't usually frequent as it involves driving out there and usually we prefer just to walk to one of the myriad cafes and restaurants in Northampton to grab a sandwich or bowl of soup for lunch. However circumstance found us at Spoleto Express, an offshoot of the 'Spoleto empire' which includes the eponymous downtown location, Pizza Paradiso, the Del-Ray, Mama Inguana's and a couple of others whose names escape me. Anyways, trepidently we surveyed the menu boards and discovered no vegan options as such but a couple of dishes that could easily be veganised: grilled vegetable panini with mozzarella and mayo or the hummus and vegetable wrap with cheddar cheese.

Being as it was a chilly day, I plumped for the former but requested they hold the cheese and mayo - a simple concept, one would have imagine. But no! Apparently, they could 'leave the cheese out' but the mayo was already spread and nothing could un-do that. Hmmmm, I thought to myself, OK I'm flexible, I'll just go with the hummus vegetable wrap instead and ensure that the cheese is left out. 

Great, so we paid, grabbed our coffees and sat to await our lunch.

Then the chef came over - a young guy who was very nice but full of remorse that they'd run out of hummus. Would I perhaps like the grilled vegetable panini?, he enquired. Yes, I said, very much so - it being a hot sandwich and it being about 8 degrees below outside and blustery - but I don't eat dairy - being vegan - so I need the cheese and mayo left out.....

No problem, he said, we can always accommodate special requests.

Which left me sipping bemusedly on my coffee and wondering whether I have not yet, in fact, mastered the native tongue after all....????