Southampton Vegan Festival

This weekend just gone was the first Southampton vegan festival and my husband and I (yep, we got married! More on that another time though!) got in the car, drove the hour or so to get there to check it out.

It was worth the trip, we ate some really good food and always spent way to much moolah on stuff to take home. Here's what we got...

We started with some Greek food from Greek Vegan Deli Specialities; having just come back from our honeymoon in Crete, we had to! And we were not disappointed. We both got a pitta (which was amazing!) filled with tofu halloumi, falafel, salad and a bunch of dips including vegan taramasalata! avocado, some sort of sweetcorn relish and what I think was beetroot hummus.

It was so good, I mean look at it! (I love that they gave us a fork too, as it was a messy sucker!)

I also grabbed some of their baklava to take home, which Simon and I ate for lunch the next morning.

After we ate, we decided to have a leisurely wander around and this is what we bought:

We got a couple of pieces of cake from Vegan Sweet Tooth, London to share. We went for the pistachio, pomegranate and rose cake. The frosting tasted like straight up soya yogurt to me, which I wasn't a fan of at first but actually it worked well with the cake. The cake was really tasty and I liked the rose flavour.

We also bought a piece of the nutella brownie which I wasn't a huge fan of, it just tasted healthy, if you know what I mean! haha. It was good but I'd have preferred it to be sweeter.

Then we found the VeggiJelli stand which interested Simon, as he has requested a trifle for his upcoming birthday! We got 4 packs to take with us.

And some ready made to eat then and there. It was pretty good and they told us it works well for trifle as the fruit won't stop it setting. The more important question I forgot to ask was will vodka stop it setting (like the sachets of veggie jelly crystals you can buy in holland and barrett!!)?? I'll let you know!

Jellyyyyyyy

Then we went to the Eden stand so I could get a new bottle of their J'adore copy! I ended up buying that and their copy of Flower Bomb. Plus two for Simon! I've been trying to find a copy of his Mont Blanc aftershave for ages and after a chat with the lovely owner, he advised me that one of their Abercrombie copies is actually exactly the same. And it is pretty spot on!! So yay. We also picked up their copy of Jean-Paul Gaultier's classic for men.

I spotted a stand called LoveSeitan and as I do, I had to give it a go! I bought a half loaf of the original seitan, but they had a curry version, a smokey and a couple of others.

Then one of my favourite things, was some fudge from Slab! I got two bars of the Tiger Butter (chocolate and peanut butter), a cookies and cream and a salted caramel. Honestly I thought the tiger butter would be my favourite and it is really really really good, but the salted caramel was my favourite! SO good, I will definitely be ordering some more of their vegan bars from their website.

We also of course had to pay a visit to Hannah Banana's stand, as she made our amazing wedding cakes last month and we are big fans! We grabbed a couple of cupcakes, not picture, for a friend of ours working on the Sea Shepherd stand, as she missed out on our wedding cake and we also grabbed a slice of the Speculoos cake and some jaffa cakes. We did have a jaffa cake cake at our wedding, but all the jaffa cakes were eaten before I got a chance to have one, so I was really pleased that Simon spotted these - and they were yummy!!

Lastly, we managed to snag the last Drunken Mushroom Pie from the Mr Nice Pie stand; Simon and I ate this last night and it was really good!

Then before we snuck off, we grabbed a burger to share from Got No Beef (which also had a FroYo section too, but I forgot to get some). Lighting was crap so my pics are not so great, but hopefully you get the idea. This was a tasty burger! We got cheeseburgers, with the mild cheese and all the toppings :)

The lighting really was shite!

So all in all it was really good and worth the trip!

I believe the venue will be different next year, which is probably a good thing. There were definitely a few issues, it was in a nightclub so lighting was low, hence my even shitter photos than ususal and although apparently the venue said the parking was free beforehand, they changed their minds on the day - not the fault of the organisers though and I don't remember it being particularly expensive to park!

Did anyone go? What did you think?

Laters
Sal xXx

Why I haven't blogged for a while and why the cereal bar aisle at the supermarket makes me stabby

Q - Why haven't I blogged in a while?
A - I'm lazy.

Q - Why does the cereal bar aisle make at the supermarket make me stabby?
A - Honey. FORKING HONEY!!  Why. Why Why WHY WHY why does every feckin cereal bar that is magically free from dairy or eggs have honey in?

Ok so now that that's out the way... how the devil are you all?  I thought I should post as it's been forever. But because it's been so long I have a crap tonne of pics on my phone, most of which are not really anything of note. So I'll just post a couple of fun ones.

Starting with afternoon tea at Terre a Terre.  Jojo and I and her husband Nick and friend Tabitha went there t'other weekend for Jojo's belated birthday celebration. And needless to say it was epic.

Check this shit out....

The menu. Obviously Jojo and I went for the one with Prosecco!

3 tiers of rad

The Savoury Tier

It had a seaweed cracker, which is basically like a prawn cracker, with fancy tomatoes on. Then sesame hoisin tofu with some fancy veggie sandwiched in the middle. Jojo knew what it's called but I've forgotten. The one at the back I'm struggling to remember exactly what it was, but it was potato based and delicious. All 3 things were amazing.

The Middle Tier

This had 2 mini churros, 2 little cakes (an almondy fruit one and one with chocolate in the middle) and a piece of chocolate brownie. It also had a pistachio cracker and some cherries. All of this was insanely good.

The Top Tier - The Scones

YES! Perfect scones, yummy creamy stuff and jam. Triple WIN!

For £18 ish, including a glass of prosecco, I think this was totally worth it. Everything was delicious, it looked amazing and it was the right amount of food.

OK so onwards.

Last weekend we had some nice weather and because it's meant to piss down for oh I dunno, the rest of summer probably... we made the most of it with a barbecue.

Wait, COME BACK!!  I KNOW YOU'RE BORED OF MY BARBECUE POSTS.... But we changed it up a bit.  Just a bit though, don't get too excited!

I made a yummy salad with some fancy yellow and red tomatoes, an avocado and some chilli and lime. Kind of like guac but without the mushing (and the coriander!).

Garlic bread of course. I added extra nooch!

Sweet potatoes that I roasted in olive oil with a bit of chilli and sea salt.

a crappy blurry pic of my plate, that's a Vegusto wiener (hehe) and a no cluck cutlet from Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day (this is fussier than I usually like to deal with for seitan, but so totally worth it, they rock socks!)

Homemade lemonade - there's a recipe for this below if you want it. You know you want it!

And baked mini donuts, because I bought a tin. I just veganised the recipe on the tin box by changing out the dairy for the usual stuff, using flax seeds + water for the eggs and adding a bit of extra bicarb. It was nothing life changing, but nice. I reckon I could do better. The glaze was just soymilk and icing sugar, that I heated and whisked then added strawberry flavour and some (apparently really crap!) red food colouring too. And sprinklez. YEAH sprinklez... ok I've had too much sugar.

Lemonade Recipe
6 Lemons (plus an extra one and a lime if you want to put some slices in the jug and be fancy like me)
1 cup sugar
Water water water
Ice ice baby

Method
Peel as much of the skin off the lemons as you can be arsed to, with a potato peeler, taking care to get as little of the bitter white crap as possible. Put in a pan with sugar and 1 cup of water and bring to the boil, stirring constantly.  Turn the heat down a bit but it should still be bubbling, let it go for 5 minutes.

Pour into a jug and leave to cool completely.

Squeeze the juice from the lemons then strain it and the syrup into a jug and add ice, lemon & lime slices if you're fancy and top it up with water. Just add it until you are happy with the taste, I added about 1.5 litres / 6 cups.

Easy and everyone will woo and coo at you like you're some sort of domestic goddess because you made your own lemonade. Until you trip over and fall on your face with a plate of food in your hand. Not that that happened, just sayin.

Have an ace weekend.

Laterz
xXx


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Alien on Roast

Groan, that was a bad title, even by my standards... sorry!

So yesterday I went to Brighton to spend the afternoon eating with my favourite vegans, Jojo, Kip & Holley. After a bit of Brigton traffic funtimes I met them in VBites for a roast. I must say that I'm not a huge fan of the Vbites fake meat but I really enjoyed this meal. The roasties were great and there was cauliflower cheese AND a yorkshire pudding. The yorkshire was a bit doughy but still good. The stuff ball was also very nice. You can pick from beef, gammon or turkey style roasts or you can be a glutton and have all 3, as we did.  There's definitely more creative vegan roasts available in Brighton but for something traditional and comforting, this one is a good option.

Afterwards we walked round the corner to Boho Gelato and there was a big queue. When we got to near the front the guy told us that they would be restocking the 'crack' in 40 minutes. There wasn't much else we fancied so we decided to wait for the crack. We went back after a bit of makeup shopping and after a bit of a wait inside the shop, they brought out the good stuff. It's peanut butter sea salt caramel flavour and it's the best ice cream I've ever had - vegan or no! Delicious and totally worth the wait. I only got one scoop because I was pretty full but I'm fairly certain I could've polished off a second scoop!

Onto some random stuff from my camera... this is a cake I made last weekend and my brother and sister-in-law were over. VCTOtW basic vanilla sponge made into 2 layers and filled with vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam.

TACOS! I post these a lot I know. What can I say, I love a taco!  The filling is tempeh, spices, sweetcorn, peppers and kidney beans. And some soya yoghurt and cheezly on top and guac on the side, as I had an avocado to use up. 

Guacamole MOLE MOLE!!!

This was something that came to me one night and I decided to give it a go, as I had leftover rice. So I made mushroom rice and tandoori vegetables. For the veg I mixed tandoori paste with soya yoghurt and dipped the veg in, then sprayed with oil and baked for about 20 minutes at 200C. It was pretty good but I want to tweak the marinade before I post the recipe.

That's all for now. Have a great week peeps.

Laterz
xXx

I'm forever blowing bubbles

A couple of weeks ago I was very jammy and got invited to go see an advanced screening of Cuban Fury in London, the day before it came out (a friend from salsa class won the tickets; there was a raffle at our class, as the guy who choreographed the movie was there teaching us a bit of the routine from the film - very fun!  Anyway I spent the day in Soho as that's where it was and Soho is a good day out.

First thing I did was go get bubble tea from Bubbleology. My friend Kip introduced me to bubble tea a couple of years ago and I can't walk by that place without getting one now. This is Taro flavoured, it kind of tastes like cookies! So good.  I also went back to the chinese/thai vegan buffet place that I posted about in my last post, but the pic is basically the same as last time. (It's called Tao by the way if anyone's in that area; it's on Great Windmill Street and it's super cheap and awesome! Everything's vegan on the buffet, they do serve dairy ice cream though apparently.

Then because I'm a nice sister, I made a cake for when my Bro & Sister-in-Law came to dinner. This is the vegan cupcakes take over the world basic chocolate recipe x 1.5 and baked for half an hour in 2 sandwich tins.  I also tweaked the recipe and used coconut milk instead of soy and added 1 tsp coconut extract, 1/2  a cup of dessicated coconut and a tin of cherries chopped up (less enough to decorate the top with that I didn't do in the end!)  The icing is the one from Nigella's Devils' Food Cake Recipe - I just replaced the butter with vitalite. The chocolate I used was a bit bitter (it's all my local shop had) but I really like this recipe.  It's way less sweet than buttercream, which I like but it's so sickly.

V for Vaygun! (My brother is rude)

SOUP! I love soup when the weather is crap and with the exception of today, the weather's been pretty crap.  This is a recipe I've posted on here before and I love it with crusty bread.

The other week I went to meet a friend I met on holiday last year in her home town and the first night we were pretty drunk so I probably couldn't have worked my phone to take a pic of the food, even if I had remembered. But I got pics of the next day's lunch. We went for thai food!

I started with Tom Yum soup. This was SOOOOO spicy, totally cleared my nose out! hahaha. It was great.

Then a thai red curry with steamed rice.  Loads of veg and lovely sauce, I really enjoyed this. (As with all Thai restaurants, just be sure to ask them to not put in any fish sauce, as they tend to put it in everything, even if it's marked vegetarian!)

Last weekend was my friend's birthday, so I offered to bring dessert as she was cooking dinner. I made the peanut butter criss-crosses from vegan cookies invade your cookie jar and to be honest they were a bit of a fail.  The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of molasses. I only put in one but it totally overpowered everything (maybe UK molasses is different??) so I added more PB and it was better. But I burnt the first batch. DAMMIT!  The second batch was a bit better. I sandwiched them with vanilla buttercream.

So because I felt bad about the crappy sangers, I made a cake too.  I was totally winging this, just chucked some stuff in and hoped for the best. It was some leftover coconut milk and lemon juice/zest that I used for the wet ingredients. I was kinda going off the lemon coconut bundt recipe in veconomicon but I was too lazy to get out the book. I also baked it in a loaf tin. It was a bit dense but surprisingly nice!  haha. I drizzled the top with a simple glaze of lemon juice and icing sugar.

And just to prove that even cute kitties take bad photos (just like their owners!), look at this stupid photo of Jazzy. BAAAHAHAHAHAHAH. It cracks me up. Snaggletoof!  haha.

Laterz
xXx

Street Foodz

Afternoon all. As promised in my mammoth beauty favourites post, I also have some food pics to share with ya.  Last weekend, I met up with my vegan ladybros in London for a day of scoffing and gossip.

 

My friend Holley and I started in Cakes 'n' Treats in Camden, as we wanted CAKE!  Cakes 'n' Treats is an all vegan cafe located in Pratt Street, which is about a 5 min or so walk from Camden Town tube.

 

But after being starvin for cake, Holley had a breakfast and I had a tofu scramble-filled bagel!  My bagel was pretty ace, behold....

Holley did get cake though, double (triple?) chocolate gateaux. She let me try a bit and it was really good. I loved the frosting because it was sort of moussey, not overly sweet.  I do love a cupcake but the amount of sugar in buttercream always makes them soooo sickly.  But yeah this was good. Holley described it as just like a Sara Lee chocolate gateaux which is apparently a good thing. But I don't remember eating those as a kid really.

And because it would've been wrong to not get something sweet, I took away a vegan snickers. Basically this was super gooey caramel, with big whole peanuts in and a chocolate topping and it was DELICIOUS! I had it the next day and it took me a few goes to finish it becuase it was very sweet. But that caramel, OMG - awesome!

 

Then we headed off to meet Jojo at a pop up market - help me out Jojo, where was it?  I just am along for the ride when we go out in London because I usually don't know where the hell I am. But we met at Liverpool St. Station and walked about 10 minutes from there to an indoor market, where The Mighty Fork had a stall.  I've blogged about them before (I had the Big Chilli last time), this time I knew before I got there I was going for the Brew Dog (because last time I was kind of regretting not getting one of those as well haha) and I made the right decision. Awesome.  I loved the extra jalapenos they put on too, because I like the sshpicy!

 

We then found a bar round the corner from the market and stayed for a couple of hours chatting and drking prosecco out of a plastic champagne flute. Fancy!  By that point it was time for more food. So we hopped on the tube to Soho and found an all you can eat, vegan thai buffet that Holley suggested. It was great but I only remembered to take a picture of my first plateful; which included awesome noodles, spicy 'beef' curry, rice and somewhere hidden under there are a couple of spring rolls.

 

Last week, Mummy Alien had a week off work and as I'm currently an unemployed bum, we decided to go to Guildford town for the day and do some shopping. There was a farmers' market going on and when I saw the bread stall I knew we had to go look. I wish I'd taken down the name of the stall now, because the bread we bought was delicious and I found a vegan pasty!  Marked vegan and all their items had ingredients lists displayed as well.  I'm just gonna have to go back aren't I!

I must admit I'm surprised that it was pretty good. It had loads of root veggies and wholewheat pastry. Normally this kind of thing is bland as hell and needs salt, but this one didn't. I very much enjoyed it! Now that I think about it, it would've been even better if I'd thought to bust out the Reggae Reggae sauce. Dammit!

Last a pic of a curry that I knocked up last week after watching Jamie Oliver's Money Saving Meals, he made an Indonesian beef rendang with leftover beef and I've been googling for ages and I cannot find the recipe anyway.  But basically I didn't write it down anyway, I just stole his idea and used Fry's beef strips. I also added veggies which Jamie didn't, because I like me some curried veg! I've put some basic instructions below if you're interested.

First, I chucked the following into my mini food processor: a whole red chilli*, a clove of garlic, a thumb size piece of ginger, 2 small shallots, about 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds, about 1/2 teaspoon turmeric and all the stalks / half the leaves of a small (supermarket) bunch of coriander.  I whizzed it up as fine as it would go (I added a tsp or so of olive oil to help it along).

Then I hacked up half a red pepper and sauteed it in a couple of tsps of coconut oil.  Then I added the paste and cooked that out for a couple of minutes.  I added a big carrot that I chopped and blanched for 5 minutes in the microwave. I also added a couple of handfuls of green beans that I chopped in half and a good couple of handfuls of Fry's beefy strips.  Then I added a couple of cups of hot water and a stock cube and let it cook down until the rice was done cooking (about 10 minutes).  While the rice had it's 5 minutes standing off the heat with a lid on, I added in half a small tub of CoYo coconut yoghurt and the remaining coriander leaves.  A good stir and it was done!


*I tasted a bit of the chilli as Jamie said to do and it wasn't overly hot so I chucked the lot in, seeds ribs and all. It was after I blended it that my tongue started burning! hahaha. So this was pretty hot, but I like it like that.  Really I'm just suggesting that you test your chilli first and if you don't like it too hot, take out the seeds/ribs!

This would've served 2.  My mum and dad ate the leftovers between them though.

Laterz
xXx