Vegan Egg-Free Mayonnaise

Since moving to a share house I've had to come to terms with sharing cupboard and fridge space. This means that I can no longer collect vegan-friendly condiments with the enthusiasm that I used to. Now I make my own sauces and dressings and there is less packaging and less waste involved and I'm seeing what goes into my food. And I think that can only be a good thing.

In the past few weeks I had made falafel and falafel burgers on a couple of different occasions and used something like this Yoghurt-Tahini Dressing to accompany it. Then last week our MCR had a long-weekend BBQ to celebrate the final emergence of the sun after months of absolutely horrid (typically British) weather. So I decided to make a potato salad and to make my own mayonnaise.

If you like your mayonnaise a little creamier then I suggest straining the 1/2 cup of yoghurt through muslin or cheesecloth (or a clean dishcloth) for 24 hours to remove excess water. You'll be left with a thicker yoghurt (kind of like Greek yoghurt) and you can then add all of the other ingredients from there.

You can tinker with the measurements according to taste. Sometimes I also like to add a 1 tsp of miso paste for a little extra flavour if I have some around. It makes enough for about 750g of potatoes. I only used half for 500g of potatoes and then stored the rest in a jar in the fridge to use later as a yummy creamy dressing for a vegetable salad.

At any rate, as the weather slowly gets warmer and BBQs become a little less painful to endure in the cold, I hope the recipe is of some use. Luckily, it can be served hot or cold! Enjoy!

Vegan egg-free mayonnaise in a potato salad.

Egg-free Mayonnaise

1 cup soy yoghurt

1 tbsp tahini

1 tbsp soya sauce

2 tsp cider vinegar

salt & pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in a small bowl until thoroughly mixed and smooth.

For a warm dressing, pour on warm potatoes/vegetables and serve immediately.

For cold potato salad, allow potatoes to cool, stir in dressing and refrigerate until needed.

 

Vegan egg-free mayonnaise on some lightly steam vegetables is just as delicious!

Oil-Free Sugar-Free Sticky Toffee Pudding

I recently went to a vegan baking evening hosted by the Cambridge Carbon Footprint group who put on a variety of events to raise awareness about climate change and sustainable living. Unfortunately, the evening was aimed more at omnivores who wanted an introduction to vegan baking rather than vegans who had been baking for quite a while. Also, the two recipes we made (Sticky Toffee Pudding and Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles) were packed full of refined sugar. But I met some lovely people and still had a great evening so it was well worth it.

I've recently been trying to avoid eating sugar as part of a regime to stabilise my blood sugar levels in order to avoid migraines. Any slight addiction to anything seems to be enough to put me in some sort of withdrawal which can start a headache which can then turn into a eleven day head pounding marathon. So despite the pudding and snickerdoodles being rather delicious, I wanted to try to come up with a recipe that did not use sugar.

The recipe I came up with uses dates to sweeten the cake and dates and maple syrup to make the toffee sauce. Now, I'm not suggesting that maple syrup is better than sugar. However, I figured that it would be better to come up with a recipe that doesn't use sugar so that I get out of the habit of using it. The maple syrup could easily be replaced by agave nectar, brown rice syrup, date syrup etc which tend to have lower glycemic indexes (although that does not necessarily equate to them being better for you). I used maple syrup because I had it on hand.

The recipe also uses quite a lot of maple syrup for the toffee sauce. This is mostly because the original recipe had both sugar and golden syrup with melted butter and so it was difficult to get the right consistency with the dates. You could easily double the amount of dates and add 80ml (1/3 of cup) of water in with the dates and milk when you boil them for the sauce and then only add a small amount of maple (or otherwise) syrup to taste. You could also easily halve the amount of toffee sauce and still have enough to complement the cake.

The biggest problem with me baking by experiment is that I end up eating all of the experiments. So I decided that perhaps it might be best to try to cut the vegan butter out of this recipe too hence why it's an oil-free sugar-free sticky toffee pudding. I will post another version that I adapted from the original recipe with all of the tasty, naughty stuff in it (although still not as much as in the original recipe!) at a later date.

The recipe uses soya milk and soya yoghurt so will only be sugar-free if your soya milk and soya yoghurt are sugar-free. It's easy enough to get unsweetened soya milk but it might be a little bit trickier to get unsweetened soya yoghurt unless you make your own. Alternatively, you could use 1/4 cup mashed silken tofu or more soya milk instead.

Enjoy!

Oil-Free Sugar-Free Sticky Toffee Pudding

Cake:

250ml (1 cup) unsweetened soya milk

100ml (slightly < 1/2 cup) water

200g pitted dates*, halved

1 level tsp bicarb soda

50ml (1/4 cup) unsweetened soya yoghurt

200g (1&1/3 cups) self-raising flour

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

Toffee Sauce:

75g (approx. 8) pitted dates

150ml soya milk

80ml maple syrup

1 tsp vanilla essence

Cake:

Preheat oven to 190C/Gas Mark 5/375F.

Line a 20cm x 20cm shallow cake tin with baking paper.

Put the dates in a small saucepan and cover with soya milk and water. Simmer until dates are soft then take off heat and stir in bicarb soda. It should froth. Leave to cool.

Mix the spices into the flour in a small bowl.

Place the yoghurt into a large bowl and stir in the cooled date mixture. Sift and fold in the flour. Spoon cake mixture into prepared tin and bake for 25-30 minutes until cake springs back when touched.

Allow cake to cool then prick the top of the pudding all over. Pour on the toffee sauce incrementally, allowing the sauce to seep into the cake before adding more.

Toffee Sauce:

Roughly chop the dates and cover with soya milk in a small saucepan and simmer until dates are soft. Leave to cool slightly, add maple syrup and vanilla essence then transfer to a food processor or blender**. Blend until smooth.

*I prefer medjool dates.

**Please make sure your food processor or blender can handle hot liquids and is not glass. If it cannot, wait for the dates to cool completely and then carry on as per instructions.

Berlin

If you are vegan and you've never been to Berlin then I cannot recommend going enough. I've travelled quite a lot and have visited some fantastic vegan restaurants in some wonderful vegan-friendly cities but no where compares to Berlin. And it's not just the fact that there are vegetarian and vegan restaurants in almost every damn area you can think of (check out the Berlin Vegan website if you don't believe me) it's the fact that even in the non-veg*n establishments they are still so damn vegan-friendly.

One of the reasons for my trip to Berlin was to see my friend Ahmad. He took us to lots of veg*n restaurants all over Berlin, introduced us to the hip and cool areas and took us to the most hipster cafe I've ever been in in my entire life (even The Hipster had trouble keeping up with the coolness). The cafe is a cafe/gallery called Bloody Mary and they have an impressive range of smoothies. And to give you an example of how wonderful Berlin is I will give you an excerpt of my conversation (that I have turned into a short play) with the extremely cool guy working there who spoke perfect English and whose customer service was so overwhelmingly wonderful I considered staying there and marrying him.

***

A Vegan In Berlin

Act I

elise: Um, are you able to make the smoothies without the yoghurt?

coolest hipster cafe dude on earth: Sure. But we have soya yoghurt so I can make it with that instead.

(Elise's jaw drops to floor as she contemplates a cafe having soya yoghurt. Silence ensues and she scrambles to choose a smoothie because she did not, in one million years, expect him to say yes to being able to make it without the yoghurt let alone make it with soya yoghurt.)

The End

***

Bloody Mary cafe; cards and coffee;
Guarana smoothie with soya yoghurt.

Before I get around to writing about the individual places I ate at I wanted to say a couple of things about how I found the restaurants this time. Normally I use the Happy Cow website and work my way to a certain restaurant based on ratings and reviews. This time I did things a little differently and chose places to eat based on where I currently was (or if Ahmad took us there). Before I left England I downloaded the Trip Advisor app onto my phone which can be used offline. It uses your GPS signal to figure out where you are and can find you the closest restaurants. You need to filter by vegetarian restaurants but I found it quite useful. The only thing that was a bit unhelpful is that the app doesn't display opening hours so we turned up to a couple of restaurants at certain times and found that they were closed.

Berlin Vegan also has an app for your phone but it does require a data or wifi connection. Wifi is available almost everywhere in Berlin so that's not always a problem but if you are using it to find somewhere to eat in-between places and you don't want to incur roaming charges then it's a bit inconvenient. The app has a great feature where it draws you a map from your current location to the place you are going, though, so we would look up the restaurant when we had signal and just keep the map active once we were out of range. Just be warned, though, that some of the information for the places on the app are in German only but I certainly hope that this will improve if the English version of the app becomes more popular.

There are a couple of things to remember about eating out in Berlin. Firstly, water is not free. You (most of the time) cannot get tap water so if you order water you will be paying for it. Secondly, you need to tip but the tipping process is extremely confusing. The standard amount is about 10% but there are no tip jars and leaving money on the table is not really done (most places you will pay at the counter after your meal). What you are supposed to do is listen to the total and then say to the person serving you that you would like to make it another amount. So, for example, say your total is 16 euros and you are paying with a 20 euro note just say to the person serving you 'make it 18' or whatever you think is appropriate.

Below are little bits about the places we ate at while in Berlin that I hope is of help for anyone travelling to Berlin any time soon. I've split them up into vegan, vegetarian and omnivore but they are all vegan-friendly. There are many, many more that I would like to visit so I am already planning my next visit to this wonderful vegan-friendly city.

Vegan

Wind & Wetter

This was the first cafe that we went to simply because it was a short walk from the hostel we were staying at (EastSeven Berlin Hostel which I cannot recommend enough). Lunch is served between 12 and 4 and dinner is served between 7 and 11. The place is spacious and the menus are in both German and English. The food seems to be vegan versions of pub food mixed with a bit of American diner influence. We went there for lunch and I had the Grilled BBQ Smoked Tofu Sandwich and The Hipster had the soup of the day which was a vegetable soup. We both got freshly squeezed/pressed juices which was rather yummy.

It's not exactly gourmet food (my sandwich was served on a white baguette) but it was hearty and tasty. There was also an impressive range of cakes on display that I would have like to have tried but I couldn't actually finished my sandwich so there was no way cake would have fitted.

Grilled BBQ Smoked Tofu Sandwich

Kopps Bar & Restaurant

Ahmad had told us that one of the must-do things in Berlin was brunch on the weekend. Knowing that I was vegan he booked us a table at the all-vegan restaurant Kopps who have a vegan buffet brunch on weekends from 10am -4pm. They are also open on weekdays for lunch and dinner where you can order from an al a carte menu (you can also order from this on weekends).

I don't think I've ever been to an all-you-can-eat vegan buffet before. I also don't think I've ever eaten so much food in my entire life! A lot of the dishes had TVP in them, which I am not a fan of, so I steered clear of them. But there was a large range of hot dishes, salads, cold 'meats', breads, condiments and desserts available. I especially liked the desserts. There was a polenta dessert made with almonds, orange and sultanas that was delicious. There was also chocolate brownies, two different style of vegan pancakes, vegan cream, vegan custard and fresh fruit. The great thing was that even though I was the only vegan (and there was only one vegetarian in the group) everyone really enjoyed the buffet and stuffed themselves silly.

Drinks were not included in the price of the buffet (which was 13.50 euros) but it was still excellent value for money.

Vegetarian (vegan friendly)

Cafe V

This was a nice vegetarian restaurant that we decided to venture to after checking out the East Side Gallery. The menu is really quite extensive with a lot of options for vegans that are clearly marked. The menu is also available in English.

Chickpea Polenta in Indian Curry Sauce with
Sultana-Almond Spinach

I had the Chickpea Polenta in Indian Curry Sauce with Sultana-Almond Spinach. The polenta was really yummy with the sauce but the thing that made the dish absolutely amazing was the spinach. I've never enjoyed eating my vegetables so much in my entire life! Another friend ordered one of the other vegan options (the Stuffed Aubergine) and he said it was really nice. Everyone seemed to really enjoy their meals although The Hipster order one of the salads and said it was rather heavy on cheese. However, after a very long day of walking around being tourists the restaurant was nice and cosy and the meals were generous and generally delicious.

Take cash because they don't take card.

Stuffed Aubergine

Satyam

This is a vegetarian Indian restaurant near Savignyplatz in the Charlottenburg region of Berlin. We visited this restaurant by recommendation from a friend of Ahmad's.

They have a buffet available but we missed it so were left to order off the very extensive menu (which has English translations). There are quite a few vegan options and they are all clearly marked, although I was a bit confused by some of them as they seemed to contain paneer so I just steered clear from those ones.

I ended up ordering the vegan platter which was huge and quite tasty. The style of food was more like the Indian I used to get in Australia rather than the oily Indian served here in the UK. Everyone really enjoyed their meals and it was really reasonably priced.

Omnivore (vegetarian/vegan friendly)

CHIPPS

Make your own salad at CHIPPS: the only vegan
option on the lunch menu.

This was probably the most expensive and less vegan-friendly. So why did we end up there? Well, it's a bit of a funny story.

The Hipster and I had spent the morning in the Pergamon Museum and wanted to check out another hipster vegan cafe in Berlin before heading back to the UK that evening. I used the Trip Advisor app on my phone to find the closest/coolest vegetarian cafe/restaurant to us. After some avid scrolling on my phone while basking in the beautiful spring sun we decided on a place called Cookies Cream. It seemed to be the closest place to us although it also seemed to have some rather cryptic reviews about actually finding the restaurant once you had reached the address.

Turns out these cryptic reviews weren't so cryptic: the address is easy to find but the restaurant itself is hidden. We found it eventually, relying on our friend's German, only to discover a very friendly staff member who congratulated us on finding it but informed us that it was closed for lunch. But he raced away to grab some business cards that showed us the location of another restaurant that was owned by the same 'hard vegetarian' (I have no idea what that term means). And that's how we ended up at CHIPPS.

CHIPPS actually has a completely vegetarian menu but with a couple of meat side dishes you can add on if you are omnivore. The breakfast menu had a couple of options for vegans but we had missed the times for that. The lunch menu doesn't have any vegan options except for a 'make-you-own' salad which was actually quite nice and rather large (I ordered the medium just to get more choices) although they did forget to put in one of my options. However, I got muddled with the tipping so I feel CHIPPS and I are even on that score. But if you aren't keen on the idea of getting 'just a salad' for lunch then maybe CHIPPS is not the place for you. I enjoyed mine, though.

Soya milk is available (although, it's available everywhere) and the coffee was good.

Azzam
(They don't have a website but you can check out their Qype page and a review in English and a German review)

Azzam is found in the Arab-Turkish district of Neukölln. It's not at all in the standard tourist part of town but there are many locals who claim that this place has the best hummus in Berlin and possibly the best falafel too!


The menu wasn't in English (although it was in both Arabic and German) and I'm not entirely sure if the staff spoke English (Ahmad ordered in Arabic for us) but it was still pretty easy to figure out what was what on the menu.
 
I ordered the falafel plate and for 3.50 euros I was given a full plate of falafel with hummus and pita and pickled vegetables and all-you-can-drink tea. It also came with some sides of a tahini-yoghurt sauce and a garlic sauce but these didn't look vegan so I avoid them (they were shared among the group). It was tasty and by far the best value for money meal we had in Berlin.

The Purple Carrot - Bellingen, NSW, Australia

If you ever find yourself on the north coast of New South Wales (and many travellers do as they make their way from Brisbane to Sydney or vice versa) I would highly recommend the short detour from the highway to the town of Bellingen.

The main street of Bellingen.

This tiny town of not even 3000 people seems to have achieved cult status with the cafe dwellers of the nearby bigger towns of Coffs Harbour and Nambucca Heads. And it's not hard to see why. The quiet little town is set against the beautiful peaks of the Dorrigo National Park and the main street proudly displays some beautifully preserved buildings full of food, fashion and craft stores that I've not seen the equal of in many places.

The creek in nearby Promised Land.

I had visited Bellingen on school trips when I was much, much younger but had not been there for many years. On our recent visit to Australia my lovely cousin and her, just as lovely, husband took us for a drive to Bellingen for lunch. We ate at a great, vegan-friendly cafe called The Purple Carrot.

The Purple Carrot
Bellingen, NSW


The cafe doesn't have a website (something I consider a sin these days) and there is nothing vegan on the menu. So why am I reviewing this cafe? Because they were super happy to accommodate vegans and they produced the most delicious quinoa salad with roasted macadamia nuts, beets, carrot and pumpkin/squash. The dish originally had cheese in it (goat's cheese, I think) but the dish really didn't need it and it was really filling and delicious.

The beet-pumpkin-macadamia nut quinoa salad was delicious (sans cheese).

There were lots of vegetarian options on the menu (Geoff really enjoyed his although he can't actually remember what he ate!), the coffee was great (soya milk available, of course) and the service was lovely. It was also just an absolute pleasure to sit out in the sun and enjoy a delicious lunch with great company.

If you have it then take the time to visit Bellingen and this yummy cafe!

Some notes from Australia... (Brisbane)

You might have noticed that I've been a bit absent lately. This time it wasn't just Cambridge eating into my spare time, I have legitimate excuses that are not attached to my code or my thesis. Firstly, I no longer have a computer at home which makes blogging a little difficult since my supervisor is not too keen on blogging in the office. Secondly, I spent all of July in Australia.

I moved to the UK in September of 2010 and have not been back to Australia since then. Despite the fact that I complain about the English weather, the horrid English food and the grumpy NHS doctors, I really do love the UK. But I also love Australia and it was really lovely to be home.

I have lots and lots of new and exciting recipes I would like to share with you all but I thought I would take some time to dedicate a few blog posts to some new and old favourite food spots that I visited while in Australia for all of my Australian readers (since I do tend to neglect them most of the time!).

In general, I think Australia has become a little more vegan friendly (or perhaps I've become so accustomed to paying exorbitant prices at UK restaurants that I'm eating at nicer places in Australia?). Even in my small, country hometown of Grafton I found a really lovely restaurant to eat at (twice!) and a couple of other places that were more than accommodating.

One thing that really got on my nerves is that everywhere in Australia charges extra for soya milk and decaf coffee. Apparently Australian cafes think it is necessary to charge me an extra $1 per cup of coffee for not being cool enough to drink caffeine and cow's milk! Not cool, Australian cafes, not cool at all.

Apart from the price of the coffee, it was so lovely to be able to enjoy cafe culture in the sun again. I especially enjoyed being back in Brisbane and meeting friends in all of the lovely cafes and restaurants that I've grown so fond of over the years so I think that will be the first place I write about. I didn't take any photos of any of the food in Brisbane, since I've eaten in the places so often, so I'll just write a few lines about each of my favourite places and I hope it helps any vegans visiting the area in the future.

I hope you are all enjoying your summer here in the UK (and the lovely mild winter at home in Australia!) and I look forward to sharing more of Australia (and then some great recipes!) with you soon!

Brisbane Vegan Recommendations

The Forest Vegan Cafe
West End

I don't think there is a single restaurant (vegan or non-vegan) in Brisbane that can beat The Forest for value for money. For $13 you can get an enormous plate of food (your choice of hot mains with brown rice or salad from the counter) or a good sized bowl full for $8. There is also a huge range of burgers, wraps and sandwiches with a lovely selection of vegans cakes and desserts (although the cakes are the same cost as the mains!). It's been refurbished in the past few years (although, unfortunately, the bathroom facilities have not so if you can avoid them then you probably should) and there is always free, self-serve water available.

The hot food can be a little bit bland sometimes (especially if you go for something like the dhal) but I would highly recommend getting a mix of salads and hot food because the salads are always delicious even if the ingredients look a bit surprising.

I ate here several times on my recent visit. They are open every day for both lunch and dinner and everything is vegan.

The Three Monkeys Cafe
West End

Although I never actually order any food at The Three Monkeys (you can get them to make some of the sandwiches vegan but I can never be bothered with the hassle, especially since The Forest is 500m down the road) but I love to meet friends here for a big bowl of soy chai. There is no denying that the atmosphere at The Three Monkeys is not really found anywhere else in Brisbane so I don't feel so bad about only ever going there for the chai. Note, though, that the soy chai is served with honey so if you are a non-honey vegan then you should tell them so when you order at the counter. It's also a very busy place and seating is hard to get so I would recommend scoping out a spot first and then ordering.

Govindas
Elizabeth Street,City

Govindas is another great value-for-money place. Located opposite the Myer Centre on Elizabeth Street their entire restaurant is vegetarian and most of it is vegan (just ask, they are well aware of what a vegan is and can always let you know what you can and cannot eat). If you are a student then you can get the all-you-can eat Feast Deal for $10 instead of the usual $12.90. The Feast Deal includes rice, daily special mixed vegetable curry, split mung dahl, koftas with fresh tomato and herb chutney, a pappadam, fresh garden salad, halava with custard (unless you tell them you are vegan and then they give you a vegan alternative) and home made ginger & mint lemonade. And you just keep going back for more and more until you've had enough!

 If you don't want to have the Feast Deal you can also buy smaller portions of each of the daily specials or order off the menu.

It's yummy food, great value and lovely service.

Kitchen Sanitarium Cafe
Eagle Street, City

This was a new Brisbane experience for me. It was open when I used to live in Brisbane but due to the fact that it is only open for breakfast and lunch, and it's in the middle of the city, I just never made the effort to visit before. Which was stupid. Because this cafe is awesome.

It's a totally vegetarian cafe with lots of vegan options available on the lunch menu. If the cafe becomes a regular spot for you there are daily specials to break up the monotony of having the same thing every visit. However, I dn't think that this will be a problem; I had the Spiced Pumpkin Wrap on my visit and couldn't believe how full of flavour (or how large) it was.

I also met a friend there for breakfast early one morning, which was also a lovely experience, but there are a couple of things to note. Firstly, there is only one option for vegans on the breakfast menu: avocado on toast. It's yummy but if you don't like avocado you might be out of luck. Secondly, they don't advertise coffee on their menu although they do serve it. So, if you are desperate for that caffeine hit, just ask for it.

It can get quite busy during lunch so I would recommend booking a table.

A Night In India
Toowong

Ah, A Night in India, how I missed you and your dhal palak! I cannot say enough good things about this restaurant. The service is awesome, the curries are delicious and they know what a vegan is and are more than happy to accommodate (curries can be made vegan and the roti is vegan).

Book ahead on Friday and weekend evenings because the restaurant is super busy. Also, takeaway gets a discount and the portions are slightly bigger so if you live nearby I would recommend getting takeway and enjoying the deliciousness at home!

Dragon Inn Restaurant
Chinatown, Fortitude Valley (aka The Valley)

They may serve a lot of meat, and they may have some pork dishes in the vegetarian section of their menu, but their Sizzling Szechuan Tofu and Chinese Mushroom with Tofu dishes are so awesome that I will keep going back here for a very long time. This is my favourite Chinese restaurant in Brisbane. Just be careful when you order anything else. Not everything may be as un-meaty as it seems...

Thai Green Curry

I used to love going to Chinatown on warm Brisbane evenings for a deliciously spicy Thai Green Curry, sitting in the lovely outdoor setting of Thai Wi Rat. When we moved to Cambridge we discovered local Thai restaurant Sala Thong but found that eating out in the UK is a little pricey. So we started making our own green curries at home but with bought curry paste. When we could find curry paste that didn't contain shrimp paste, it just didn't have the same limey, fresh flavour of the green curries in restaurants. So we started making our own curry paste and we've not looked back.

Below is a recipe for the curry paste and then a recipe for making the green curry. The only thing to be wary of is that Thai curries use a lot of coconut milk and can be quite fatty and thus unhealthy if eaten regularly. If fat content is an issue for you, try some light coconut milk instead. If this still isn't right for you, try adding more vegies and using a mix of half vegie stock, half light coconut milk.

Thai Green Curry Paste

6 medium green chillies, deseeded and roughly chopped

5cm/2in piece of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

small bunch of fresh coriander

2 lemongrass stalks, chopped

juice of 1 lime

8 kaffir lime leaves, torn into pieces

1 tsp grated galangal

1 tbsp coriander seeds, crushed

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp black pepper (preferably from peppercorns)

2 tsp soy sauce

3 tbsp olive oil

Put all ingredients into a food processor or blend and blend until a smooth paste.

This recipe is enough for about 6-8 servings. You can use it straight away, store it in a fridge for up to 3 weeks or it even freezes OK.

Vegetable and Tofu Thai Green Curry

1/2 serving of above curry paste

1 tbsp vegetable oil (preferably sesame)

1 brown onion

1 cup green beans, chopped into 2.5cm pieces

1 carrot, sliced

1 bunch of Asian vegie (pak choi, bok choi etc), roughly chopped, leaves and ends separated

400ml coconut milk

300g firm tofu, cut into 1cm blocks

225g can bamboo shoots, drained

1 tbsp dark brown sugar (or palm sugar)

juice of 1 lime

coriander for garnish

Heat the oil in a hot wok and add onion and cook for a few minutes until it begins to soften. Add curry paste and stir for another minute. Add all of the vegies excluding the Asian vegie leaves and bamboo shoots. Add coconut milk and watch until it is about to boil.

Just before the coconut boils, lower the heat to a simmer. Add the sugar, bamboo shoots and tofu and let simmer until vegies are just about cooked. Then add lime juice.

Serve over rice (preferably jasmine although we prefer brown basmati).Garnish with coriander.

Serves 3-4.

Vegan Brussels

EDIT: Since I first wrote this blog post quite a few very helpful readers have made some corrections about my impressions of what is and isn't vegan. So make sure you check out the comments section!



Every vegan knows that one of the most difficult things about being a vegan is finding places to eat in a foreign country, especially if the language is not your mother tongue. Happy Cow is my go-to place to find places to eat but it's not always possible and, sometimes, when you do rock up at a restaurant listed as vegan-friendly, you can find yourself lost looking for a restaurant that hasn't existed since 1998 or in front of a waiter who has never heard the word vegan in his/her life.

Luckily my recent trip to Brussels was pretty successful on the food side of things. There's a great vegan restaurant open for lunch right in the centre of the city and a couple of other vegan-friendly hotspots littered around town. Also, Belgium is the chocolate capital of the world so you can get some really great, high-quality, milk/butter-free chocolate. But you need to be careful where you shop.

~~~

Chocolate

To start my little guide to vegan Brussels I'll give some hints about where to find good chocolate that is suitable for vegans.

The wikitravel website recommends Neuhaus and Leonidas on the cheaper but still good quality end of Belgian chocolate but I'm not sure I'd recommend either. Both seem to use butter instead of cocoa butter in most of their dark chocolates. You can get dark chocolate on a stick in Neuhaus that is vegan but that's about it. We also went to two separate stores and the service was friendly but pretty hopeless. Leonidas was very similar but the chocolate was even cheaper so I couldn't find any vegan-friendly options at all.

Galler Chocolatier chocolates can be found in most supermarkets.
It's great quality chocolate but a bit cheaper than the chocolate found in boutiques
(but not lesser quality!).

 I did find vegan friendly options in the local express supermarkets like Carrefour and GB. My particular favourite was Galler whose Noisettes chocolate (hazelnuts in cocoa butter and surrounded by dark chocolate) was absolutely delicious. It's definitely more expensive than chocolate you'd buy in the supermarket at home but it's still a lot cheaper than what was being sold in the 'boutiques'. I also saw Galler chocolate being sold in many of the chocolate shops that have a mix of brands. Just be careful to check out the ingredients (helpfully in English as well as Dutch and French) because some of the dark chocolates have cream in their centres.

~~~

Frites

 The frites (fries/fried potato chips) in Belgium are supposed to be the best. The secret, apparently, is that they double fry them so the chips are crispy and golden. There are many places to pick them up around the city (you can see Wikitravel's recommendations here) but you shouldn't pay any more than about 3 euros for a large cone including a sauce.

One of the great things about the frites in Belgium is the huge range of sauces available for them. Unfortunately, most are not vegan so you might just have to stick with ketchup or, like me, without any sauce at all. You also need to be careful that the store you go to uses vegetable fat to fry the chips in. A quick Google search should help you out.

~~~

Den Teepot
Rue des Chartreux 66, Brussels
Open: Mon-Sat 12pm-12pm

Den Teepot is the only vegan restaurant in Brussels.

This is Brussels only vegan restaurant and is, unfortunately, only open for lunch Mon-Sat 12pm-2pm. The menu is very simple but this means the food comes out very quickly but is beautifully presented, fresh and very tasty!

There are two soups available (a miso or a vegetable soup) as a starter and then you choose one of four options for your main. These options are actually all very similar with only slight additions as they go up in price. Dish A is a brown rice and vegetable dish (it sounds basic but it tastes brilliant!) for 9 euros. Dish B is Dish A plus a croquette of brown rice, quinoa, potato and herbs (11 euros). Dish B is Dish A plus seitan (11 euros). Dish D is Dish A with the croquette and the seitan (13 euros). There is then also a selection of cakes (not on a menu but rather delicately laid out on a cake dish and brought to you for your selection) and herbal teas, if you are still hungry.

The vegetable, brown rice and croquette dish (Dish B) at Den Teepot.
The flavours and textures on the plate are magnificent!

Even though the dish looks very simple it is packed with individual flavours and is really quite filling. We both had Dish B and were surprisingly full after the meal despite the fact that we were ravenous before.

The only complaint I'd have is that we were not offered any water and the food is quite salty. It's also not easy to find the restaurant (it's upstairs to an organic food store; just head through the wooden door as soon as you walk in to the shop's front door). However, the waitress was lovely (and spoke Dutch, French and English) and the food was really delicious so I would highly recommend a visit!

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Mr Falafel  
53 Bd Lemonnier, Brussels
Open: Daily 12pm-midnight

The very petite Mr Falafel has tasty and inexpensive
vegetarian food.

Mr Falafel is a very tiny falafel snackbar between the two exits of the Anneessens tram/metro stop or about a 10 minute slow stroll from the Grand Place so it's very convenient to get to. It's not exactly in the most spectacular part of Brussels (there seem to be no women on the streets after 8pm at all) but it's one of the only places in town that is 100% vegetarian and it's extremely cheap. It's 3 euros for a pita with hummus and 4 falafels and you then help yourself to quite a big range of salad and sauces to stuff your pita with. Not all of the salads are vegan but I just avoided the ones that looked like they had cream in them (I'm not sure if the lovely lady behind the counter speaks French or English because our total transaction was done with smiles and gestures so I didn't get to ask about the salads so just took the ones without sauces).

A falafel from Mr Falafel: pita filled with hummus and falafel that you then
stuff with your own choice of salad from the salad bar.

There are a few tables and chairs in the tiny space but you might end up sharing a table because it's a popular spot! If you are after yummy, cheap vegetarian food then this is the place to go!

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Le Pain Quotidien
Several locations, see website for map.

Le Pain Quotidien, Rue des Sablon

 Le Pain Quotidien is actually a chain of bakeries found all around the world, including Australia and the UK, but the majority are in Belgium, where the chain started. It is quite a pricey bakery/cafe/restaurant but their goods are quite yummy and the service is quite pleasant. We visited the same store (Rue des Sablons 11) twice because it was situated across from the very beautiful Notre Dame du Sablon and about 200 metres from the the Magritte Museum, Fine Arts Museum and the palaces.

The organic (bio) muffin at Le Pain Quotidien is vegan and delicious!

The vegan options are clearly labelled VEGAN on the menu (if you are eating in) or the price list (if you take away). The take away prices are much less than the eat-in prices, even for the same items. On both occassions I had the organic vegan muffin (one was blueberry and the other apple). The cafe has a pleasant, shared oval table as well as some more formal, smaller restaurant-like tables in the back but I would recommend skipping the extra costs involved with dining in, grabbing your muffin and taking it to the Place du Petit Sablon, across the road, to eat it in the park.

If you happen to take a day trip to Bruges (which I would highly recommend, but pack a raincoat!) there is also a store there.

Take your vegan muffin across to the lovely Place du Petit Sablon.