VeganMoFo 2018: Cat Tuong, Berlin

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Jenny

Cuisine:  Vietnamese

Vietnam has a special place in my heart, as I lived there for two and a half years when I first started teaching English. And so too does Vietnamese food. Although I was only vegetarian at the time, most of the food I ate in restaurants was vegan by default, as it’s more in keeping with the people’s Buddhist leanings: my local friends took me to Buddhist restaurants attached to temples, or invited me to their family meals when they had their plant-based days at certain points in the lunar calendar. I’ve really missed the food since moving away.

There is a huge Vietnamese community in Prague, but no vegan Vietnamese restaurants, which is a real shame.  As usual, Berlin leads the way!  A few years ago I ate at Quy Nguyen, and, when we visited Berlin in October 2017, I was determined to tick off another of the all-vegan Vietnamese establishments.

This time it was Cat Tuong’s turn.  We popped along at about 6pm on a Sunday, and to our surprise it was absolutely heaving!  Who goes out on a Sunday evening?!  We managed to squeeze in to the last table (it’s a small place, but they’ve got as many tables in as possible), and everyone arriving afterwards had to wait outside at the picnic tables until space became available.

The menu was pretty tempting:  an array of starters, including summer rolls (but not fried spring rolls, more’s the pity) and these dim sum. The filling was fairly nondescript vegetable slivers, but the dumpling itself was good, and there was plenty of flavour in the dipping sauce. I’d never had dumplings quite as long and floppy as these, but they were still very good.

For my main, I went for the caramelised tofu dish, which came in a hot pot.  This dish had oyster mushrooms, seitan shreds, rice and veg, alongside caramelised tofu – I was hoping for sticky cubes of tofu, each side caramelised and delicious, but in fact it was thinly sliced so there wasn’t much edge on offer.  It was a little disappointing, but the dish as a whole had so many warming, delicious flavours that I can’t complain too much. The mushrooms were especially good.

Dr HH was less satisfied with his dish, which he chose from the specials board.  It was billed as green curry with soya balls, tofu, auberinge, coconut milk, veg, herbs, peanuts and onions.  There was one soya ball in the whole dish. One!  Obviously he was disappointed, though the curry itself was flavoursome.

We decided to give them a chance to redeem themselves with some dessert!  There were only two options, and we got the banana in sticky rice with coconut cream.  At first I was baffled as to where the rice was, but actually it was packed around the banana!  The coconutty custard was really good.  (The picture makes it look pink, but it was definitely all yellow.)  This dish got an enthusiastic thumbs up from both of us!

And Dr HH treated himself to a Vietnamese coffee, complete with sweet, thick milk.  He deemed it a proper Vietnamese coffee!

Overall this place was a bit of a mixed bag. I’d definitely go back and see if the other dishes ticked the boxes a bit more – there were some very exciting noodle-dishes being devoured! The flavours were so good that I suspect there’s a reason this place was so popular, even on a rainy Sunday evening.

Is going for Vietnamese food on a Sunday evening a trend I’ve missed out on? And does anyone prefer summer rolls to spring ones?

Posted in Travel, Vegan Mofo | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

VeganMoFo 2018: Rifugio Romano, Rome

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Jenny

Cuisine: Italian

When I was looking for food tips ahead of my trip to Italy last summer (my theme for last year’s VeganMoFo) and our weekend in Rome this winter, I found some very distressing advice.

“Order a pizza marinara!”

“You can get spaghetti with tomato sauce anywhere!”

“There are so many fruit sorbets!”

I don’t know who these losers are, but I don’t go on holiday to eat plain pizza and pasta followed by a boring old fruit sorbet. I want some real food! And that is exactly what I got at Rifugio Romano, an omni restaurant with an extensive vegan menu covering about 4 A4 pages of starters, primi, secondi, and pizzas.  They even have vegan desserts and labelled vegan wines! This place is close to Termini train station and was extremely popular with tourists, but it wasn’t overpriced or tacky.

There were some very tempting starters, but we only had eyes for the fried rice balls! I got the suppli vegan, and Dr HH tried the vegan arancino.  I’m not sure what the difference is between suppli and arancino (the shape?), but they were similarly crispy and delicious, and both stuffed with rice.  Mine contained rice in tomato sauce and little cheesy pockets, while Dr HH’s was rice dotted with peas and mushrooms. We were both satisfied with these.

I have never seen a four cheese vegan gnocchi on a menu anywhere, so I was compelled to try this.  Actually, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations – I was expecting more depth of flavour from four different cheeses, but it tasted like my regular mac and cheese sauce which is only made with nooch. Maybe the four cheeses they used are too similar?  It was nice, but not the flavour explosion I was hoping for.

Dr HH definitely won with his main dish: bucatini with smoked seitan and tomato and chilli sauce.  I believe he only ordered this because one of his favourite quotes from Master of None is: “That ain’t spaghetti, that’s bucatini! It’s a thicker noodle, you dummy!” Whatever the reason, it was a great choice: those thicker noodles were perfectly cooked to retain a bit of bite (whereas my gnocchi were a bit too soft), the chilli provided a good kick, and the smoked seitan was delicious.

He managed to leave room for his favourite Italian dessert: tiramisu. It was extremely creamy, which he said was a big plus. He told me it wasn’t strongly coffee-flavoured, but I can confirm that this was a malicious lie to trick me into trying some (even a hint of coffee is too much for me).

I ordered the dumplings with vegan nutella, which would have been ideal for sharing – it was far too much for one person!  I feel like this speaks for itself. Look at it. It was amazing!

With a wealth of veganisable Italian dishes, let’s never settle for a boring tomato sauce and fruit sorbet ever again!

What’s your favourite Italian dish? Could you have managed that entire portion of dessert dumplings?

Posted in Travel, Vegan Mofo | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

VeganMoFo2018: Vegan’s, Prague

Posted on September 2, 2018 by Jenny

Cuisine: Czech

If you’ve never been to the Czech Republic, you’ve probably never tried Czech cuisine. I’m not sure that there’s much international demand for it – the traditional dishes are all quite meaty and stodgy, and you definitely couldn’t eat them every day. (Of course, the Czechs still have the cheek to claim that British food is awful. Pfft!) Before I moved to Prague, I’d certainly never tried any Czech dishes, but after three years I’m something of a (vegan) svíčková expert.

This traditional dish pops up quite frequently on the daily lunch menus in places like Incruenti and Moment, but if you want to try this Czech classic , Vegan’s (formerly LoVeg) is the place to go.  We had it on our first trip to Prague when we were just scoping it out as a place to live, and have been back for it again several times since. It’s one of those dishes that’s never going to be particularly refined: it’s just big, hearty food, and not the kind of thing you could eat particularly regularly.  But it’s good when you’re in the mood for it, with the big dumplings, slabs of tempeh, a root veg sauce and a dollop of cranberry sauce.

There’s another traditional Czech dish on the menu there too – the old Bohemian feast, which is a mishmash of a few different things. How well those things go together is debatable, though.  As you can probably tell just by looking, this was a dry plate.  There was steamed buckwheat with spinach, plain polenta, puffed barley, baked millet casserole, and one other thing that was not listed on the menu and that I really couldn’t identify.  The buckwheat, polenta and barley weren’t particularly flavoursome, and I wouldn’t order this again. Stick with the svíčková!

The traditional Czech dessert is much better:  these plum dumplings are just beautiful!  In the past I’m pretty sure they came sprinkled with icing sugar which was great for my sweet tooth, but they were still nice without that extra touch.

As if things couldn’t get any more Czech, just look at the view from the balcony! Yeah, that’s Prague Castle up there. It’s always worth booking ahead and requesting a table out on the balcony (weather permitting, obviously – it gets pretty cold here!).

Have I sold you on Czech cuisine? Would you brave the svíčková?

Posted in Travel, Vegan Mofo | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

VeganMoFo 2018: Midland Hotel, Manchester

Posted on September 1, 2018 by Jenny

Cuisine: English

Is there anything more civilised than an afternoon tea? It’s such a quaint and fancy affair, and if it turns out not to be English, then I don’t want to know! Regular readers will know that I am always on the lookout for a good vegan afternoon tea, and I’d heard several glowing reviews of The Midland Hotel in Manchester, so it seemed like the perfect option for a family treat on my birthday back in April.

Afternoon tea is hosted in the Tea Room, where everything is simple and classy – no mismatched crockery here. Vegan champagne is provided if you wish to upgrade to the fancier version, and there are several teas to try, including a Victoria sponge inspired one and another with a hint of whiskey.

There are five varieties of vegan sandwiches, served on white or granary bread. We all found the avocado, radish and bean sprout one the least exciting (not many bean sprout fans in the house), while the mushroom duxelle with walnut was absolutely sensationally flavoursome. The other three (jerk-spiced chickpea hummus with courgette; heritage tomato, black pepper, and olives; fried aubergine caviar with roasted red pepper) were all very good too, and more exciting than some of the standard vegan afternoon tea fare. Not a cucumber in sight!

The scones are kept in the “scone warmer” (so we were told) and only brought over to the table when it’s time to devour them. How fancy! There’s one plain and one fruit scone per person, which I honestly believe is one too many – you need to save room for cake! The scones were very good though, warmed to perfection (as you’d expect, in their specific scone-heating device) and well-baked. They were served with soy cream, which looked quite unappetising, but was fine, and a choice of three jams: strawberry, raspberry, or gooseberry. The staff come around with the jam and plonk some on your plate as requested, which is certainly fancy, but it would be nice to judge for yourself how much you’d like.

And then the cake plate. Oh, the cake plate. It was the stuff of dreams. Just look at that meringue! It was so sweet and crumbly, and the raspberries made for a suitably tart filling. I’d happily eat one of these every day!

The pistachio cheesecake wasn’t much of a traditional cheesecake – it was a very decadent, creamy log coated in pistachios. It was tasty, but there was perhaps a bit too much of it. The dark chocolate and cherry delice was equally indulgent, but more manageable somehow – rich, without being overpoweringly so. The cinnamon and orange polenta cake was the only disappointing one of the bunch, as it was quite dry and crumbly. The flavour was lovely though.

All in all, this was a thoroughly classy affair, and the service and ambience were spot on as well. I didn’t feel like we’d been shafted with the vegan option – everything was creative and well thought out. I’ve had a fair few afternoon teas, and this was the most traditional one in terms of service and menu, so if you ever want to get that classic English experience, this is the place for you.

Are you a fellow vegan afternoon tea aficionado? Where should I try next? And, most importantly, should I invest in a scone warmer?!

Posted in Afternoon tea, Travel, Vegan Mofo | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments

VeganMoFo 2018!

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Jenny

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: VeganMoFo! The Vegan Month of Food starts tomorrow, and I’m very excited to be participating for the fourth time (and helping to organise it for the third year in a row).

While there are daily prompts and weekly themes that MoFo participants can follow, I always prefer to choose my own theme. Back in 2015, my posts were all about breakfast, the most important meal of the day. In 2016, every day I posted about a place to eat and a thing to do in a different town or city. And last year, I took you on a culinary tour of Italy.

This year, I’m taking you around the world in thirty different cuisines! Every day I’ll post a review of a restaurant which serves a different cuisine. There are a couple of places I’ve reviewed before, but it’s all new content – and some wholly new (to me) cuisines. I’ve got a host of exciting dishes to share, from traditional Czech dumplings here in Prague, to a veritable feast from the only Cambodian restaurant in the north of England.

So please read along, comment away, and let me know about the vegan dishes from these cuisines that you’ve tried too!

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Cookbook of the Month: The Main Street Vegan Academy Cookbook

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Jenny

It’s the end of the summer holidays here in Prague, and you know what that means – Dr HH is heading back to work and hanging up his apron after his month at the helm in the kitchen. I’ll let the man himself tell you how he got on this summer.

Hello! I’ve spent another summer month shackled to kitchen worktops to provide a post filled with vegan nomming delights.  I was tasked with finding my own cookbook, and, after ditching some for looking too complicated and others for looking a little dull, I settled on The Main Street Vegan Academy Cookbook.  I don’t know much about the academy itself, it looks like it’s run by some vegan lifestyle coaches who offer training courses to others.  The book is a collection of recipes from various people associated with the academy.  It seems to be aimed at newer vegans, with a a few chapters with tips about living a vegan lifestyle, and various coaching tips distributed throughout the books with some extra nutritional information about ingredients and some cooking tips.  The recipes are grouped into sensible chapters, so let me take you through them.

Good Morning and Great News: There is Life After Bacon

The idea of a jam sandwich is enough to make Ms HH run for the hills; add in the concept of mixing the jam with peanut butter, and she might actually just explode.  So she was certainly sceptical when I told her I was going to serve the aforementioned affront in smoothie format.  You’ll be pleased to hear that the PB&J sammie smoothie was a roaring success!  Without a slice of bread in sight, this made for a tasty filling smoothie that was quick to throw together.  I used raspberries rather than the recommended blueberries, which are also on Ms HH’s banned list.

Here at HH HQ we are quite the porridge connoisseurs, by which I mean we eat a lot of it.  I took the chance to make our regular porridge breakfast a little more exciting by making  Victoria’s victorious oatmeal parfait.  I had no idea what a parfait was going in to this, so I had to learn on the job.  I made a few swaps in the recipe, using walnuts rather than Brazil nuts, and there were no berries as I couldn’t find any in the shops or markets that didn’t come in a plastic punnet.  It was a tasty porridge and looked rather fancy (as much as porridge can look fancy) but I’d rather cut out all the fiddly layering and just top a regular bowl.

The breakfast burritos were next up and they made for quite the breakfast feast.  We’ve been trying hard to avoid buying anything in plastic, so I had a little extra work to do for this dish, making my own tortilla wraps and mozzarella as well as cooking up my own sausage crumbles from a packet of smoked tempeh.  I did a lot of the prep work the night before as I didn’t want to make a hungry Ms HH wait for her breakfast. I value my life too much to do that.  The end result was a magnificent breakfast: nicely fried onions and peppers, savoury sausage crumbles bursting with flavour, a good eggy chickpea flour scramble, creamy and oozy mozzarella, and, finally, roasted potato chunks, an addition that elevates any meal.  This went down as the biggest hit of the book, but be warned it’ll take you a while if you’re not working from packet ingredients.

I don’t think I’d ever really dabbled with using chickpea flour as an egg replacement, but after the breakfast burrito success I was at it again with the crazy spicy Spanish omelet. I’ve never cooked with eggs, having not really eaten them since my teens, so this was my first ever attempt at an omelette and it was all a bit disastrous.  My attempt to cook one side and then flip it out on to a plate resulted in a large quantity of batter and oil finding its way on the worktops.  I managed to shovel it all back in and cut the omelette up into quarters so it was easier for me to manoeuvre the pieces.  Eventually I won my battle, and I was underwhelmed by the final result.  For something called crazy spicy, I found this rather bland and in need of a lot more seasoning, I settled for a drizzle of sriracha to pep it up.  The textures were good and Ms HH reported hitting a potent pocket of paprika at some point but I don’t think I’ll be rushing to make another Spanish style omelette any time soon.

I completed my breakfast chickpea flour hat-trick with the besan pudla. We actually had it for our dinner, but I’m not letting you take my hat-trick ball away from me on a technicality.  These were chickpea pancakes with some Indian seasoning and chopped tomato, pepper, and coriander in the batter.  My batter started out a little too thin so my first pancake was turned into a scramble, but after the addition of more chickpea flour my batter was just right.  This was a delicious dish both in scramble and pancake form, the seasoning in the pancakes was great, and I added a little more pep to it with a tamarind chutney.

The Social Vegan: Omni-Pleasing Small Plates, Snacks, and Hors d’Oeuvres

I didn’t really dabble with the party food section much but  the 3-P pesto caught my eye. That’s right, a blended combination of garden peas, mushy peas, and sugar snap peas: pea lovers rejoice! Sadly, Ms HH is not a pea lover.  This pesto was actually a delicious combination of peas, pistachios, and parsley.  The dip was rich, creamy and bursting with flavour, even Ms HH came back for a second little taste of it so I’m calling this a success.  It was great with crackers and bread and I made a delightful summer lunch when putting it on toast with some mozzarella slices.

Salad Days and Soup for Supper: They’re not Just Starters Anymore

 

I dipped into this section when looking for inspiration for packed lunches for Ms HH to take to work with her.  I was quite excited by the zucchini beany salad as it included lots of ingredients bursting with flavour olives and capers.  The dressing was a little too sharp, a little less lemon juice would have been better, but overall it was a tasty salad.  It didn’t feel very filling, it needed some bulking up with either some more chickpeas or some other sort of filling grain.

 

The quinoa bruschetta salad looked to be a pretty standard salad affair, cooked quinoa and vegetables tossed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I had an extra sweet potato lying around so thought I’d roast that and add it in, but in the end I roasted all the vegetables to try and make things a bite more exciting.  It was a solid but unspectacular solid and I never did serve it with any bread.

There were a few soup recipes, and I decided to go ahead and give them a try even though it was unbearably hot outside.  The easy cheesy broccoli soup was pretty easy to throw together.  The recipe called for a blended base of cooked cauliflower and peppers with 6-8 cups of broccoli florets added afterwards.  First of all, I had absolutely no idea how much broccoli I needed to fill the required 6-8 cups. Measuring chopped vegetables in cups is always a source of frustration for me.  I settled on a large head of broccoli and blended about half of it in to the soup, I also added an onion to the recipe for a little extra flavour.  The soup was delicious, sweeter and a lot less green than broccoli soups I’ve had in the past, and it was even better when topped with a potato rosti.

The sweet potato miso soup sounded like a combination that was too good to pass up.  Sadly the soup didn’t hit the dizzying flavour heights I was hoping for.  I didn’t get my flavour balance right and there wasn’t enough of a miso hit in there. My blender also didn’t do a great job with the chopped ginger, so occasionally everything was overwhelmed with a massive hit of ginger.  It was certainly better when I stirred an extra teaspoon of miso into the bowl before reheating.

Set it and Forget it: One-Pot Meals for All

Our lack of slow cooker/insta-pot resulted in me just skipping over this section

Main Street Mains: You Won’t Miss the Meat

My first foray into the mains section was the lemon-Dijon tempeh and mushrooms and it was not the best of starts.  I substituted the Dijon mustard for whole grain and I think i was just a little heavy handed with seasoning, resulting in a dish that was both too salty and too lemony. I wasn’t a big fan of the mustard flavour in here either.  I think this could have been quite a good dish if I’d got my seasoning right.

 The recipe for roasted red pepper cutlets caught my eye early on and I heeded one of the suggestions that you could turn pretty much anything into cutlets, so I ended up making aubergine cutlets one night and tofu cutlets the next, both served with potato wedges.  These dishes were great, the crumb coating of oats, nooch, and herbs was really flavoursome, and I even made an attempt at using some aquafaba as an egg replacer to stick everything together – it worked to some degree but wasn’t totally successful.

Mama Day’s beefless stew made a good filling meal when served with rice.  It consisted of chunks of seitan, carrot and potato cooked up with a beef flavoured stock cube.  It wasn’t the most exciting combinations but it was good and hearty.

 

The vegan cheesy beefy penne bake was a lovely rich and creamy pasta bake.  I used a packet of smoked tempeh for the beefy element and swapped out the penne for macaroni.  I made my own marinara sauce and mozzarella too, but this could be thrown together very quickly if using jars and packets of things.

I’ve mentioned earlier that we’ve trying to reduce our packaging here and one step in that direction has been to buy dry beans from our local zero waste shop.  It takes a little more planning and effort, and I found it can be a bit of problem when I was cooking the arroz con no-pollo.  We’ve not got many pots and pans in our kitchens so cooking rice, beans, and the vegetable base for this dish made for a bit of a juggling act.  It was all worth it in the end for a tasty rice dish. I used seitan as my chicken alternative and pinto beans over black beans as that’s what I could find.

The idea of a quesadilla always sounds exciting and appealing but I normally feel a bit let down when I do actually order one. I was undeterred by this, and decided to go ahead and make the mushroom and pepper quesadillas.  This was pretty easy to make, the cheese sauce was simple and tasty. I cooked some peppers in with my mushrooms rather than the suggested addition of roasted peppers, and I managed to roll out and cook my tortillas whilst this was all going on.  The end result was a delicious and well filled quesadilla.

The easy-peasy mac ’n’ cheezburger was the last thing I cooked from the book, and once again I was up against the strict publishing deadlines of Ms HH.  I just about managed to sneak it in before the deadline, and it made for a tasty and hearty meal. I used some rye pasta shapes rather than macaroni, and double the recommended amount so it’d last us for a few meals.  The cheese sauce was tofu based and packed plenty of flavour, the bread crumbs baked on top gave it a nice crunch, but the soya mince I used in the filling got a bit lost, maybe I needed more of it or maybe something a bit chunkier.  The baked variation was nice but it won’t be replacing our regular mac and cheese.

Chocolate and Other Pleasures: A little of What you Fancy Does you good

I didn’t really go into the sweet section of this book, as we’ve been trying to eat fewer sweet things, but Ms HH requested a baked good to wow her colleagues and I couldn’t say no.  I opted for the chocolate crinkle cookies as they were described as having a brownie-like texture.  From the recipe I couldn’t really picture how they were supposed to look and cursed the lack of pictures in the book, but I managed to track down the blog for the person who contributed the recipe and that helped me put it all together.  They were supposed to be rolled in icing sugar before baking, but I didn’t spot it in the cupboard so settled for granulated sugar alone and coconut on a few at the end after I was struck by inspiration.  These were easy to make and delicious, firm and crunchy on the outside and with that advertised brownie-like texture on the inside.

 

That’s the end of my August cooking odyssey for another year.  This certainly wasn’t my favourite cookbook and I don’t think I’d really recommend it.  As it’s a collection of recipes from different contributors it doesn’t really have a unified voice. Some recipes call for things to be made from scratch, whilst others seemed to be little more than throwing a lot of things from a packet into a bowl.  I was also disappointed by the lack of pictures in here. I feel that if you’re aiming your book at relatively new and inexperienced vegans you need more pictures to guide you.  I made some tasty food, but I don’t know if anything will sneak its way into my regular cooking rotation. [But what about the breakfast burrito?! And the penne bake? AND THE COOKIES? I thought these three dishes were truly excellent. – Ms HH]

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Vegan in Brighton: Terre a Terre (Again)

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Jenny

It is no secret that I love Terre a Terre, the fancy meat-free restaurant in Brighton. I first visited it about 3 months after going vegan, and it was the first time I had really impressive, fancy vegan food. It gave me such motivation and hope about the vegan adventure ahead. And the terre a tapas sharing plate has been the stuff of my dreams since I first laid eyes on it over four years ago.

This July was my third visit for dinner (plus one trip for afternoon tea), and Dr HH and I had decided well in advance that we were getting the sharing plate again. Obviously we made the right decision. This dish can be ordered vegan or vegetarian, and includes an assortment of bites based on other items on the menu. It’s a great way to try lots of really delicious things, and it’s been slightly different each time we’ve been.

This time we got a really tasty aubergine dip with well-seasoned, puffy crackers. The polenta chips with guacamole were surprisingly quite bland and unexciting, but the melty aubergine tahini dish with sesame seeds was absolutely sublime. There was also a carrot noodle and edamame salad with chestnut puree tofu: I’m not crazy about chestnuts so I found the puree too sweet, but the salad was really delicious – and it’s not often I say that! Of course, the highlight of the platter was the Korean Fried Cauliflower. It consisted of sticky sauce, crispy batter, some sesame seeds, and beautifully tender cauliflower – we’ve never cooked it that well at home, and we make buffalo cauliflower a lot. It was just incredible!

Unfortunately I think we made some uninspired choices on our mains. On our previous visits we’d steered clear of the rosti section of the menu, but this time, perhaps inspired by Dr HH’s marvellous breakfast at Gallery Cafe earlier in the week, we both went potatoey. I got the rosti revisited: a very large rosti sitting in an unspecified green sauce, topped with lovely smoky tofu. The tofu was really flavoursome, but the rosti didn’t hold together perfectly, probably due to the fact that it was swimming in sauce. It was all just a bit weird, to be totally honest.

Dr HH opted for the aloo sailor: a similar rosti (possibly with added spices), presumably the same sauce (we were sampling from each other’s dishes but just couldn’t figure it out), some tandoori smoked tofu which was not as flavoursome as he’d hoped, and some coconut yoghurt raita that was just a bit too sweet to work pefectly. I actually thought the tandoori tofu was really delicious, and I might have preferred his dish were it not for the sweet raita.

Things got back on track when we ordered dessert. We each got a snap, crackle, choc, and my top tip to you is: get this to share with someone. It is insanely rich, and I almost died in my determination not to miss out on a single bite. It was worth the subsequent bellyache though! It was a very rich chocolate mousse, on an insanely thin base, with a  tasty shortbread crumb, orange sorbet, tiny meringues, and chocolate twists and shards. It was one of the most indulgent, decadent desserts I have ever laid eyes on, and I can’t recommend it enough – it has already claimed its space in my ‘Top 5 Desserts‘ list.

Truthfully then, we were a little disappointed with our mains, but mostly blame ourselves for straying from the more exciting parts of the menu – there were some other really tempting and creative vegan options to explore as well. And I really can’t complain about a meal involving that tapas starter and one of the all time great desserts. Here’s hoping we make it back next year for another round!

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Vegan in London: Gallery Cafe

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Jenny

Perhaps this is the very definition of first world problems, but let me tell you: it’s very difficult to get a good vegan breakfast before 10am in the UK. Whenever Dr HH and I fly home, we get the 7am flight from Prague and arrive in London starving and exhausted at 8am, ready for a sit down, a hot bevvy, and a good breakfast. Is that too much to ask for?

Apparently so: all the vegan eateries of London seem to want to give their staff a late start, which is unbelievably selfish, in my opinion. So hallelujah for Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green, open at the much more respectable hour of 9am.

It reminded me of Canvas Cafe near Brick Lane, as it’s also very community driven and all-vegan. It seems a bit bigger and more polished – there are picnic benches outside, and a nice conservatory at the back. But it still had that same welcoming, friendly feel – and an exciting breakfast menu.

Regular readers will know that I favour a sweeter breakfast – but when you’ve been on the go since 4am, 9am is basically lunch time, so I went for the full English on this occasion. Let’s start with the basic components: it featured one slice of toast (with no spread, bizarrely), an annoying tomato half, and some unseasoned wilted spinach. You might be able to detect from the paleness of the potatoes that they weren’t as crispy and well-cooked as they could have been, which was a bit of a shame. The scramble was quite carroty and had a weird taste that neither Dr HH nor I could quite identify – I wasn’t a fan of that. The fried mushrooms were excellent, the sausages were trusty old Linda McCartney’s, and the homemade beans were really delicious (and I’m not a huge fan of beans). Overall it was a bit hit and miss, and if I went back I would definitely order the American pancakes.

It’s not all bad news on the savoury front though – Dr HH was positively raving about his rosti dish! The two rostis were topped with a portobello mushroom and smoky ketchup. The rostis were sensational (“A marvel in potato work!” Dr HH enthused), so despite my underwhelming spuds, they definitely can cook potato here! The giant mushroom was good and juicy, and he loved the flavoursome, smoky, sweet, rich sauce. This was a very good dish, and one we might need to recreate at home.

On the drinks front, the coffee was good and the chai latte was excellent, but teeny tiny. And if you’re grabbing breakfast on the go, there are also various pastries (yes, they had croissants!) to takeaway as well. Beyond breakfast, there’s a lunch menu and cakes to boot.

Thank you to the Gallery Cafe for recognising that vegans need to eat before 10am – I’m sure we’ll be back next time we’re flying in to London!

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Vegan Treats: London vs Manchester

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Jenny

Dr HH frequently tells me that he doesn’t understand the North vs South divide in England – spoken like someone from the Midlands, if you ask me! The rest of us know that it’s serious business. In my entirely unbiased view, the North is far superior in almost every way – especially concerning accents – but even I have to concede that the South (London, if you will) has the upper hand when it comes to all-vegan eateries.

But I think northern cities are slowly catching up, and they certainly have the quality, if not the quantity just yet. While I was home in July, I visited one vegan bakery in London and another in Manchester, so let’s see how they match up.

Cookies and Scream is an all vegan bakery/cafe in London that I have long wanted to visit, largely based on their tempting Instagram feed. We happily took a detour out to Holloway Road when we were last in London to this quite small, but extremely well-stocked little place. It had a fun, retro feel to it, and seating both in and outside. They serve hot beverages, milkshakes (made with ice cream), brownies, cakes, cookies, and various other treats. Everything’s vegan, and it’s the kind of place where a glutton like me could spend hours deliberating over what to order.

Fortunately, I arrived hungry enough that I had to make my mind up pretty quickly or I would have perished. I was powerless to resist this chico pie, which was a delightful peanut butter and chocolate chip concoction. On the server’s recommendation, I got it warmed up (even though it was a scorcher outside), which resulted in a beautifully soft and almost gooey texture. It was like eating cookie dough, which is to say it was absolutely majestic!

Considering the temperature, Dr HH tried to cool things down with this choc chip cookie ice cream sandwich. As he can’t unhinge his jaw, it’s just as well this beast came with a fork – you can’t really eat this as a sandwich. He thought it good, but not mind-blowingly so. The cookies were tasty, and you can never go wrong with Swedish Glace. I think if he’d made a more exciting choice, he might have liked this place as much as I did.

Travelling north to Manchester, we turned our attention to Teatime Collective. This used to be a cafe somewhat out of the city centre, serving excellent breakfasts, burgers, cakes, and Christmas feasts. This year they’ve transformed into a rather breathtaking cake counter inside a clothes shop in the Northern Quarter, a much more central location. (Unfortunately, they announced this weekend that they’ll be closing the cake counter at the end of the month and closing down permanently after that. It’s such disappointing news, and a reminder to always support your local vegan businesses when you can.) The cakes in the cafe were always exceptional, so it was very exciting to see them developing a much bigger range of sweet treats. Again, it’s really difficult to narrow it down to just the one cake though!

As such, Dr HH and I decided to share a couple of desserts. We started with this salted caramel and chocolate tart which, I’m pleased to report, was basically 90% cream! The caramel flavour was nice and not too overpowering (as caramel can sometimes be, I find), and though the base was a little softer than I might have liked, it was still really good.

We were too full after that to manage our second treat, this gigantic slab of tiffin. When we were eventually able to eat again, we were both very satisfied indeed with this. I suppose it’s hard to go wrong with tiffin, but this still deserves credit for being so good.

Apparently people from the Midlands think it’s fine to abandon their loved one and go for vegan treats without them, so Dr HH actually went to Teatime Collective on a separate occasion without me. (Maybe people from the Midlands are the real villains, and Northerners and Southerners should unite against them?!) He treated himself to this brownie with maple and pecans, which he declared big and hearty, but more cakey than brownie, which is always a shame. Still, delicious!

On balance, and probably to the surprise of nobody who read the first paragraph, I think the North just edges it in this match up. But let’s face it, when it comes to vegan bakeries, everyone’s a winner.

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Vegan in London: Picky Wops

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Jenny

UPDATE: THIS RESTAURANT CLOSED IN 2022

You may have heard that there’s been something of a heatwave hitting the UK. It’s also boiling hot in the Czech Republic, you just don’t hear us moaning about it all the time. Nor does it cause public transport to grind to a halt (my favourite thing about living abroad is seeing how it really is only the UK that comes to a standstill on account of any variations in weather – whether it’s 38C or -17C, trains still run in Prague!).

There was a minor heatwave when I was in the UK at the start of July – it was about 28 degrees most days. And alas, we’re just not a country designed for those toasty temperatures. This was best evidenced when we went to Picky Wops for pizza and found ourselves basically sitting in a sauna.

Yet as sweaty as it was, I’d say it was worth it! All-vegan pizzerias are still a bit of a rarity, and I’m always keen to lend them my support. And Picky Wops had quite the exciting menu. There were five or six choices of base, each using a different type of fancy flour -no 00 flour here, thank you very much! Then there were the various toppings, some vegetable based, others mock meaty. But the decisions aren’t over with then – you’ve also got three choices of mozzarella (coconut, cashew, or mozzarisella), and the issue of whether or not to go for  the stuffed crust option with almond ricotta. In short, there are lots of decisions to make.

I really relished the opportunity to basically customise my own pizza. I went for the “burnt” base (fear not, it doesn’t taste burnt) and the lumberjack topping: coconut mozzarella, sausage, mushrooms, and smoky cheese. The smoky cheese was the key ingredient here – it really elevated the pizza. I don’t think I’ve every seen smoky cheese on a pizza menu before, but I’ll certainly be looking out for it from now on.

After last week’s shocking Dr HH reveal, you might be worrying about what he did when he had all these options before him. Fear not, he made respectable choices this time. He may not know how to eat beans, but he knows how to order a pizza! His was the meatfeast with turmeric base and stuffed crust. He loved the base, but was a little underwhelmed by the stuffed crust. He enjoyed the sausage and small bacon/ham chunks, and found the whole thing very tasty – but as soon as he tasted my smoky cheese, he wished he’d got some of that as well!

So if you’re in a decision-making mood (and it’s not too hot), get yourself to Picky Wops, and make sure you get that smoky cheese!

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