Vegan Alley

It was a pitched battle…

The spork won. Hooray for my sandwich.

I’m not a violent person. But Shane and I went to the Burrell collection just outside Glasgow and there was a little interactive area. You know. The kind for kids or annoying grown-ups. Now, I realize that hunting is something people used to do back in the day because the other options for acquiring food were not adequate. But, seriously. There’s no need now. So, here’s the scene I made with the little magnet board.

 We sampled the wares of 2 vegan places in Glasgow.  Mono(gathering place, restaurant, club, record shop) was awesome. I had a Smoked Tofu/Lettuce/Tomato/Avocado sandwich and Shane had some sort of veggie burger. Both very good. The Montezuma chocolate torte was dense and luscious. The other place we went was The 78 and it was fine. My chickpea burger was a little underdone so it had that uncooked flour taste going on. But my onion rings were sweet. 

On our weekend trip in Munster, Shane and I stayed in Cork for most of a day. We had brunch at the Quay Co-op Restaurant.I had the vegan breakfast: house made baked beans, grilled tomato, veg sausage, orange juice and house bread toasted w/margarine. Shane had the vegetarian breakfast, which was the same except with a poached egg and a potato cake which was basically a fried colcannon.

 When we stay at b&b’s, I pretty much always have beans on toast, but Quay’s beans were really delicious. I buy canned baked beans when we’re home in Dublin (they don’t put any meat products in them like in the states) and stir in some strong mustard. The mustard is yummy and also diminishes the canned flavor.

tried making baked beans from scratch a few months ago with a recipe from Lorna Sass’ Vegetarian Cooking under Pressure. They would have been good, but there was a sort of rich meaty flavor that was bit much for me. Funny how anything with a flavor even vaguely reminiscent of meat creeps me out.

 Anyway, if you have a good recipe for baked beans, let me know.

And if you’re in Cork someday, stop in at the Quay Co-op Restaurant. 

My mother often made what she called Wacky Cake when I was growing up, and still does sometimes. It was always her go-to chocolate cake and it’s the basic vegan soda/vinegar/oil chocolate cake. I think she liked the recipe because it tastes good, it’s pretty cheap, and it really easy. This was even before our family went vegan for awhile when I was a kid.

A couple of years ago, I bought the Veg-Feasting Cookbook from Vegetarians of Washington, and I noticed the German chocolate cake recipe from the Swan Café in Bellingham. It looks like a regular wacky cake, but there’s more cocoa in it. I think that’s the main difference; and the coconut pecan frosting and the chocolate ganache, of course.

I first made this cake for a birthday party for my friend, Aaron. I was the only vegan and besides Aaron there may have been one other vegetarian. But everyone loved it. So now it’s MY go-to chocolate cake. It’s written for 3 layers, but I’ve made it in a 9″x13″ pan, or divided it to make just one or two layers. Yum. 

Shane loves sandwiches. I am quite fond of them, myself. When we’re at home, sometimes I put “delicious sandwiches” on the menu and they are precisely that. The standard Guthrie sandwich consists of homemade garlic foccacia or bap (hamburger bun) with hummus, tomato, rocket (arugula), pickle, marinated fried tempeh, and possibly some mayo, mustard, and pesto. Yes. All on the same sandwich.
And it is indeed delicious.
I’m also fond of any sandwich with avocado layered on. Fantastic.

When we’re on holiday however, sandwiches can be tricky. The standard is hummus and some sort of plant (lettuce, tomato, spinach…) on bread. But after a few days, it gets tiring. When it’s available, we like prepared seasoned tofu for a sandwich filling. There’s a really good one by Demeter: pizza tofu. It tastes like pizza and you don’t even need anything else on the bread.
But when there isn’t a health food shop nearby, we resort to random snacks or restaurant meals, which aren’t always better and get really expensive.
So….
What do you put on a sandwich that is vegan, at least reasonably tasty, and non-perishable (ie. you can carry it around for a day or three without fearing for your life)?

Back in the states, I baked bread sometimes. I used my stand mixer to knead the dough for me, pretty much always. The times I had tried kneading dough by hand the bread turned out heavy and less-than-delicious. I wasn’t sure if I was adding too much flour, not kneading enough, or both, or something different completely.

When we moved to Dublin, I didn’t bring my kitchen aid. The plug would be wrong, and I had a very willing friend to take care of it while we were gone. So I left it behind.

The first time I made bread in Ireland was at Thanksgiving when I made potato rolls and they turned out beautifully. But they were made with all white flour. I always ran into trouble when I added whole wheat flour.

But as the weeks and months went by and I had loads of free time on my hands, I baked bread more often. It got easier and didn’t seem like such an epic endeavor. I tried different recipes. And I got better at kneading dough and knowing when I’d added enough flour. Eventually, I wasn’t looking at the clock every 30 seconds to see if I was done kneading. Of course, it isn’t a matter of time, but of the consistancy of the dough. Moisture, stretch, texture, etc.

I’ve since turned out some really nice loaves. Probably better than I could have done with my kitchen aid, because with that I was probably more likely to add too much flour too quickly.

My best loaves were an adapted recipe from Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair. I used millet for the cooked grain base and the resulting bread was sweet and tender and really delicious.

I think I’ll keep kneading dough manually even when I get my stand mixer back. At least, most of the time.

Whilst in Amsterdam, Shane and I found ourselves at a sweet little vegetarian-anarchist collective. I called in the afternoon to make a reservation, as requested by their website and I asked if they had vegan options. The guy on the phone said everything was vegan, so I’m not sure why Happy Cow has it listed as vegetarian, but there it is.
We arrived for dinner at the appointed 7pm, paid our 5 euro apiece (for 3 courses!) drank apple pear juice, and watched the kitchen folk scurry around for about 30ish minutes. One guy was grilling courgette slices in a pan before putting them in the oven, a gal was alternately chopping what looked like way too much parsley and flattening/decorating cookies, there was a Canadian lady tending bar, and another guy making salad dressing. It was all busy and rushing around and frantic, but happy and excited.
I’d say there were about 20 people there, altogether. We queued up for spinach soup, ladled out of a 40ish quart pot and dolloped with soyogurt, selected a chunk of bread, and returned to our tables. I’m not a big spinach fan. I’m not a soyogurt fan. I am a bread fan. But it was all tasty together. I think it might have been frozen spin, but the application was quite satisfactory. Next, we watched with trepidation as salad was tossed in what looked to be a too-small container, and the loads of parsley were mixed in with another huge kettle full of some grain or other. We queued up again for our main course: salad (iceburg) with a really tasty, smooth dressing, toasted seeds and green pepper (eh), barley and rice with parsley, vegetable and bean chili, grilled courgette, and corn on the cob. It was all surprisingly delicious. I mean, I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. I felt pretty special to be served corn on the cob, too. Let me explain. In Ireland, at the farmer’s market, you’d have to pay about 1.50 euro for ONE ear of corn. From what I saw at the health food shops, The Netherlands doesn’t fare much better. Anyway, it was good corn. Dessert was tahini cookies with peanuts on top, and walnuts mixed in the dough. Kind of crumbly, but rich and unusual tasting.

On the way out, I was leaving a tip, and the gal at the bar noticed my veganism patch on my backpack, and had apparently also seen my ‘Eat like you give a damn’ shirt and my herbivore hoodie. She said ‘You are walking vegan propaganda!’ I’m not sure if it was said admiringly or scoffingly. But, it’s true. So that’s alright.

Our friend Harvey gave us some baking apples from his garden. I made a regular pie. Actually, it was the Brandy Apple Pie from Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson without the Brandy. And I used the Sweet Pastry Dough from Nonna’s Italian Kitchen by Bryanna Clark Grogan. But, it was mostly regular. It turned out really well and the apples were really tart. In a yummy eye-opening way. 

I didn’t have time to use the rest of the apples before we went to Amsterdam, so I just hoped they would be okay in the fridge until we returned. The looked and felt okay, so I proceeded.

Now, I’ve made this recipe before. It’s from Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I made it on Thanksgiving. Shane and I had been in Dublin about 3 weeks and I had very little in the way of kitchen accoutrement to play with. But the main thing I was lacking was an oven thermometer. The pie was edible, but the bottom crust was gooey. So I was apprehensive about trying again. But…

It turned out really well. And we’re eating our way through at a ridiculous rate. Thank you, oven thermometer.

Starting today, I will blog about something vegan food related every weekday in October. At least, that’s the plan. You can read more about it and find out who all is participating here.
I want to write about eating on vacation, cookbook reviews, dinner parties, what I ate for dinner, grocery shopping, ethics, thrift, meal planning… and more or different topics.
To start us off, here’s something I found at the Dublin food co-op: