Vegutopia at the Kent Vegan Festival

This weekend I went to my very first vegan festival and it. was. amazing.

There were:

• cakes
• brownies
• cupcakes
• hotdogs
• crisps
• cheeses
• *egg* mayo
• activists
• awesome T-shirts
• chilled music
• blue skies

The Kent vegan festival was in a hall in the idyllic centre of Canterbury: think cobbled streets, Tudor-style buildings and a massive cathedral.

I kind of expected an awkward village hall affair, but when we got there, a pretty big queue had already formed outside the hall (the hall was so packed they had to control how many people were going in).

Inside, it was completely rammed, but full of lovely happy people who care about animals (which is a great setting to be in), and a really lively buzz.

To top it all off, there were tastings galore. I tried cinnamon cake, kale crisps, 5 types of cashew cheese, *egg* mayo, and much more.

And here’s a little flavour of what I ate:

Hotdog with lashings of sauce including vegan mayo. Am I sorry? Not one teeny tiny bit.

Mini chocolate cheesecake with the creamiest chocolate you ever did taste

Down and dirty belly-filling cakes just like momma made

Made by Global Fusion, who also sold us this beast of a mud pie

And finally, the most gloriously adorable mini cupcakes in the world.

Chocolate and coconut

Cherry bakewell

All of the above, plus chocolate peanut (yum!)

There were a lot of cupcake stands and since I’ve recently started experimenting with making my own vegan cupcakes, I was really inspired by all of the different flavours and just wanted to bake for the rest of the weekend.

Which reminds me – I can’t believe how crazy hot and lovely this weekend was!

Sunshine, blue skies and lots of vegan food – does it get any better?

Interrail: scam or saviour?

I recently returned from an incredible month of travelling around Italy with a cumbersome backpack and a duck called Caecilius.

The route we took through the country started in Pisa, passed through Florence, Rome and Naples, and snaked down the west coast of the boot before arriving in Sicily.

The best way to do this route was by train, so we looked into the most cost-efficient way of doing it.

Interrail offers a one country pass to Italy for 8 days of travelling within a month for £137 per person.

Given that this price was not necessarily the full cost (some trains require hideous reservation fees and it’s very difficult to find out which ones), we decided we didn’t want to go with the Interrail pass.

So, having bought individual train tickets all the way through Italy, this is a breakdown of the journeys we took and their costs:

Pisa – Florence €8

Florence – Rome €20.85

Rome – Naples €11.80

(We took a Circumvesuviana train from Naples to Sorrento which I don’t believe would have been covered by the Interrail pass, and it was around €2 each. We then took a bus from Sorrento to Positano which was €1.80, and a ferry from Positano to Salerno which was €12 but went along the whole of the Amalfi Coast and was one of the most incredible things I have ever done.)

Salerno – Paola €12.50

Paola – Cefalu €40

Cefalu – Palermo €5.15

Of course we took various buses and metros during our travels but these would not be covered by an Interrail pass so I won’t include them in my calculations. I will, however, point out that all public transport in Italy is incredibly cheap. When we were in Naples, a single journey on the metro, regardless of how far you went, was €1.

Given that we travelled on 6 days rather than 8 and could therefore have got a cheaper Interrail ticket of £109, I will lower the price comparison. However, this is quite generous given that if we had actually bought the pass we would have bought an 8 day one for the sake of a little extra freedom.

So, the amount we spent on train tickets in the end was a total of €98.30, which given the current exchange rate of 0.71p to the €1 makes our total spend £70.02, meaning we saved at least £38.80, not including what we might have had to spend on reservation fees with an Interrail pass.

If that’s not enough proof that the Interrail pass is a bit of a scam, the freedom of knowing we could just turn up to a station whenever we wanted and buy a ticket without having to make a reservation was really great, and I can’t stress how easy it is to buy tickets in Italy.

Every station has plenty of Trenitalia ticket machines, which you can set to English and buy your ticket within about 3 minutes.

So, the moral of this story is that in many cases the Interrail pass is a rip-off. If you’re planning to buy one, make sure you do plenty of research to find out whether it is actually saving you any money, and what reservation fees you will have to pay.

In countries where the railway system is not as efficient or cheap, it may be a really good buy. Just make sure you don’t trust the pass implicitly.

Featured image: the view of Villa San Giovanni train station from the train-ferry to Sicily

Soy Vegetariano

If you don’t want to sit through the gloriousness of Freddie (shame on you), skip to 1.42 for the music that goes through my head every time someone says Barcelona.

So, during our foray to Espana, we had a day-trip to Barcelona, an insight into Gaudi’s brain and potentially best city in the world – obviously I haven’t visited them all but I’m willing to hazard a guess.

The day consisted of four parts: an intrepid exploration of the wild Parc Guell, a hazardous and exciting drive through the manic streets of Barcelona which are littered with suicidal scooter-riders, including a drive-by of the Sagrada Familia, a stop-off at the cramped city beach to soak our poor aching feet in the soothing sea water, and a tour through the maze of the old city.

The day was glorious, and I hadn’t imagined it could get any better, until while we were trapsing around the back streets of the old town we stumbled across a hidden gem of a square with several vegetarian outlets, including a vegan cafe…

Hold the phone. A vegan cafe?! In Spain?! Home of the chorizo and land of the ‘que es uno vegetariano’. At one restaurant I told the waitress ‘soy vegetariano’, and she asked, in succession, ‘no meat?’, ‘no fish’, ‘no seafood’? When I responded no to all of her increasingly desperate questions, she just waved her hand and said ay-ay-ay, proceeding to bring me out a plate of vegetables to sate my hunger. Oh Spain. YOU have a vegan cafe? A luxury I have not even had the pleasure of finding in England yet.

As you can tell, I was more than excited (only a little frustrated that I wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry). Having pored over the contents of their deli counter, which included such delights as vegan chorizo, vegan tortilla, vegan pizza, I settled for a coconut and strawberry milkshake and a slice of vegan carrot cake.

It tasted incredible. I don’t know that I can do it justice, but it tasted as good as normal carrot cake, only it was lighter, not at all stodgy, and I felt sufficiently full at the end rather than sick with too much cake (usually me after a slice of cake in a cafe).

I was so surprised that we found this tiny square amidst the entirety of Barcelona, and it makes me feel more positive in terms of how us veggies will fare abroad in the future. Admittedly Barcelona has a high tourist density, and big cities are always more forward-thinking than towns and villages, but I would suggest small advances like this are hints towards a better attitude to vegetarians in Spain, and I look forward to it!

 

 

A sojourn to Spain

Disclaimer: I didn’t manage it.

Positive: am vegan again now back in England.

In actual fact, being vegan was manageable all the way through France. I ate bread, jam and vegetables. Not a very varied diet but a diet nonetheless.

The cows were angry because they knew I’d be eating cheese (although these cows actually seemed kinda happy, just annoyed that we were disturbing their family photo shoot).

My big test came on our first night in Spain, when everyone wanted to go out for dinner. We ended up at a lovely little pizza place by the sea, and while I could have asked for a pizza without cheese, I think I was just so tired from the drive and so hungry that my craving for cheese overrode all else.

Throughout the rest of the holiday, I really struggled with finding a variety of anything vegan in the shops, although my saving grace was the lovely market in Vinaros full
of fresh, local fruit and veg.

The local Carrefour supermarket had half an aisle of soya milk, which was cheap and really useful, and while I wasn’t strictly vegan, I didn’t eat any eggs or any product with egg in it (aside from some croissants my friend left that were going to be thrown away anyway). Therefore, the only dairy product I actually ate was cheese, with the rest of my diet being made up of pasta, potatoes and sauces with lots of fresh veg and olives from an incredible olive store at the market (when my friends had ice-cream I had sorbet – watermelon sorbet is incredible).

I didn’t actually take a picture of the sorbet, but here is some sorbet blended with ice – yummy 😀

I was a little disappointed in myself at the time, but having analysed my diet I don’t think I was that bad, and I do have a weakness for cheese that is really hard to subdue in countries like Spain and France when they have such a massive and varied selection!

It hasn’t been that hard to get back to vegan since being home, and I’ve bought some lovely stuff that you just can’t get in the rest of Europe, such as basil tofu, Linda McCartney sausages and burgers, etc, etc.

Last night I even made vegan banana muffins!!!! (separate post to come later, but that was very exciting).

Vinaros seafront from the harbour wall

So all in all, being vegan abroad is quite hard, especially when you love cheese as much as I do, but I’m definitely of the opinion that cutting down on your normal dairy intake is almost as valuable as cutting it out completely, and would be more realistic for a wider group of people.

Certainly this would have been harder if I’d not had my own kitchen, and when I go to Amsterdam in a few days I think I’ll find it harder as I won’t have time to prepare my own pasta sauces, etc, but we will see.

Adios!

A weekend with the parents

I went to visit one set of parents last weekend. They’re vegetarian, so I assumed, rather foolishly, that eating would be easy.

I was wrong.

Instead of the nice variety and interesting foods I was expecting, I ate an alarming amount of jam sandwiches (on home-made bread, admittedly).

photo: Rebecca/flickr

You see, my parents eat a lot of Quorn: not a single bit of Quorn is vegan. We had spaghetti bolognese, and while they had quorn mince, we had to go out and buy soya mince so that we could make two separate meals.

In this house, Friday night is pizza night, so I got to have a vegan pizza. It was good, but there were peas on it that flew everywhere because the glue, the cheese, wasn’t holding it all together.

photo: http://bit.ly/1rvawfa

Birdseye veggie fingers are vegan and I’ve also eaten a lot of those!

None of this is down to my parents being awkward or not trying to find vegan foods. It seems as though they’ve done a lot of research and they’ve scoured the town centre for suitable foods and had cartons upon cartons of soya milk in the fridge ready for my arrival. Nevertheless, we’ve managed.

However, when it comes to puddings, I’ve been struggling. A lot.

I have a bit of a sweet tooth (understatement), and while my parents have been eating magnums, rocky roads, madeira cake, I’ve been sitting there craving pudding.

One of the most difficult things has been labelling. Almost everything that’s vegetarian is labelled quite obviously as vegetarian, and that’s fantastic and shows a real shift in the notion of vegetarianism as a more mainstream thing. But veganism: nothing. I’ve seen the label ‘suitable for vegans’ on one product, and that’s hummus. So you have to check the list of ingredients on literally every single product.

photo: http://bit.ly/1nF40ib

What’s more, when you read the ingredients, you can sometimes end up less sure than before as to whether it’s vegan (weird ingredient names like lactylate sounds suspiciously like a dairy product).

We went into M&S today to see if we could find any pudding-y stuff for me. We checked all of the biscuits and the only ones that were vegan were the rubbish ones: ginger nuts, digestives, rich tea. Blergh. So another night of no pudding. There are worse problems in the world, obviously, so I won’t go on.

I’m heading to Spain on saturday, and I think that will be the real test. The Spanish think vegetarians eat chicken, so the concept of veganism must be utterly ludicrous to them.