Flicking the Vs: October 2015

Normally I don't really make a lot of hallowe'en food, I just enjoy all the crazy fun stuff that everyone else posts, but this year, I'm making an exception and offering up my own contribution.

However, with a metric truckload of revision and a couple of assignments hanging over me, I desperately needed a way of procrastinating. So here it is - the cheesy skull crackers I made rather than getting on with my actual university work.

Happy hallowe'en!

Cheesy skull crackers

Ingredients
150g self raising flour
50g ground almonds
Pinch salt
3tbsp of non-dairy milk
50g non-dairy spread/butter
5g nooch
Olives
Sunflower seeds

How you do it
Preheat your oven to 180C.
Mix together the flour, almonds, salt and nooch (if your scales aren't overly precise, just grab whacking handful of nooch and that's the right amount) in a bowl.
Add the vegan butter and rub through your fingers until you get something that resembles fine breadcrumbs
Add the milk and bring together til you get a dough.
Roll out on a flour board til the dough is a little under half a centimetre thick.
Cut out some rounds with a round cookie cutter or similar (I used a wine glass)
Between your thumb and forefinger, grab the dough about half way down and squeeze til you have a little jaw for the skull and then gently roll over with a rolling pin - voila, skull biscuits!
Place olives for the eyes and sunflower seeds for nose and teeth. If they're not sticking to the biscuit, brush with a bit of non-dairy milk and try again.
Put your completed skulls onto a greased baking sheet and into the oven for 17 to 20 minutes.

crackers

Cheesy vegan skull crackers for Hallowe'en

Normally I don't really make a lot of hallowe'en food, I just enjoy all the crazy fun stuff that everyone else posts, but this year,...

Being the switched on type you are, you've no doubt heard about the whole 'eat clean' movement. I'll be honest with you here, I appreciate the idea of eating minimally processed foods, but some days, I just want to eat a bag of crisps, and if that means I'm eating dirty, so be it.

Thanks to leaving my job to become a student, the time I have to cook and prepare meals has taken a vicious tumble. Sometimes, it's all I can manage to find the nearest vegan thing and shove it in my face.

Case in point: the fancy grain-and-bean based salads I used to take to work for lunch have been replaced by that most depressing of English staples, the sandwich, eaten out of a plastic tub on a bench somewhere. So, if I feel the need to tart up my bread-based lunch, I reach for some Ten Acre crisps - which are handily sold on campus.

The 'cheese and onion' flavour, despite having no animal ingredients, is a pretty good version of the milky version that I remember from my pregan days. To be honest, I used to hate cheese and onion crisps, so the fact that I rather enjoyed these perhaps suggests that they're not an entirely faithful reproduction. That said, what would you rather eat - authentic or tasty? I'll pick tasty over authentic every time.

I also enjoyed these vegan chicken crisps, but I found the branding a bit problematic - chicken soup saved the day? Did it? I thought it mainly killed chickens.

This is one example of the problem I guess vegan food manufacturers face - shout about veganity and raise awareness, or keep it on the down low, get more people eating their products and save more animals, but at the same time, not make those buyers aware that's what they're doing. I'm not sure what side of the argument I fall down on, and I'm glad that Ten Acre have their vegan credentials clearly on the back, but I wish the name of the crisps didn't feel pro meat. Or am I just being oversensitive? Quite possibly! Ten Acre are the most popular all-vegan crisp brand out there, and I'm happy that they're there.

My university also sells their popcorn, which I am also fairly partial too - including this wasabi flavour. Hot enough that you know it's wasabi, not so hot you're still feeling it the day after (you know what I mean).

Another vegan find on campus is Rebel Kitchen's mylk, which there are a few flavours of in the library canteen. I'm crushing on the matcha flavour. I like matcha, but buying some to drink at home is waaaaaaay too expensive for this poor student, so Rebel Kitchen is as close as I can get these days. And very nice it is too.

If I really want a treat though, this is combination I turn to - Lucy's Maple Bliss biscuits and a cup of tea. Everything goes better with a cup of tea and a handful of biccies. If I had to face down the apocalypse, this is exactly how I'd choose to do it - with a brew in my hand and some snacks for good measure.

Sadly, these aren't sold on campus. The only place I can find them is at Whole Foods in Piccadilly, which means they're not as often a visitor to my house as I'd like them to be. Still, that makes them a rare treat and one I always appreciate.

biscuits

Crisps, biscuits and other vegan treats I'm loving right now

Being the switched on type you are, you've no doubt heard about the whole 'eat clean' movement. I'll be honest with you here...

I love sushi. Who doesn't love sushi? Everyone, that's who. Apart from people that are allergic to seaweed or something. But apart from them, almost everyone loves sushi.

But most people think that sushi involves raw fish (most people are wrong, it's sashimi that's the raw fish - sushi is the vinegared rice), and coming by vegan sushi is really harder than it ought to be. (It should be easy, because all sushi should be vegan, you say? I hear you.)

So, it's with some joy that this sushi-loving vegan can report two new vegan sushi discoveries in the capital.

The first is Happy Maki, an itinerant sushi purveyor that was last seen at the Moveable Feast (the great veg*n popup that is now sadly no more) and recent Veg Fest.

Happy Maki sells sushi rolls handmade before your very eyes, and they're rather good. I picked up a couple when I visited the Moveable Feast for lunch - the avocado K.I.S.S (not sure why it's written as an acronym - maybe it stands for Kwik! It's Sushi Satisfaction?) and the teriyaki chicken, I think.

The teriyaki chicken wrap involved cucumber, sweet potato, chicken-style pieces, and lots of sesame seeds and teriyaki seeds. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with chicken style stuff, and one that's been mostly at hate lately. The teriyaki chicken roll was the equivalent of chicken turning up at my house with a bunch of flowers and convincing me to take it back because this time it had really changed.

The avocado KISS (I'm not writing the full stops in, that's too much like hard work) was double avocado, red pepper, cucumber with a bit of soy and sesame to go with it. In my head, I have big list of things that all vegans seem to love - you know, like leafy greens, waffles, and Hallowe'en - and avocado is definitely on that list. By that logic, vegans should like this double as much. I know I did.

My next vegan sushi discovery wasn't quite as much on my love list, but still, it's good to know it's out there.

The Japan Centre in Piccadilly is a great spot for picking up Japanese cooking essentials, and it has a large readymade sushi section. The other day when I was browsing said section, I saw one of their onigiri marked as vegan, so obviously I whisked it home to shove it in my face.

The rice ball had soy beans, avocado, and cucumber - it wasn't overly blessed with flavour, but having picked up some wasabi and soy sauce at the Japan Centre, I was able to remedy that.

After all that sushi based gluttony, I decided I needed to make some at home. Don't judge me - vegan sushi addiction is in the DSM-5, I'm pretty sure. The only known cure is to eat more sushi, I believe.

I thought I'd try and make some teriyaki chicken rolls at home, so wandered off and bought some analogue that I'd not tried before. I wasn't overly impressed, so I guess I'm back to the not-love side of my equation.

Teriyaki chicken sushi rolls

Ingredients
For the rice
100mls (that's mls, not g) of sushi rice
1tbsp of mirin
1tbsp of rice vinegar

For the teriyaki chicken
One handful of vegan chicken pieces
1tsp each of soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin
Half tsp of dark brown sugar

Other stuff
A few sticks of green pepper, avocado, and carrot
One sheet of nori

How you do it
Wash your rice until the water runs clear. This is boring, but you have to do it, trust me.
Drain and leave it to one side for half an hour.
In the meantime, mix up all the sauce ingredients bar the chicken until you have a teriyaki sauce. Heat a little oil in a frying pan over medium heat, add the vegan chicken, then add the sauce and stir until it's absorbed by the chicken. Take it off the heat and leave to one side.
You might have a bit of time til your sushi rice is dried out, so you could always chop up your veg now.
Once the half hour's up, put the sushi rice in a small saucepan, ideally with a glass lid. Add 130ish mls of boiling water, put the lid on, and whack the heat up high. When you see the water's got back up to boiling point, turn it down low, low, low and leave for seven minutes. Don't take the lid off at any point. Seriously, don't, it monkeys with things. Once the seven minutes are up, take it off the heat and leave for 10 minutes. Don't take the lid off, at all.
Once the 10 minutes is up, then you can take the lid off.
Add your mirin and vinegar to the rice, stir thorougly and leave to cool.
Once that's cool, get your nori, spread the rice over it, line up your teriyaki chicken and vegetables and roll. If you need any tips on how to go about that, this dude can help you out.
Cut into six slices with a damp serrated knife and enjoy. Enjoy the sushi, not the knife or cutting. That wouldn't be right.

japanese

Two new vegan sushi discoveries, and one teriyaki roll recipe

I love sushi. Who doesn't love sushi? Everyone, that's who. Apart from people that are allergic to seaweed or something. But apart f...

I have more than once said I really like The Moveable Feast, a cafe in London that houses a regularly-changing roster of veg*n food sellers.

I've been there a few times, and I've never been badly fed on any of them. I enjoyed Club Mexicana's jackfruit tacos there, guzzled Pomodoro e Basilico's ravioli, and dined happily on a huge slab of vegan chocolate cake.

I have bad news for you - it's closed! Sadly, A Moveable Feast was only a temporary resident of London Bridge, and now it's time is up. It's a real loss for the area (and the veggies and vegans in the area), and I hope it eventually finds a new home somewhere else in the capital.

Before it shut up shop, The Moveable Feast went out with a bang, with an amazing night of vegan desserts. (You know it's going to be good from those last two words, right?)

Last month, A Moveable Feast - normally only open at lunchtime - staying open later to turn out platters of sweet vegan treats.

For each plate, there were three desserts - one berry, one lemon, one chocolate. Three tasty desserts = one happy Joey.

When we sat down to get stuck into all our desserts, we were told that the place only had a BYOB licence, and Mr FtVs immediately volunteered to get the drinks in. We couldn't work out what drinks actually go with a plate of puddings (I'm still not sure there actually is one, but tell me I'm wrong), so we ended up drinking coffee instead. There was so much indulgence on the one plate, I guess you don't really need booze.

Onto the desserts:

I started my three course meal (!) with the berry cheesecake. It was a very grown up version - sharp berries, and a soft, pillowy, just-faintly-sweet underneath. Was it tofu or nut-based? Intriguingly, I couldn't tell you what it was made of, but I can tell you it was delicious. The hazelnut praline was also fairly wondrous - a mature offshoot of the Ferrero Rocher genus.

The chocolate cake with the raspberry middle was always going to be a winner - it came with its own puddle of chocolate sauce and a hidden raspberry middle. Oh, and if that wasn't grand enough, there was chocolate ganache on the top. When it came to this chocolatey dessert, more was definitely more. Swoon. It was described as a cupcake, but it was a bit of misnomer - usually cupcakes are buried under a mountain of sugary icing. This was anything but - dark, rich, slightly bitter, and definitely intense.

We were advised to eat the lemon posset after the other two, as it was a bit of strong flavour. It really wasn't really, but it was delicious nonetheless. I'm not a huge fan of lemon and chocolate together, so I saved the chocolate cup it came in and nibbled on it happily.

This particular feast at The Moveable Feast was made by Guloo (@Proofsplace on Twitter) a self-described experimental vegetarian chef, and this was his first London event. I hope we'll definitely be seeing more of his vegan experimenting before too long.

cake

A meal entirely composed of vegan desserts. And no, it's not a dream.

I have more than once said I really like The Moveable Feast , a cafe in London that houses a regularly-changing roster of veg*n food seller...

This is another post from when I was away Mofo-ing (yep, another one of those). During August, I went off to Manchester.

I like Manchester - I've got family and friends there, and it gives you scenery like this at the same distance from the city centre as a particularly aggressive sneeze can travel.

Thanks to reading Tea and Sympatico, I often wonder if Manchester is a better destination for vegans than London (Tea and Sympatico is better at finding cool vegan stuff than me!)

Case in point: Unicorn Grocery, a workers co-op and entirely, amazingly plant-based place. Thanks to a tip-off from my friend's mum that there was a vegan supermarket nearby, we decided to take a journey down to the suburb of Chorlton to check it out.

I was expecting something like your local health food shop - a few shelves heathily stocked with all the things needful to veg*ns. Unicorn is way better than that - it's huge. It is, as my friend's mum had said, a vegan supermarket - aisles and aisles of stuff, half of which was new to me. It's a swimming-pool sized place where you need never check the label to see if someone has slipped a dusting of whey into your food, and you never have to quest for the elusive vegan mark.

As if that wasn't enough to get me considering a move to Chorlton, there's also a deli counter - rows and rows of interesting salads, snacks, fun shizz, and baked goods. I availed myself of a samosa, a load of rum truffles, and a slice of nut and chocolate cake. It was a dense slab shot through with almonds, topped with grassy coloured pistachios, gravelling a mirror-sheened - and pleasantly bitter and grown-up - dark chocolate icing.

Along with the deli raid, I picked up a restrained number of other things - some biscuits, for example, a bottle of Spanish sparkling wine, and a jar of sun-dried tomato paste that cost £1 less than it would in London. And that's another reason to love Unicorn - as it's a co-op, the prices are all wallet-friendly.

Among the rows of organic veg, tinned goods, cleaning products and all the other things you'd expect in an omni supermarket, I was particularly taken with the chilled section - it's not often you come across entirely new vegan brands, but Unicorn had a couple including Hobbit, which had a range of readymade tofu, tempeh, and vegetable-based dips and other tofu products.

Here's some of the stuff I picked up:

Another new discovery not pictured here was Paul's tofu, which won my affection for two reasons - its price (low) and its water content (equally low). Thanks to its non-watery nature, you don't even have to press it before using it - who doesn't love labour saving tofu?

I used it make the brunch we had with my lovely Northern friends - tomato, mushrooms, beans, scramble, and um, chapatti. It's not traditional, but it works... Much like Unicorn.

breakfast

The wonders of Unicorn, Manchester's amazing vegan coop supermarket

This is another post from when I was away Mofo-ing (yep, another one of those). During August, I went off to Manchester. I like Manchester...

Another post that's been hanging around since before MoFo - a visit to another veg*n-friendly eatery in South London - Crystal Palace's Domali.

My other half had been to Domali a few times and had been attempting to drag me down there for a while before I finally succumbed to visiting, and on the whole, I'm glad he did.

It's a large, airy place indoors, with a few bench tables in its sweet and appealing back garden, if you're stopping by when the elusive London sun is making an appearance.

There's a lot of vegan menu options, though some aren't overly exciting (a hummus sarnie can be pleasant, but it doesn't get my pulse racing) and most are clearly labelled on the paper menu, though that marking hasn't made it across to the menus on the Domali website.

Those menus are divided up into small plates like olives or hummus and pita, main course salads, side orders, favourites like tomatoes on toast, and specials. There's also a separate breakfast menu, and happily, Domali doesn't just believe in serving breakfast at breakfast time. As well as standard full English type options, there's a comprehensive choice of sandwiches, including the aforementioned hummus variants.

One plus point worth mentioning - they also mention which of their wines and beers are vegan too. Hoorah!

On my first visit, I opted for the promising-sounding wild mushroom pate with chargrilled farmhouse bread in olive oil with salad garnish from the small plates selection. I also ordered some chips, because I like my plates on the large side.

Here's the pate:

I could be wrong, but it looks like a tin of Granovita turned onto a plate, or something similar. Don't get me wrong, I like Granovita, but I was hoping for something a bit more homemade from the kitchen. Also a whole can of pate is a lot when you've only got one slice of bread. The bread was nice, it tasted of the olive oil that had been promised, but I couldn't help but feel let down.

The chips though were glorious - whacking great things, soft in the middle, and almost a meal in themselves. The helpful staff also brought some vegan mayo too! They helped make up for the pate sadness.

I went back a couple of weeks after to meet some friends in the area, and feeling greedy, I went for the more substantial vegan full English. I immediately feel a warm fuzzy feeling towards anywhere that serves a vegan full English, though in this case, it may have been because I was enjoying a glass of one of their vegan wines at the time. (I should reiterate, this was lunchtime, despite the breakfasty nature of my meal.)

There was toast, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms and a bit of 'Lorne sausage', made by More than Meat. It isn't a company that I've heard of before, but being local, and a maker of fantastic vegan sausage patties, I'm hoping to run into them again - the patties were full of flavour, and the proteiny cornerstone of a good breakfast.

The toast was chunky granary which pleased me - a good change from the usual white that seems to accompany English breakfasts (why so? do we just need to maximise the unhealthiness of the affair?) and the mushrooms were spot on. If you think the skill of your mushroom cooker is negligible, think again - the weepy creatures that besmirched my last full English still haunt me now.

I enjoyed my full English, I enjoyed the wine that came with it, and I enjoyed having enough warmth to sit outside. I'll be back to Domali - I'll just might give the pate a miss.

Domali
domalicafe.co.uk/
38 Westow St
London
SE19 3AH
020 8768 0096

breakfast

Visiting Domali, a Crystal Palace cafe with some good vegan options

Another post that's been hanging around since before MoFo - a visit to another veg*n-friendly eatery in South London - Crystal Palace...

In my mission to uncover south London's best vegan and vegan-friendly eateries that I embarked on before MoFo kicked off (yes, this post has been sitting around that long), I thought I'd take myself off to Dulwich.

It's not a corner of London I often visit, given as it's an area for the more affluent folk south of the river. You'd think that the existence of a veggie restaurant there, the Blue Brick Cafe, would be enough to drag me into the chi-chi district, but the cafe has only the most rudimentary menu on its website and it's not really clear how much of what it serves is vegan friendly. But when I unearthed a breakfast menu on Zomato promising a vegan full English, I could resist its pull no longer.

After an overly-long bus journey to reach the Blue Brick Cafe, located on a side street off Dulwich's main drag Lordship Lane things looked promising. It's a nice looking place, done up in the style you'd expect of the area - mismatched furniture, cute knicknacks, and the blue tiles that cover the cafe, and presumably lend it its name, give it a cheerful hippy air. There's even a few outdoor tables for diners to catch any passing ray of London sun.

The service was cheerful but slow - getting two cups of black coffee took rather longer you'd expect given the number of folks inside, but when you're outdoors and that south London sun is shining, you won't find yourself minding too much.

Both me and Mr Flicking the Vs opted for that full vegan breakfast - homemade baked beans, mushroom, spinach, tomato, bubble and squeak and a veggie sausage. Here's what arrived for us:

Note: everything looks a bit dark due to the sun disappearing behind a cloud when it came to picture time! That may have been a pathetic fallacy at work - sadly the breakfast promised good things, but didn't get everything right. The mushrooms had been overcooked, and had begun to go floppy and leech grey water over the plate. The bubble and squeak was also a bit on the wet side, leading to slightly damp feel to the breakfast.

There wasn't much in the way of the advertised spinach either - perhaps it had called in sick and the mushrooms had stepped in to cover its shift. There were a lot of mushrooms.

On the other hand, the toast and the veggie sausage were clear winners. The toast was a beautifully crisp sourdough, and the sausage had that vague taste of stuffing that made me yearn for those packet mixes that were most people's source of veggie bangers a long, long time ago. They were herby, flavoursome, and comforting - as the cornerstone of any brekkie should be. On the lunch menu, there was chick pea stew featuring those sausages - I'll be back to try that before too long.

As we went to the till to settle our breakfast bill, I spotted a vegan lemon and lavender drizzle cake, and pocketed a slice for later.

I was glad I did. Given the curate's egg of a breakfast, I was astonished at just how good the cake was - a mixture of fairy-light sponge and a crisp icing top, the sour of the lemon and the sweet of the cake making a happy duet.

If you're a lavender fan, this is one for you, but those unfortunate types that claim it gives everything a whiff of an old lady's sock drawer may prefer to give it a wide berth. (Note: if you're in the latter camp, you're missing out.)
I'm not often in Dulwich, but you can bet every time I am, I'll be dropping in at the Blue Brick Cafe for some coffee and cake.