Flicking the Vs: November 2019

Being as I'm currently studying medicine, I have a bit of a soft spot for the Wellcome Collection, the London museum dedicated to all things health.

There's a lot to like about the Wellcome Collection: the main collection is fascinating and a manageable size, there's always an interesting exhibition on, and it's free. If you've ever fancied a quick tour around the human body and a look at health from a fresh perspective, then an hour spent at the Wellcome Collection won't be badly spent.

A couple of friends were coming to meet me in London, and put in a shout for visiting the Play Well exhibition. After working our way around the exhibits -- big shout out to whoever swapped the voices of Barbie and GI Joe as a protest against gendered toys -- we were sated for knowledge, but pretty hungry for food.

The downstairs cafe at the Wellcome is always hectic and the vegetarian and vegan options (if there are any) aren't clearly marked. We wandered up to the second floor restaurant, without much hope for good vegan food awaiting us.

I was a bit wrong-footed to find a open quiet space with a decent amount of vegan options, and for London food, not wallet-damagingly expensive.

Aside from a couple of standard vegan nibbles, the menu had a vegan sandwich, a couple of salads, and another two hot mains: a stew and a gratin. The gratin sounded a bit more interesting: tofu, cauliflower, and chickpeas with a side salad.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but here's what I got:

At first glance, I thought I ordered a wrong 'un: should cauliflower, tofu, and chick pea really be sitting together under a white sauce with a bit of vegan cheese on top? If I'd had the same ingredients in a curry, it would be a more natural team, with the gentle flavours of the veggies able to play bass to the spices' lead guitar. But with just tumeric and a bit of Violife for flavour? I wasn't convinced, I'll be honest.

It seemed a bit like the sort of dish someone who's never eaten vegan before would come up with if someone challenged them to make a plant-based meal out of the ingredients they had in their cupboard.

And then there was the side salad: a big bowl of watercress with a sharp dressing.

It's fair to say I had more than my fair share of reservations before I started eating, but once I got into it, I was happily surprised. The cauliflower and chickpeas had been roasted to give them more texture, the tofu added a bit of texture and moisture rather than flavour, and the watercress side salad added a bit of peppery heat to the otherwise gentle dish. And, if it all got a bit mono-texture, the almonds were there for a bit of contrast and crunch.

I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, and it's something I'll be recreating at home some time.

And, if that wasn't enough to give the Wellcome Kitchen a vegan thumbs-up, there was a vegan dessert that wasn't sorbet - result!

Instead, there was a chocolate mousse with spiced pear, and I was powerless not to order it. Here's what happened:

Mousse, meet pear

Again, not what I was expecting. I thought there'd be a poached pear with some mousse on the side, rather than a bucket of mousse with some distinctly biological looking pear slices on the top.

What it missed in looks, it more than made up for in flavour -- a delicious warming Christmassy tinge to the fruit, with a not-too-sweet milky-chocolate mousse. It was just the ticket, and a really generous portion.

In honour of the Play Well exhibition, the Wellcome Kitchen also had some games available for diners -- you can see our dominos game behind the mousse! Turns out my parents were wrong -- playing with your food is actually a great idea.

Pear, meet mousse

london

A very vegan welcome: Can you get a good plant-based meal at the Wellcome Collection?

Being as I'm currently studying medicine, I have a bit of a soft spot for the Wellcome Collection , the London museum dedicated to all t...

If you listen to companies that advertise on TV, Christmas starts the day after Boxing Day. If you listen to traditionalists, maybe it starts with advent on the 1 December. And if you listen to kids, it starts as soon as humanly possible.

Christmas for me starts when the Finnish and Norwegian churches in London open their doors for their annual Christmas fair, and the Scandi Market sets up shop just outside. It's always at the end of November, and it's the earliest I can even begin thinking about Christmas.

If you're looking for a lovely way to fire the starter's gun on the festive season, then getting down to Albion Street for the Scandi Market is the way to do it. There's sparkly lights, traditional decorations, stalls selling mulled wine and seasonal bits and pieces. I've been going there for almost as many years as I've been in London, and it's been gratifying to see how many more vegan options there are now than I when I started visiting.

I think for the first time, the Scandi Market had a wholly vegan stall: the CaribSwede Vegan Bakery.

On its website, the CaribSwede Vegan Bakery says it offers Swedish bakes with Caribbean flavours, and that's what we got a taste of when we visited the stall.

This beautiful piece of pastry work was a mango mazarin, a tropical take on a traditional Swedish almond cake. I've never got a chance to try a mazarin before, but as a reference, it reminded me of a frangipane tart - a dense, chewy mound of almond in a pastry shell.

I tend to avoid mango desserts normally, as I find them a bit on the sweet side -- and plus mangoes are perfect just as they are. The CaribSwede mazarin was a beast of a dessert, and could easily have fed me twice over. It was perfectly sweet too, so while I could have stopped eating after half of the pie and saved me a chunk for the next day, I kept right on eating.

Can you blame me? Look at the colour of that gorgeous filling:

For anyone after a straight Swedish bake, there were berry mazarins too, but having tried the mango version, I know which one I'll be going for if I get a chance again.

There were also Swedish classics on sale, including cardamom and cinnamon buns:

Look at this beauty though. It's just a perfect festive knot of pastry to warm the soul, with the sort of glorious seasonal spice that just makes you feel cosy just to smell it.

There were loads more vegan goodies on sale at the CaribSwede stall, including bread and a variety of patties with appealing sounding fillings. Next time I see CaribSwede, you can bet I'm going to taking a load home with me. If their savoury goodies are on a par with the sweets we tried, they're going to be gooooood.

With winter drawing on and daylight drifting away, the world needs more pastry to keep us cosy. CaribSwede has the festive tastes that make you remember all the good things of winter, and the sunny flavours to tell you summer isn't so far away. It's just the right mix for the start of Christmas.

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Caribbean Swedish vegan treats to get you through winter

If you listen to companies that advertise on TV, Christmas starts the day after Boxing Day. If you listen to traditionalists, maybe it start...

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

Hey friends! As you know, veganism is only for the wealthy and privileged. Of course, as a vegan, I am no exception. Oh wait, no, I'm a final year student living on student loans and whatever else I can scrape up with freelancing (hot tip: did you know in your final year you get dramatically reduced funding? In case you were afraid students would be able to afford such luxuries such as avocado toast, rent, and electricity, fear not. Student Finance ensures that any final year student will definitely not have enough money to cover even the basics of life in the capital.) So, for today's post, I'm joining lots of other bloggers with a celebration of Five Frugal Things I've been doing recently.

1. Art on a budget
There's a saying by Confuscius that if you have two coins, you should spend one on bread and one on flowers; the bread keeps you alive and the flowers give you a reason for living. My budget maybe tight, but I'm a sucker for a good exhibition. Time Out had a voucher for two tickets to the Barbican's exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art for roughly half price (they're still available here if you fancy going yourself!)

It's a really interesting exhibition looking at some of the greatest nightclubs of recent times, from the Weimar Republic to the 1970s Iran. There are some of the fixtures and fittings from the clubs themselves, including their wall art, tables and even their menus. Obviously, I was checking them out for vegan options! Good news for any vegans time travelling back to the Chat Noir in 19th century Paris: if you're down with the old herbivore trick of making a meal from sides, you'd be able to eat vegan even then!

One of the coolest things is their recreations of some of the clubs that you can walk around. This is Vienna's Cabaret Fledermaus -- isn't it beautiful?

2. £125 for a bank switch
Lloyds was recently offering a £125 bonus for anyone switching to a Club Lloyds account (the bonus is not available any more, sadly, otherwise I'd point you to it!) I've never switched bank accounts before because I'm lazy and I thought it would be a hassle, but with £125 as a carrot, I could be persuaded. Turns out it actually wasn't that hard -- it got turned around in a week, including the £125.

And, if £125 wasn't enough, there's six free cinema tickets. I love the cinema, but with tickets normally in the region of £12-20 in London it's not something I can afford to do often. Now, I can afford to do it at least three times this year (you didn't think I wasn't going to share with Mr Flicking the Vs did you?!)

If you're looking to switch accounts, MSE has a list of what's available.

3. Free coffee for a piece of my mind
I'm on Leon's email mailing list, and earlier this week they sent out an email offering a free coffee in exchange for sharing your opinions on their food and other things about the chain. As you can imagine, I said they need to have more vegan options (to be fair, Leon have some great vegan options, but everywhere needs to have more, right?!) and get rid of plastic in their packaging.

In return, I picked up an oat milk latte:

4. Vegan desserts at almost half price
I remember seeing on Twitter a list of things that, if you could find them in your house, indicated you'd reached adulthood. One of them I remember being the ramekins you got Gü puds in. Until recently, there were no vegan Güs, so we were destined to remain eternal children, with no chance to lay our vegan paws on those coveted grown up ramekins.

Happily, Gü recently launched three different vegan puddings: chocolate and vanilla cheesecake, rhubarb and strawberry cheesecake, and Spanish lemon cheesecake. What's better than vegan cheesecake? Cheap vegan cheesecake! Last time I popped into Co-op, they were £2 for two, compared to their normal price of £3.50. I bought two different lots, strawberry and chocolate. I'll report back on my findings!

5. Cashed out of some cashback apps
I managed to squeeze a few quid out of Quidco as well as Checkout Smart and ClickSnap. Sadly, I'm not going to get rich on cashback apps, but when you're a vegan as rich and privileged as me, every penny counts!

I'll be writing a round up of which cashback apps are worth your time shortly, so don't forget to check back for that. Unless you're a vegan, in which case, you probably don't need the cash, you rich herbivore, you.

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Five frugal things for the weekend: Art on the cheap, bank switch bonus and coffee for nada

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash Hey friends! As you know, veganism is only for the wealthy and privileged. Of course, as a ve...

After our recent trip to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, we visited the country's second largest city, Plovdiv.

After being surprised about how much I ended up enjoying Sofia -- after a shaky start the city grew on me on a way I never expected -- but for me, Plovdiv was the opposite. The city has a beautiful medieval heart studded with amazingly preserved buildings, as well as a hipster heart for all your graffiti spotting and craft beer needs. I thought I'd love it, but for me it wasn't a patch on Sofia.

For one, the vegan food options in Plovdiv weren't a patch on those in Sofia. In Sofia, we were spoiled -- we had so many vegan restaurants and so little time! In Plovdiv, there wasn't a single vegan-only place.

But fear not -- vegans won't starve in Plovdiv. There are a few veggie places and they do serve vegan options, and one almost-vegan-apart-from-the-honey option, called Veggic.

We decided to hit up Veggic for our tea. It's in Kapana, the lively, grungy part of the city and a fine spot to grab an outside table and watch the world go by. The food at Veggic isn't going to win any prizes for gourmet cuisine, but it's cheap, filling and there's bound to be something you want to eat.

After a starter of hummus with enough bread to fill us both up, we picked up a couple of chilli bean wraps with potato salad. They looked like this:

We also managed a slice of raw cake for dessert and a few beers, and a pleasant couple of hours watching the sun set. The food, prices, and service all make Veggic a solid vegan-friendly option in a town that's not exactly full of them.

One non-vegan but vegan-friendly place you should definitely check out is Savini. It's a gelato place with a good range of flavours many of which are vegan, and the staff are very clued up on which are which. They also do plant based milk if you need a coffee too.

Here's a couple of flavours I got to try: dark chocolate and (I think!) plantain, all vegan to boot:

Just the thing for to cool down a vegan on a hot day! It's not the easiest place to find, but I heartily recommend checking it out if you're in the city.

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Vegan in Plovdiv: Two places to get a good vegan feed in Bulgaria's second city

After our recent trip to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, we visited the country's second largest city, Plovdiv. After being surpris...

A bird's eye view of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria

If I asked you to name some of Europe's greatest cities for vegan eating, what would you say? London would be up there, Berlin for sure, and where else? After a recent trip, I've got a suggestion -- Bulgaria's capital, Sofia.

In the summer, I took a trip to Bulgaria -- my first visit to the country, and a holiday I'd booked in the middle of exam stress. After I got off the plane, my first impressions were I'd made a mistake -- why had I decided to fly three hours to get to what looked like a non-descript post-industrial city. My friends, Sofia grew on me massively over the few days we were there. By the end of the trip, I'd fallen in love with the parks, the buildings, the museums, the bars, the history -- and did I mention the vegan food? Oh yes, that was cracking.

We didn't eat a bad meal in Sofia, and we ate a lot of really good ones. Not expecting to be so deluged with so many great restaurants, we'd booked an AirBnB expecting we'd need to cook for ourselves. We didn't eat in once - we managed to find somewhere delicious to eat every night.

Here's the dish I ended up eating on the last night, from a chain called Sunmoon.

Sunmoon is a veggie bakery and restaurant with a few branches in Sofia, and it has the advantage of being open late throughout the week, so if you've been out sightseeing and you wanting to eat at 9pm, SunMoon will sort you out. Sure, 9pm might not be late for a dinner in a lot of Europe, but there aren't many places open til 10pm when we looked.

Anyway, back to the food. It's all veggie, and there are a good number of vegan and veganisable options. I got myself a bowl of tarator, a Bulgarian dill and yoghurt (vegan for me, obvs) soup, a really nice simple cooling dish. There were also pizzas on the menu, one of which was veganised on Mr Flicking the Vs' request.

We popped into another branch the next morning to pick up some vegan baked goods, including banitsa, a Bulgarian pastry. Sunmoon had a few types of banitsa on sale, including a vegan one that was stuffed with veggies and fearsomely salty olives. I managed to pick up some chocolatey cakey goodness too.

Another stop on our Bulgarian eat-a-thon was Kring, a great buffet place.

Buffets: The choose-your-own-adventure of vegan food

As I've mentioned before, I love a buffet. I mean, I LOVE a buffet. I love piling my plate high with a completely weird mix of dishes that would never otherwise share a plate. They might feel uncomfortable about it, but I wasn't. I made myself a mix of salads, spuds, noodles and spinachy-tofu. Prices won't hurt your wallet, and there's enough vegan fare there that there's bound to be something you like.

There are also vegan desserts to be had, like this big old slice of cake:

Two forks, because I was sharing. (Or should that be 'sharing'?)

Other places that we stuffed our faces at but don't have photos for (other summer events: the sad death of my old phone, and all the photos I forgot to save...)

Edgy Veggy - if you're craving your vegan meats and cheeses, or burgers as big as your first, and you want them with big-hearted service as well, Colibri Kitchen's the place to go. There's wraps, salads, burgers, soups, and all sorts of comfort food, and it's just off Vitosha Boulevard, the big thoroughfare through the heart of the city. Recommended.

Dream House - this one's located in the back of a mini shopping mall, past the entrance for a backpacker's hostel. It sounds a bit tricky to find, but plough on and you'll get there. The food is a globe-trotting mix of cuisines, from local to Greek, Chinese and Indian. The mains need rice or similar to bulk them up, which the menu handily doesn't mention. Solid but nothing to write home about.

My favourite of our Bulgarian eats was Soul Kitchen, which we stumbled into near closing time on an unforgiving and rainy evening. It's one of the more expensive vegan options in the city, but by London standards it's still a bargain. We went back twice it was that good.

This autumnal delight was my favourite:

One of my favourite vegan meals in Sofia

Sweet potatoes, pearl barley, asparagus with the most gorgeous gravy... If I asked you to make me up a plate of some of my favourite things to eat in the world, it would probably look a lot like this. Every single bite was a little bit of heaven, and proof that you don't need exotic ingredients or meat replacements to make a gorgeous meal (and I speak as a big fan of both!) This was simplicity itself, and I still remember how good it was a few months later.

We ate at Soul Kitchen twice -- Mr Flicking the Vs was a big fan of their pizza, I felt the same way about their desserts and beers. Food this good is normally way out of my price range in London, so if you need a bit of vegan indulgence in Sofia, head over to Soul Kitchen.

So, there you have it, a quick vegan tour of Sofia. I didn't expect to enjoy the city, and all its vegan restaurants, as much as I did, and I definitely didn't think I'd be advising you to add it to your travel list. Turns out I've never been so happy to be completely wrong. Do yourself a favour and go.

bulgaria

Eating vegan in Sofia: Where to get amazing food in Bulgaria's capital

A bird's eye view of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria If I asked you to name some of Europe's greatest cities for vegan eating, wh...

The capital's vegan scene used to be a bit on the mediocre side, now you can't move for all the great herbivorous places. If I had another 24 hours in the day, I'd visit every last new opening. As I'm just a mere mortal, I'll just visit the ones that aren't a million miles from me.

Handily, Stem and Glory isn't over the other side of the earth from where I live, so that went straight on my ever growing list of new vegan places to stuff my face in (where sadly it lingered for a few months until I got my sorry self down there). And, as I ate in Stem and Glory's Cambridge branch not so long ago and loved it a lot, it went straight to the top of my list. Aaaaand then I saw the London restaurant was offering a 20 percent off voucher for first time visitors - well, I just did what a vegan's got to do and booked myself in.

It was a Sunday and, as I have said in great, drooling detail, I love Sunday lunch. A proper vegan Sunday roast used to be a bit of a rarity round these parts, but thanks to veganism's surge in popularity, there are a few great options out there (South Londoners, get yourself down to The Ivy House or the Amersham Arms).

There were other things that I could have ordered, but there was a Sunday roast, so I didn't.

Here's the plate that landed on my table, in all its (stem and) glory:

As a roast obsessive, there are a few things that I reckon all Sunday roasts should have to be considered a great roast: pastry, good roast potatoes, and several pints of gravy. Salad though? Salad not so much. I don't think I've ever sat down in front of my Sunday roast and thought 'you know what this plate needs? More lettuce, dammit'. So, I'm not sure why there was a whole heap on top of my dinner there, but still, I'm a plant eater, so you know I'm not going to turn my nose up at eating more plants.

Once I'd made my way through the foliage, then I got to all the goodies: the pastry, the spuds, the gravy. Bonus points for the polenta coating on the roots, and for the inclusion of caramelised brussel sprouts, the cruciferous of my dreams (don't tell me you don't like sprouts or we can't be friends. Sprouts are for life, not just for Christmas.)

So, was this a great Sunday roast? I'm not sure it's my first-place roast (I'll let that honour go to the Amersham Arms), but I'd be happy to eat it again any Sunday you want to ask me for lunch.

But what do you eat on Sunday lunchtime if you don't want to eat a Sunday lunch? Are there even other meals in existence? Turns out yep, there really are. If you're Mr Flicking the Vs, there's always the shakshuka bowl, full of the good stuff: chickpeas in tomato sauce, roasted aubergine, scrambled tofu and big polenta crisps. And leaves, lots of leaves. Maybe everything in Stem and Glory comes with a big fluffy pile of leaves? Sadly I didn't get around to dessert so I can't tell you if the leaves grow on their puddings too.

Leaves aside for a bit, the Shakshuka bowl (or 'Shakshuka' bowl, as the menu has it - quote marks, model's own) actually was the boss of the meal - lots of variety, lots of flavour, lots of leaves. And big crisps, because there's not many meals that aren't improved by big old polenta crisps.

We were too full for dessert, but there are a few appealing options for next time. There's also a gorgeous looking vegan full English. Between that breakfast and that Sunday lunch, I could spend a whole day enjoying Stem and Glory's all vegan menu.

Edit: It turns out it must have been a while since I stopped by at Stem and Glory for Sunday lunch - it looks like the roast is no longer being served! Not to worry, there's still lots of good stuff on the menu. I'll be returning soon to check it out!

Stem and Glory
stemandglory.uk/london
60 Bartholomew Close (Barts Square)
City of London
EC1A 7BF 0203 9699392
info@stemandglory.uk

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