Three vegan meals: Burgers, burgers, and a cracking keema

Hello there! What with a new year just arrived, I thought I'd clear out some of the old pics on my phone from 2019 that didn't quite make it into a blog post of their very own.

Without further ado, I present you with the Truffler burger, a huge towering beast from Byron Burger:

Wandering around in the cold and the rain in central London with some of my course-mates one day, looking for somewhere to eat, we saw a branch of Byron. I was the only vegan, but my lovely friends insisted that we wouldn't go in anywhere we couldn't get a good feed. I'd never been to a Byron before, but a quick run through of the menu revealed three vegan options, all of which looked pretty good. 

I chose the above Truffler: Plant-based patty, truffle 'cheese' fondue, mushrooms, truffle 'mayonnaise', American mustard, pickled red onions, crispy onions, lettuce, according to the menu. As a side note: do those apostrophes may you grind your teeth? They do me. Why does everything without a bit of animal in it need scare quotes? But back to the burger: it was a great, tasty, sloppy beast, the sort of thing that makes its way down your arms and your shirt, and because it's so tasty, you don't mind a bit. It was one of the nicest vegan burgers I've had in ages. (And they do a student discount, which is always a good thing, if you ask me. Get it through the Unidays app.)

Next up, another outing with my course-mates to another place that I'd never tried before: Dishoom's soy keema no eedu.

The keema is a breakfast dish, according to Dishoom, is a breakfast dish. Dishoom has seven -- count them, seven! -- vegan breakfast dishes, but I couldn't resist the lure of a bowl of spicy mince, fried potatoes, and a couple of bread rolls to mop it all up with.

Normally, my breakfast is a bowl of porridge and a cup of tea, so going out for breakfast is luxury of the highest type. The keema was deliciously simple, no messing about, just spice and carbs and a very happy me. If I could get someone to cook it for me, I'd happily swap my usual oats for a bowl of warming mince.

One of my fellow diners got a Vegan Bombay, a Dishoom take on the full English, with scrambled tofu, sausages, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, masala beans and more of those inviting bread rolls. In other words, I know what I'll be having next time. 

Not all of my eating last month was in London, I also got to head up to Manchester to check out Wholesome Junkies.

Wholesome Junkies is a kiosk in the back-end of the Arndale Centre. It's not somewhere you'd stumble by accident, or really by choice, but handily one of my relatives was able to point me in the right direction. 

£10 will get you a burger, a hearty amount of tater tots (and sauce to dip them in!) and a drink as well. I managed to go there twice in one weekend -- once with one relative, and then with a second, who was aggrieved she didn't get to go too! 

The first burger I had was a meaty beefless patty, with all the usual goodies: cheese, chutney, lettuce and tomato. The sort of cheeseburger you always hope for when you see it on a menu, and it doesn't always deliver. Wholesome Junkies' version definitely did. The second time I helped myself to a KFC burger, a great heaping slab of cauliflower with a spicy batter, with cheese and onion rings to keep it company.

I nearly didn't finish it, it was so big. Nearly. Of course I ate the whole lot -- I never leave a vegan burger behind.