Yesterday I decided to finally try my hand at the stretchy bean-thing and put some chickpeas up for soaking.

Today I bought a bag of watercress. Now I’ve bought this stuff before, a good while ago, and didn’t care for it much. I can’t remember what I did with it, probably made some kind of basic salad, but the flavour was a bit too sharp.
Still, I’d seen the stuff mentioned, and it’s supposed to be healthy and actually quite good when prepared properly.
It has it’s followers, with a festival and an alliance and everything.
Unfortunately, the festival is not anywhere near me, so I’ll miss out on some good old veg-veneration and morris dancing (I’m not actually being sarcastic. I think I’d truly enjoy that kind of thing). unless I plan my holiday around it (don’t think I’m not tempted. It’s on the UK’s South coast, so not too far away).

Anyway, I was still not too sure about just doing any random thing with it, so I looked for some recipes.
The festive site gave me a neat recipe for watercress hummus, which was great considering I already had them chickpeas going, and some more googling got me a simple-looking watercress soup, which also called for chickpeas. Is that great, or what?
As per usual, I didn’t follow the recipes to the letter and basically did my own thing as far as quantities and spices were concerned.

I decided to go stretchy on the watercress as well and make both these things. I used about a third of the watercress for the hummus and about two-thirds for the soup. I considered keeping some for a smoothie, but figured I could just buy some more later.
I also made some standard hummus with coriander leaves as the green bit and kept some chickpeas seperate for making some other random food. Perhaps something involving quinoa. I’ve not made anything with that for a while, and I still have some coriander leaves left.

So far I’ve not yet tried the watercress hummus, but the soup is most tasty and has a familiar greeny flavour I can’t quite place. Chervil, perhaps?
Against all expectations, it actually tastes, well, quite soft. Very nice.

Unfortunately my beloved shoyu contains wheat, so I couldn’t put any of that in any of my lovely foods. I’ll have to get me some tamari later.

Vessels containing stretchy food:

I have quite a lot of hummus now. Not a bad thing, really, but still. I’ve frozen some for later use, but I’ll have to eat some freezer food if I want to freeze some more.
Between using a lot of coriander leaves and using a fair bit of watercress, I can’t actually tell the different kinds of hummus apart. I expect I’ll be able to taste the difference, though.
Nutritional analysis of the soup. Probably not exact since I guessed the quantities and didn’t bother with the salt and spices, but I still like doing it.
Can you actually see the page properly if you’re not logged in as me?

°Post contains much YouTubery°

I like bananas. Bananas are good.

Yes, they are. Trufax.
They’re easy, tasty, and healthy. They contain lots of manganese, potassium and vitamin B6. Your body needs that. And you can do all kinds of fun stuff with them.
Except travel, they don’t usually take well to that. You also shouldn’t put them in your ear (English version).
It’ll piss off Bert.

One of the fun things I like to do with bananas is peel them, slice them in half length-wise, put some pb (chunky is my fave) on one part, put some random small itty-bitty food on the pb, put the other part on top, and cut in a few smaller pieces.
Brilliant snack, that.

Picture:

It’s pretty easy to make, though the banana cutting can be a little tricky. It often breaks. Cutting it into smaller pieces before cutting it legth-wise might help.
Usually I use raisins as the itty-bitty food, but I didn’t have any when I made this one, so I used shredded desiccated coconut instead.
Also good.

While on my way to visit the boyfriend, I got a little peckish. Not unexpected, seeing as lunch was rice cakes and a bit of chocolate. So when I had to switch trains at Brussel Noord/Bruxelles Nord and had some spare time between trains, I thought I’d check out the nearby GB express to see if they had some quick vegan food.

They had a bunch of salads, and one of the pasta salads actually looked vaguely vegan (the veg ones all seemed to have dressings, which tend to be full of weird things) so I figured I’d check the label. I checked the whole damn thing but was unable to find the ingredient list until I gave the container a good shake and looked at the bottom of the container lid.
That’s right, they put the ingredient list somewhere you’d not be able to properly read it until you open the container. Something the staff doesn’t like you doing before you’ve actually paid for it.
Eejits.

Still, they had the good sense of putting the allergy info on the outside. That’s something, I suppose.

Some more shaking, a good bit of squinting, and taking into account the allergy information led me to conclude it was most likely vegan, so I bought it. If it had turned out to not be vegan after all, I’d have gone back in to return it with a polite (but Dutch. Apart from not being too confident at French, I would not have been in too a polite a mood and would’ve expected Brussels Belgians to be able to speak both the city’s languages, no matter how much they generally seem to dislike speaking Flemish) explanation.
Luckily (the check-out woman was friendly and didn’t look like she needed the hassle) this wasn’t necessary as the salad was indeed vegan. Okay, so ten out of ten for selling random prepared vegan food, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

Horribly flou pic of container containing bland and somewhat filling food:

See? It’s a big label. Big enough to print both the Dutch and French ingredient lists somewhere.
Big enough to put up a little box telling us that customers thought this was a Good Product, apparently. Don’t you think the actual ingredients have some priority over that?
And this is just the one side, too. The other side was simply a bunch of red with some random and utterly forgettable print. No letters. But plenty of room for some.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know how this “fresh” salad will keep until August (or July. I forget), which is should be able to do according to the label. Before I ate it, that is.
Best not to think about it, really.

Today we had the Dunya festival (Dutch site) here in Rotterdam, a free festival with lots of world music. Mostly by artists I’ve not heard of before and will likely not hear much from again (though I do intend to remember Daby Touré), but that doesn’t mean it’s not good fun.

While I generally feel food at festivals is somewhat overpriced (but then I generally think that of prepared food), there is generally at least some vegan stuff on offer here and I usually end up buying some snacks even though you usually spent a lot more time waiting for your turn than actually eating the food.

This year’s loot:

Churros:

Bara:

Churros is a Spanish snack. Basically it’s fried dough with something sweet (sugar, cinnamon sugar, some kind of syrup) or possibly savoury on it. I’ve had them before, since I find random vegan snacks hard to resist at times, but I’m always vaguely disappointed. It’s nice enough, I suppose, but I don’t really have that much of a sweet tooth and after eating one or two bits, it simply becomes more bland sugary food. Which I figured out pretty quickly, but I still occasionally cave when I see a churros stand.

The bara was much more enjoyable, though. It’s a savoury snack from Suriname, also fried. And the ones you get here are properly fresh and crispy, not that soggy, dense microwaved nonsense you get at some surifood places.
Next time I see a churros stand, I’ll promise myself two baras if I can walk past it. One bag of churros is almost the same price of two baras, anyway.

As it was a free festival with a fair bit of sponsoring and ideological and governmental stands trying to educate the public about a whole bunch of very important issues, there were some people handing out free stuff and asking the public to sign petitions. I avoided the petitions (unless they specifically tell me what they intend to do with them, they always seem like a waste of paper to me) and most of the pointless freebies, but still managed to get me a zip-loc baggie containing condoms, safe sex booklets, and a lollipop from the nice people at the local GGD stand and a bag with posters from a nice woman from a local anti-discrimination foundation. (Dutch site)
Now I just have to find places to hang the posters…

For some more good news, the leak in my SIGG bottle seems to have fixed itself after all. I have no idea why it took so much longer this time, but I’m very happy about it.

ETA: Because I really did like Daby Touré, I figured I might as well share some.

Yesterday I stopped by the organic grocer for some fruit and veg and some breakfast things.

Among other things, I bought some of that large chard (or whatever the English word for snijbiet is), some tomatoes, the vine of which had a peculiar yellow glow that fascinated me, and some tiny daikon-like things called ijspegels (icicles), which I thought was just too adorable even though I’m not particularly fond of radish-y foods.

Look!

At the time it seemed like ingredients for a nice salad to accompany whatever soup I was planning to make in my spiffy new 5l pan, but when I got home and played with the internet for a bit, I learned that those large chard leaves can be rather bitter when eaten raw, so I thought it might be nicer stir-fried and I decided the soup could wait.
I defrosted some tempeh, made some gingery-y sauce using shoyu, random spices, and some of the passata I still had left from earlier (and actually added a tiny bit of cocoa. Totally Sinead’s fault. To be honest, it didn’t seem to do much, but I’ll keep at it), and one of the tomatoes, and chucked the whole thing into my frying pan in what I assumed would be the correct order (tempeh, leafy stuff, chopped tomato, sauce) and waited until I figured it’d be done.
Somehow I didn’t expect the darling icicles to go well with this, so I’m just randomly snacking on them.
Not more than two at the time, though. Any more will be too much radish for me.

Result:

I again neglected to prepare a proper grain base and I was too lazy to prepare the leftover pappadums, so it’s a pretty basic meal.
Nice, though.
I’m starting to really appreciate sautéed leafy greens, though I still have to figure out what sauce would be nicest to add. Probably something simpler than what I concocted.

The tempeh seems a little off, however. While it’s pleasant enough when its built-in flavour is hidden by some kind of sauce, it’s not that good on it’s own. I’m not sure if it’s this batch or whether I went wrong with storing it somewhere, but it’s a bit annoying. I have one more part of this batch (I tend to cut it in three and freeze it) and I’ll probably crumble it into some tomato-y sauce.
Might even make some pasta to go with it.
No promises, though.

Because I can’t currently think of tomatoes without thinking of a particular Fry&Laurie sketch, I thought I’d best share the fun:

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to use the word cancie-wancie in front of a patient during my future career. Or the smack-faerie…

Since we were too lazy to attack the pumpkin and didn’t feel like eating spaghetti again, we made some more rice with some more beans.

Ingredients used this time around:

As you can see, we did not use the exact same ingredients as we did previously. We used peas instead of sweet corn, added some supposed-to-be-spicy Alpro tofu strips (yes, I did buy a second container. The lightly spiced one, which probably lacks any kind of spice, seeing as this “spicy” one wasn’t anywhere near too spicy for my pepper-hating boyfriend), and totally forgot about the kale.
Still, it was good.

All mixed up:

This here is my dish, with the rice and beans hidden mostly under a tomato (cut up, visible on the left), not-too-spicy curry spice mix (that yellow-y patch in the middle), curry gewürz (that brown-red sauce on the left. Probably not the best of foods, seeing as the first ingredient is glucose-fructose syrup), and some harissa to make up for the lack of spicy from the tofu strips and the curry spice mix (the bright red blob near the tomato).
There’s still a little bit of rice and beans visible down South, between the tomato and the curry gewürz, to show what my boyfriend’s dish looked like.
Mine was probably tastier, though.

We spent part of the evening watching BSG (I’m only at late s2, so spoil me and die. srsly), and broke out the snack foods after we’d finished our rice and beans. Mostly Shanghai nuts and some chocolate, though I had intended to finally pop some corn and eat it with nutritional yeast. I’ve been told that stuff is good.
Will do so later.

My boyfriend is staying with me at the moment. As he’s a big fan of rice and beans and I’m rather into easy foods, the first meal we cooked for ourselves was, well, rice and beans.
Something more orange would’ve suited the day better, but I was too lazy to make something with that pumpkin I have laying around.

Ingredients:

Guess which supermarket was open on Koninginnedag?

All I did was cook the rice according to the instructions and chuck the rest of the ingredients in the pan. After mixing it up properly and letting things get to the appropriate temperature, we ate it.

Rice and Beans:

Though we both enjoy the basics of this dish, I generally prefer to add some things while my boyfriend thinks anything beyond rice, baked beans, sweet corn, peas, and tomato ketchup is unnecessary and diminishes his enjoyment of the dish.
He didn’t mind me adding some cubes of kale, but didn’t want any of the spices. Lucky for me it’s easy to add some random spice mixes and some harissa to the food on my plate, or it would’ve been rather bland to me.

~-*-~

One of the reasons my boyfriend is visiting at the moment is to attend the wedding of a friend of mine.
We had a great time, and my friend, who is a vegetarian herself and most thoughtful, had made sure there was plenty of vegan food available.
Even one of the cakes was vegan!
And it was a tasty one, too. I don’t know the exact ingredients, but pineapple was very present.
All of the other people, most of whom were omnis, were very cool about veganism as well. Sometimes people can get a little defensive when you merely mention you’re vegan, but not the people at this wedding.

Since there was a lot of left-over food and since my friend and her new husband were leaving for their honeymoon the next day, everyone got to take some food home.
We got to take home the cake (already eaten and very much enjoyed) and some of the brightly coloured coconutty balls. I’m sure she told me what they were called, but I can’t remember it. They’re way tasty, though.

Picture:

Last post before my little trip. I’ll be back next week, with more tasty vegan things and most likely a tl;dr report on the food situation during the trip.

Here a picture of the pre-packaged food I’ll take along to Germany:

Looking at it like this, it seems rather a lot…
And it’s not even the whole thing. There’s still some sammiches I’ll have to make, I have some small containers with soy nuts, raisins, and dried apricots, and I still have to fill that missing Heinz tomato juice-like bottle (not buying those again, ever. There’s still a lingering taste of tomato juice in spite of all the fruit juices added. Not my thing, tomato juice. Oh, and it’s pointless, overpriced and overpackaged food. Even less my thing) with Brinta so I can make me some runny porrige if I mix it with some rice- or soymilk in the missing Tropicana juice bottle.

Maybe some of my carrots look presentable enough to bring along…

Now lets see if I have some jim-jams lying around. Might be nice if I have to share a hotel room. I should also maybe prepare me some dinner before going on home to my parents. And do my dishes. *sigh* I’m terrible at planning trips. It’s a good thing I don’t have to plan the whole damn thing, really. We’d never get anywhere.

ETA: Found jim-jams. And all cool and retro ones, too. Got them from my Gran. One problem, though. The food doesn’t really fit. That kind of sucks. I guess I could chuck some in my clothes bag, but then I won’t be able to use that as a pillow. And I suspect I will want one…
Maybe I should use the meshy side pockets for drinks…

Not a proper meal by a long shot, but a very nice treat.

Tea and stroopwafels, or syrup waffles.
Not sure how accurate that article is. It lists eggs as a possible ingredient, but I’ve never seen that one on the ingredient list. It’s usually something dairy that makes it not vegan.

From above:

Stroopwafels are tasty waffle-y things with syrup in the middle which get even tastier if you heat them up just slightly. By, for example, placing one on your cup of tea.

Like so:

From above again:

All you have to do is leave it on there for a minute or two before you eat it.
Easy!

Like I mentioned above, most stroopwafels have some dairy in it. If the package doesn’t proudly boast about the 100% real butter (I keep wondering why people are so keen to stick that on their packaging in some old-fashioned Delfts Blauw font as if that’s something of which to be very, very proud), there’s probably whey or lactose in it or something. They stick that junk in damn near everything.
However, you should be able to find a vegan and organic version at any organic shop. Usually three varieties are sold, of which two are vegan. A plain one (my favourite) and a hazelnut one. The non-vegan one has honey in it, which probably has something to do with De Rit’s love for bee products.

Finding them outside of the Netherlands isn’t always easy, as it’s a pretty local food. I have, however, come across the organic vegan version I used here at an organic shop in the UK, and someone told me she’d found a maple syrup version in the U.S. (want!), so you might just be able to find some where you live.

In case anyone is interested, the tea I drank was a mint-based basil rosemary mixed herbal tea. Probably not technically tea, strictly speaking, but whatever. It was tasty.

~-*-~

This picture with the orange and blue-going-on-orange lion reminded me very strongly of that Pluizig en Blauw song.
Enough to look if it was on YouTube.
Enough to share it with you all.
Enjoy!

It’s the Dutch version, but there is, of course, an English version. Fuzzy and Blue!
Maybe it’s because I spent half my life listening to a tape with the Dutch version, but I don’t like the English version quite as much. It’s like they’re trying to make Grover do baby-talk.

Last Friday I was running a little late for the train and didn’t feel like I had the time to cook up a proper meal, so I decided to make proper use of my collection of containers and take along some stuff to snack on while traveling so I wouldn’t be all hungry and grumpy because of delayed dinners.

Veggies!

Taking along a healthy snack isn’t that difficult, apparently. It doesn’t even take any planning. Provided one already has everything necessary at hand, of course. If that’s not usually the case, some planning might be needed after all.
While I had originally packed this food as a snack, it was filling enough to reframe it as a meal.
Along with it I drank the roselle juice I got at the Chinese supermarket earlier that evening (going there was part of the reason I was running a little late…), which was quite tasty. I had taken some pictures of the bottle, but they were all flou so I’m not going to bother posting them. Sinead already has the bad pictures of good food covered and I wouldn’t want to step in on her territory. Though to be honest, her pictures aren’t any worse than mine. Certainly not flou.
Her food’s probably better, though.

ETA: The pictures seem to be showing up somewhat wonky. At least when I’m looking at the main page. Is this happening to anyone else?
I don’t remember it being like this, so I’m somewhat confused. I tried editing some pictures to make them smaller, but it made no difference. Does anyone know if a changed layout might have something to do with it?