Eating Out: Four Pho (Loving Hut, Bun, Roll'd, Cafe O'Mai)

I've mentioned I have been sick quite a few times this year, and a few months ago I was... well... sick. But not housebound sick, so I did what any sensible person would do, and I attempted to cure myself with all of the pho. As I write this, we are having days over 30 decrees Celcius routinely, so the last thing in the world I want to eat is a steaming hot bowl of soup, but back then it was a more soup-friendly weather. I ate all of these in about an eight day period, I think!

First up, Loving Hut. This was on their specials board, so it was good timing that it coincided with my pho-a-thon. There's was full of mock meats (including a few of those weird seafood balls I am not such a fan of), and had a nice broth. (See my other Loving Hut posts here.)



I had a pho from Bun delivered one night. I have had this before, and it is pretty yum. It comes in two separate containers, but here is a photo of when I put it all together in a bowl. It has tofu and vegetables, no mock meats. (See my one previous post about Bun here.)



Roll'd is a chain that has locations in several cities in Australia. I'd had their pho before in the cup size, but this time I of course got it in the bowl size. It has mushroom and tofu, and is fine. It is the least exciting of the phos in this round-up, but it is chain restaurant food so probably not that surprising. (See what else I've eaten at Roll'd here.)



Finally, the pho from Vietnamese cafe Cafe O-Mai. Not surprisingly, it was the best. I have had their Vegan Pho before (with tofu and veggies), so this time I tried their Deluxe Vegan Pho (with 'various types of soy protein'). This was good, it still had tofu and veggies, and it had those beefy TVP-style slices and some yuma-style stuff, but no weird seafood stuff. Yay! (See the other great stuff I've had from Cafe O-Mai here).



Here is a bonus photo of the delicious vegan carrot cake I took home from Cafe O-Mai as well.



Loving Hut - Shop 2/1420 Logan Road, Mount Gravatt, Queensland

Bun - Westfield Garden City, 8 Street Market, Corner Logan Road & Kessels Roads, Upper Mount Gravatt, Brisbane

Cafe O Mai - 15 Cracknell Rd, Annerley, QLD - (07) 3255 9778

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Hold up... who is this?!?! This is Petal's fourth child, and only son, Jed Junior. As you can see, he looks nothing like his mother or his sisters. But we have a pretty good idea of what dad looked like!

Recipe Round-Up: Veganissimo

Shockingly, this is my first proper recipe round-up of Veganissimo by my wonderful friend Leigh. I tested for this book several years ago, and made heaps of stuff, and then I got the beautiful finished copy of it but, like so many of my cookbooks, it languished for a while. But now I am back at it, because it is a great book! I'm going to share a mix of recipes I made during testing (that I can now rate and talk about), and also some of the newer things I've made.

A note, if you are looking for this book, search for Veganissimo by Leigh Drew, as there are a couple of other books with the same name. I guess it is popular!

Baingan Bharta with Tandoori Cauliflower Cheese: I made these two recipes during testing, and they go great together (served with some steamed basmati rice). The Baingan Bharta is an eggplant (both mashed and chooped) and tomato based stew, with lots of seasoning. I found my eggplant did take a but longer to bake than the recipe, so make allowances for eggplant size and oven temperament. I left out the chili and the cayenne with this. It went well with the tandoori cauliflower cheese, which was amazing! The original tester recipe used whole spices, but the published one uses ground to make it super easy. This makes a big amount, but you won't be sorry.
Rating: Baingan Bharta :), Tandoori Cauliflower Cheese :D



Chocolate Raspberry Muffins: This is another one I made during testing, but have made again since because they are so good! The muffin batter has crushed frozen raspberries in it (rather than finely chopping them, I found that if you put them in a freezer bag and use something to hit it with they crush up super fast). The best part about these muffins is the middle - they have a couple of chunks of dark chocolate and some raspberry jam baked into the middle. If you eat them when they are still a bit warm, you just get this amazing burst of melted chocolate goodness! But they are a bit fragile, so treat them gently until you shove them in your face hole!
Rating: :D



Overnight Breakfast Cups: I made this recipe quite recently, for a pre-work breakfast. The recipe is designed to make cute little cups - six cups based on 2 cups of rolled oats (or quinoa if you'd prefer, but I used oats). Of course, I halved the recipe to make one nice big bowl! But geez, it was filling. The oats are soaked with milk (I used oat), granny smith (meant to be grated but I seriously hate grating apple so I just finely chopped it) and some dried fruit. The dried fruit called for is cranberries and goji berries. I used some dried mulberries instead of the goji berries as I had some kicking around that I needed to use up. The recipe tops the cups with banana and peanut butter before serving. I used these on my bowl, but also added some fresh blueberries and pepitas.
Rating: :)



Mozzarella: Leigh has several cheese recipes in here, but my star is the mozzarella. This takes a bit of time, but is very easy. It uses agar agar to set, which means no yucky coconut oil (it uses canola oil instead), and it is based on soy yoghurt. It sets up beautifully, is very sliceable, and as you can see makes an amazing melted grilled cheese sandwich.
Rating: :D





Reuben Sandwiches: I do love a Reuben, and I love Leigh's take on them. This recipe does require a few components to be made ahead of time - cheese sauce, vegan bacon, and thousand-island style sauce. I took a couple of short-cuts, using a premade cheese sauce mix and making a simple thousand island by mixing mayo, ketchup, and gherkin relish. For the bacon, I used the Baked Seitan Bacon recipe. This is cool, because it involves making the seitan mix with bacon marinade, so the flavour is all the way through. After cooking and cooling, you slice and cool it. What I really loved about this was the sauerkraut, which is sauteed with caramelised onions. It was a really nice take on a reuben!
Rating: Reuben :D, Seitan Bacon :)



Waldorf and Caesar Salad Remix: This was a great, fresh salad with a bunch of lovely flavours and textures. I made a half recipe to serve one hungry me. Again, this does involve a couple of other recipes - Vegan Bacon and Avocado and White Bean Dressing. For this bacon, I made the tempeh bacon. There is a bacon marinade in the book that is unlike anything I've seen - it involves making a spiced soy sauce and then using that, and it was amazing. You can use it on tempeh, tofu, kale, or other vegetables, but of course I chose tempeh. IT WAS AMAZING. The avocado and white bean dressing is very tangy and quite thick, on its own it is great on sandwiches. For this recipe, it is then blended up with some kalamata olives. Once I had done this, it was almost too thick, so I had to thin it with some water. The salad is a mix of cos, granny smith, tempeh bacon, the olive avocado bean dressing, capers, croutons (I used rye bread instead of sourdough), and pecans (which I used instead of walnuts) candied with agave syrup and garam masala.
Rating: Salad :), Avocado and White Bean Dressing :), Tempeh Bacon :D



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Holly is a sweet black and white girl with a lovely blaze and a funny personality. Yes, we named all if Petal's baby girls after plants!

Beltane 2019

See this post for the meaning of the sabbats for me, and see my food celebrations of the other sabbats this year here.

Beltane (31st October - 1st November, 2019)

Beltane is one of the major sabbats of the year, the point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, the peak of spring. Traditionally, it has always been one of my favourite holidays, I used to love spring. However now, when Brisbane is just summer about 80% of the year, I find that I now yearn for cooler months. In the Southern Hemisphere, Beltane falls on what is culturally Halloween (which has origins in the sabbat Samhain in the Northern Hemisphere, which is on the 31st of October). Halloween has become a little more popular in Australia every year. So it is a bit of mind trip celebrating Beltane while a lot of Halloween stuff is going on!

My way of marking the sabbats and the wheel of the year is through food, so this is what I did.

Basic Creamy Garlic Sauce from The Everyday Vegan by Dreena Burton: Beltane food is based on spring, which means lots of spring vegetables. Also baby sheep, but they are not food, they are friends! Don't eat them ever. I made this spring based pasta dish, using some fresh vegan chickpea linguine, roasted asparagus, peas, portobello mushrooms (save sheep, eat a mushroom), and this basic creamy garlic sauce. I made half batch of the sauce, which is based on roasted garlic. It uses a lot of garlic, and my tummy no longer handles large amounts of cooked garlic (and no raw garlic at all), so I did decrease the amount down to six cloves. It is a simple sauce once the garlic is roasted and pureed. I didn't have any fresh herbs, so I used some dried thyme, and I used nutritional yeast instead of vegan parmesan. It was tasty, though I don't know that I would call it creamy? Still, a nice spring based pasta dish.
Rating: :)



'Honey' Mustard Vinaigrette from Eat, Drink, & Be Vegan by Dreena Burton: Honey is another traditional food of Beltane, but honey belongs to bees, not to me. I made a lovely spring salad with this dressing, which uses agave instead of honey. I made a third of a recipe, for one salad, and used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic. I also used a mix of water with a pinch of guar gum instead of the oil, not because I think oil is bad, but because oily dressings can make me feel a bit ill. I tossed it through a salad of baby spinach, cherry tomatoes, and roasted asparagus.
Rating: :)





Raisin Bannocks from Wholegrain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes: Oatcakes known as bannocks are also traditional for Beltane. This recipe uses a blend of oat, spelt, barley flour, and pastry flour. I halved the recipe to make two bannocks rather than four, and baked them in my cute 10 cm springform cake tins. These are very dense little cakes, and not too sweet, making them excellent for any time of day. I had one fresh with a cup of tea. The second one I had the next day, sliced, lightly toasted, and spread with a smidge of Nuttelex and strawberry jam.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



This little sweetie is Pansy, who is hanging out in their tunnel in this photo. I have to confess, Pansy is my favourite. She is a chonky little floof of black and white. She has a cute little white spot on her butt, which you can kind of see here.

Eating Out: Carina Leagues Club

Typically, your local leagues club isn't a place you'd think would have anything for a vegan to eat. Things are changing, slowly, but more places are starting to offer options. Still, not necessarily somewhere I would go unless I had to for something else. A few months ago, I had to go to Carina Leagues Club for a work thing. One thing I did know about them was that they had vegan doughnuts - I saw them advertising them as I drove past once and that is a bad thing to distract a vegan driver with! The non-vegans at work had platters of things like party pies and mini quiches and what not. But myself and another mostly vegan vet were given their standard vegan menu to order off.

Their are only three vegan options on the menu, and they are pretty much what you'd expect. The other vet picked the Tofu Stir-fry, which comes with a choice of rice or rice noodles. Why did I not pick this one? Because it had a chilli sauce all over it. She said it was very good.



Deprived of tofu, I went with the Mushroom and Asparagus Risotto with pumpkin and no parmesan for vegans. Yeah, risotto. It was actually not bad. I didn't eat all of it, because I had already had dinner a couple of hours earlier (because I really didn't trust that I would get much at all). I wanted to take my leftovers home, but they said that they legally weren't allowed to do that. Ugh. Anyway, I just went to my car and grabbed a container and put it in there myself and took it home anyway. I'm not going to let a whole bunch of food go to waste. Now, I realised that I was very silly and forgot to take a photo of it! So please enjoy this photo of leftovers that I took for lunch the next day. I added the spinach and the peas. Imagine the risotto on a nice plate, with a big wedge of pumpkin on it.



Dessert for everyone was doughnuts. And it turns out that they were all vegan doughnuts, so I ate away! They were really good. I tucked a couple up in a napkin and also took them home illegally as well. I am a rebel!



If you are wondering, the third vegan option on the menu is a Roasted Pumpkin Salad (minus the ricotta to make it vegan). So the vegan food options are solid, but basic. But the doughnuts are very fun! There are way better places to go, I wouldn't go to eat there just for the sake of going there, but if you ever need to go there for a work or family or other event, rest assured you will at least be satisfied.

Carina Leages Club - 1390 Creek Rd, Carina, QLD

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Meet Tulip, one of Petal's kittens. Tulip is a sweet little tuxedo floof. She loves sleeping in this box of syringes in pharmacy. Very comfortable, she says!

Recipe Round-Up: Vegan Yum Yum

One day I was gifted with the book Vegan Yum Yum by a friend who was clearing out some of cookbooks. This book, by Lauren Ulm, is a treasure trove of lovely recipes. I've only posted once briefly about it before, this is the first round up I've done for it on the blog.

Broccoli Almond Sweet and Sour Tofu: I am not always a fan of sweet and sour, I find a lot of the sauces tend to be too sweet. This one, however, was not. It was nice and tangy, with a hint of sweetness. The recipe calls for '1 tub extra firm tofu, pressed', with no weight given. I used a 375 g block of tofu (the kind that is vacuum packed in the fridge, rather than in a tub). The tofu is coated and fried, then coated in the sauce and before serving with steamed broccoli (and jasmine rice). This recipe does use a few pots and pans, but overall comes together quickly.
Rating: :)



Dal Makhini: This is a really simple but tasty dish, as daal/dal/dhal/dahl (which one?) tends to be. It is a comfort food sort of dish. This uses masoor dal, or you can use green lentils (which I did). I soaked my lentils first to shorten cooking time a bit. There are tomatoes and several spices in this, and it also has a cashew cream mixed through and then drizzled on as well. Served over some roasted cauliflower and rice, I got three servings.
Rating: :)



Italian Rice and Beans: This is a simple recipe but it is oh so delicious! Rice, dried herbs of choice, beans, spinach, and some sundried tomatoes and pine nuts. Plus some balsamic vinegar and, the magic ingredient, some lemon zest. I don't always enjoy zest, but it is fantastic in this. This recipe says it serves 2-3, which is accurate. I served it with some salad.
Rating: :D



Rainbow Rice and Beans: Another winner, this book knows how to do some good rice and beans. Peas, carrots, and corn bring some colour, black beans bring the protein, plus several spices and a mix of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce (there's a recipe for this in the book if you can't find a vegan one to buy). It says it makes two huge servings, and they weren't lying - they are definitely big!
Rating: :D



Soy-Mirin Tofu with Snow Peas and Peanut Sauce: Tofu and peanut sauce? Make me swoon! I also love mirin. The peanut sauce is simple but delicious, with the option to use coconut milk or coconut water as the liquid - I used coconut water and it made it was lovely. The tofu is cooked and then glazed with a soy sauce and mirin mixture. This is served over brown rice, and I also served it over some baby spinach.
Rating: :D



Tahini Lemon Rice and Beans: Yes, more rice and beans. They are endlessly versatile! This recipe says it makes two serves, but I got four out of it. The sauce itself is very tangy, but I didn't get much of a lemon flavour from it. Perhaps decrease the vinegar and soy sauce in it, or increase the lemon juice, to make that flavour come through more. This rice is mixed with black beans, seitan (it was meant to be 6 oz but I only used 2 oz as I had a teeny bit left over after another recipe), kale (I used spinach), and carrot.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photos of the Post



A couple of weeks ago, we had a mumma and kittens surrendered to us at work for rehoming. I'll be introducing them to you over the next several posts. But firstly, here is the sweet mumma. We named her Petal. She is so beautiful and sweet at lovely! And while we now have homes lined up for all of them, Petal was the first to be reserved! It is so rare that mumma is the first to get a home, most people are just in it for the kittens. So this was lovely. She's going to an amazing home where she will be very loved.

Midweek Munchies

More random things.

A while ago I spoke about how Cha Time, a bubble tea place, had soy milk options now. I had tried a strawberry milk tea with red beans, very nice. But my favourite flavour of bubble tea is taro milk tea with pearls. A lot of places have the taro already pre-mixed with cows milk, but Cha Time can mix it with the soy milk. I was excited. Then I was sad. I think maybe they didn't mix it well? It was very grainy and didn't have that wonderful cookie flavour that I associate with taro milk tea. In the future, I'll stick to my strawberry.



Popping back to those blessed frosty days of winter, oh how I miss them. And this lovely bowl of pumpkin soup topped with bacon bits.



When I am exhausted or sick or overwhelmed, instead of cooking I might get a delivery from my trusty nearby Superoll. As always, I get the Tofu Hustle, with tofu, mushrooms, and vegetables in a mushroom sauce. It never fails me.



Alpro yoghurt is here in Australia! And it isn't coconut! This is very exciting! I enjoyed this mango flavoured almond yoghurt, and they also have a strawberry almond yoghurt that was good.



Behold, this silly drink. I drank it when I was sick, a lot of the above photos were from one of the many times this year I have been sick. I had hoped it would heal me. It did not, but it was fun.



I think I've mentioned that I've been eating a lot of tofu scramble for lunch lately. This was some leftover scramble from a previous dinner, mixed with cheese sauce and served with toasted olive and thyme sourdough and avocado.



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Poor Dim Sim, it is still often too hot and/or there is too much smoke haze (because Australia is on fire at the moment) for her to be out in the cat max as often as she'd like. But here is a photo from one of the times she has been able to go out and enjoy the sun.

Eating Out: Loving Hut Brisbane

It's been a while since I've posted about Loving Hut in Brisbane, which in part is because it has been a while since I've been there. I used to eat there all the time, I worked my way through most of the menu, but then I needed a bit of a change. With so many other vegan and vegan friendly places popping up all over, it is only natural that I would need to branch out and explore. Lately, however, I have been in the vicinity with limited time and in need of a yummy lunch, so Loving Hut has been back on my radar. You can see some previous posts about Loving Hut visits here.

My favourite of the mains is the Beijing Black Bean, which has beefy style TVP strips in a delicious savoury sauce. Also in this photo you can see the Salt and Pepper Mushroom, which is a whole field mushroom battered and fried in salt and pepper style. The S&P can vary, but thankfully this was a good one. And I love the pickles they serve it with.



The Summer Rolls are probably my favourite thing on the menu. They are so light and delicious, served with a hoisin sauce.



They have occasional specials, like this Vermicelli Salad. I got the Gluten Free version, not because I am gluten free but because the gluten free version came with tofu and I will always choose tofu. This was great for lunch on a hot day.



Sometimes, you just need potatoes. They serve potato wedges with tartare sauce. But I must remember not to get these again. The wedges were not very well cooked, and I needed lots more sauce.



Finally, their Steamed BBQ Buns. I love these! There's are on the smaller side, but still have lots of flavour. For some reason they serve them with sweet chilli sauce, which seems like a weird combination even if I did like spicy stuff. So I skip that and just enjoy the buns.



Loving Hut - Shop 2/1420 Logan Road, Mount Gravatt, Queensland

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post