My friend Sarah was recently in Melbourne where she discovered two
brands of white vegan chocolate -- Sweet Williams which is made from
soy beans and Bonvita which is made from Rice Milk. The good
news is one of the brands is soon to be available here in New Zealand!

Some of you may be familiar with Sweet Williams chocolate -- it is vegan and
is different to the usual vegan chocolate, it is more similar to non-vegan dairy chocolate and comes in a variety of flavours.

Here are the list of stores that should have Sweet William White Delight in stock at the end of May:

Huckleberries (2x stores)
Harvest Wholefoods Grey Lynn
I E Produce Takapuna
East West Organics
Natural Health Company, Highland Park
Ceres, Ellerslie
Naturally Organic, Albany
Natures Storeroom, Orewa
All the Health 2000 Stores
Lifesense Chain of stores
Hardy's Healthy Living stores

All the organic and health stores initially. Then rolling out to the leading New World
stores and the better Foodtown / Woolworths / Countdown stores. I am so excited!

My mother was in town last week, and at my request brought up a box of fruit for me -- she lives in Gisborne where you can get bulk amounts of super fresh and tasty fruit for cheap (or free!). In the box was feijoas, apples and pears, and also a bag of walnuts! I haven't had walnuts in their shells for years! And feijoas and pears aren't the type of fruit I'd normally buy even though I love feijoas so it's been great having a whole box of them to snack on. It just seems weird to pay for something that I used to get for free, in such large amounts I'd never be able to eat them all!

So we've been busy smashing open the walnuts and snacking on fruit -- this morning for breakfast I made a fruit salad of apple, pear, banana, orange and some Kingland mango soy yoghurt. So delicious and a refreshing change from the usual peanut butter or marmite or hummus on toast!

I have decided that when I buy a house, it needs to have a backyard big enough for the following:

- Walnut tree
- Avocado tree
- Feijoa tree
- Tamarillo tree
- Lemon tree
- Lime tree
- Passionfruit vines
- Blueberries
- And probably a whole lot more!

It may seem a bit ambitious, but if I buy somewhere that has the space I promise that I will water them and look after them! It has always been a dream of mine to live somewhere with enough space to have a little orchard. It seems so romantic, waking up in the morning and wandering around the trees collecting fruit while my cats run around in the morning sun. And I miss living in Gisborne and in houses that have fruit trees in the backyard and where everyone else you know also does so you end up giving away bags and bags of fruit and also receiving bags of fruit from other people!

I also want to mention I've been to Casa del Gelato a few more times and have tried the lime flavour and passionfruit flavour. So far they've all been really good, but my favourites are cherry and lime. Last night I came home from a late meeting and Fiona said there was a surprise for me in the freezer -- some cherry gelato! It was a struggle to eat it since Fiona and I had been to Renkon on Ponsonby Road for dinner -- I always have the spicy miso vegies and tofu on rice -- so good, and so filling, all of their servings are huge and around $10 so it's great value.

What kind of trees or fruit do you grow or would like to grow? Have you discovered a new cafe or restaurant? Let me know in the comments!

Renkon Express
175 Ponsonby Road
Ponsonby
Auckland
09 376 3090

For my birthday I was lucky enough to get this bag:

From Bourgeois Boheme, and these shoes:

From No Sweat Apparel, which are not only vegan, but also sweat shop free, which is really important.

I've found that it is quite difficult to get good vegan shoes and bags! Just because I don't want to wear leather, it doesn't mean I want to wear shoes that are ugly or bad quality!  I'm also looking for some more shoes -- perhaps some more sneakers like the vegan ones Macbeth do, or perhaps Stella McCartney's range for Adidas.  I'm also after some more dressier type shoes, so have been looking at vegetarian-shoes.co.uk and Moo Shoes. I'm looking for boots and perhaps shoes with a very small heel, so if you see anything online, please let me know!

The vegan actress Natalie Portman even has her own range of vegan shoes out now, but they're not quite the type of shoes I'm after -- I doubt I could walk in heels! But they are available here if it sounds like your kind of thing.  And also have a look at Stella McCartney's shoe range out under her own brand here.

Another place that does a great line of vegan bags is Matt & Nat -- they do both women's and men's bags, although I do prefer the men's! Have a look for yourself at their site.

I'm always interested in hearing about places that do good looking and well made vegan shoes and bags, so please leave a comment if you know of anywhere else! 

My girlfriend
Lately she's been spending time in the weekends cooking lots of food so we have good food to eat during the week, since we're often both too busy to make a proper lunch or cook a good dinner. One of my favourite things she's been doing is roasting a bunch of vegies such as pumpkin and kumara with red onion and whole heads of garlic. We then use the vegies during the week to make salads for lunch or dinner -- so good! If you do this, try chopping up some roast vegies and onion, mixing them with a can of chickpeas or some fried tempeh, raw tomato and raw spinach leaves. Make a dressing by mixing chopped sundried tomato, some of the roast garlic, balsamic vinegar, oil from the sundried tomatoes, lemon juice -- anything you feel like! It's so versatile and so delicious. When roasting the vegies you can roast them plain or experiment by adding some herbs.

Birthdays
It was my birthday not too long ago, and I had lots of great food! On my birthday, Fiona and I went to Raw Power for brunch, it was amazing. I had the scrambled tofu, and she had the tofu burger. We both had freshly made juice which was probably the highlight of my day, I loved it so much! I can't quite remember what was in it apart from blueberries, but I really want to have it again! I couldn't stop talking about it for hours, ha ha. For dinner we went to Devenport and bought some hot chips and went up North Head to eat them, I really like doing things like that, it's kind of like an easy picnic.

A couple of days later I had a birthday dinner at Mexicali downtown, which is somewhat like Subway but with good mexican food and happens to be one of my favourite places to go for food with a groups of people. I had what I always have -- the corn tacos with beans, vegies, etc. If you are vegan, be careful when getting beans as only the black beans are vegan as the refried beans contain some kind of animal product or meat. This makes me a little bit sad, because I love refried beans! I also had a margarita and some chilli beer! Apparently my friends and I are the only ones who ever order the chilli beer which is a shame because it's so good and isn't really that hot -- everyone should try it!

My friend Kat gave me a great present for my birthday, which was a bag full of vegan and gluten-free snacks! There were two bags of the cumin snacks I like (I can't remember what they're called though! And I think I only have them when she buys them for me), some Garden of Eatin blue corn tortilla chips, Freedom chickpea chips (so so good) some Green & Blacks organic chocolate with spices and orange (once again, this is amazing chocolate and omg looking at their site now they do chocolate with cherry), and some Pussy Pucker Pot lip balm in Chocolate Nipple Ripple!

Casa del Gelato
This is a new ice cream parlour that's opened on Ponsonby road, but half of them are vegan! It's not actually ice cream, it's perhaps a cross between and ice cream and a sorbet. Nice and creamy but not too icy or sugary. I went there for the first time a couple of nights ago and fell in love. I had the cherry flavour which was a bit intense on the first taste, but after a couple of spoonfuls it was the best thing ever. Off the top of my head, some of the other vegan flavours are passionfruit (which looked really good), papaya, strawberry, bilberry, cointreu. Fiona had tiramisu, which is one of the non-vegan flavours, but she said it was really well made and tasted great and that it even had pieces of real tiramisu in it. Everything is made fresh on site, every day, and is $4 a scoop. I didn't ask about the cones though, so if you go there you'll either want to have it in a bowl or find out if the cones are vegan / gluten-free. It's my new favourite discovery and I just hope that it lasts through the winter as it will be a great place to hang out at in the summer time.

Angel Food rich coconut fudge
Justine gave me some of this for my birthday! They also do a lot of other thigns I want to check out, like the marshmellows! They make vegan and gluten-free snacks and confectionery, so check them out at www.angelfood.co.nz.

Blueberries
I think I could eat a punnet of them a day!

What are you loving at the moment? Leave me a comment and let me know! 

Raw Power Cafe
Floor 1 10 Vulcan Lane
Auckland
09 303 3624

Mexicali Fresh
137 Quay Street
Auckland Central
09 307 2419

Mexicali Fresh
29-35 Nuffield Street
Newmarket
09 522 0990

Casa del Gelato
288 Ponsonby Road
Ponsonby
09 378 8457

I haven't had a chance to write much for this site lately -- have been busy moving house, working, etc. The good news is that I now live close to a great fruit & vegie store, as well as walking distance to Harvest Wholefoods and Mamata bakery. Yesterday morning Fiona and I decided we wanted to buy spelt bagels to make for breakfast, so walked to Mamata. Unfortunately it turns out they only make the spelt bagels on Saturdays, so we stayed there and had coffee and chocolate cake for breakfast! We were sensible enough to buy a loaf of spelt bread to bring home though, which we had for lunch. For dinner I had more caffeine and more chocolate! I love the Whittakers dark chocolate peanut slabs -- they're so good!

I've eaten a whole bunch of other great food lately and have had some success in making sundried tomato bread, so I'll update again as soon as I can.

Here are two articles I've come across lately that have been interesting, let me know if you come across anything else you think I'd be interested in.

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler via the New York Times:
Mark Bittman discusses how a cow's stomach was meant to digest grass not grains as well as the destruction of land to make room for cattle.

Carnivore sex off the menu via stuff.co.nz:
Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is vegan-, as in “vegansexual.” 157 vegans and vegetarians were polled on attitudes about eating meat
to keeping pets to wearing possum fur to, yes, “cruelty-free sex” — that is, “rejecting meat eaters as intimate partners.”

This morning I had a meeting over breakfast at Triniti Of Silver in Mt Albert Auckland. They have a great variety of vegetarian food, a lot of which is vegan or can be made vegan. They're really accomodating if you explain that you are vegan or gluten-free, and the owners are the kind of people who are just so genuinely nice. I used to go there quite a bit, but haven't had the chance to much lately, so have been looking forward to my weekly Thursday morning breakfast meetings there!

Today I had the Vegetarian Trio -- it is usually made up of hash browns with herb oil, mushrooms, eggs and sundried tomato toast; I asked for no egg and gluten-free bread instead of the sundried tomato bread. They gave me avocado in place of the egg which was really nice! It was really delicious, and I am still full now even though it's past lunch time! I also had a soy flat white, which is always good.

If you haven't been to Triniti Of Silver, I recommend dropping by for brunch one day -- they do lunch as well as breakfast, but no matter what time of the day I go there I always have breakfast food -- I always go for the cooked breakfast whenever I go to cafes! At Triniti Of Silver I used to get the gluten-free toast with hummus (that they make on site), tomato and red capsicum pesto, but my favourite is now the Vegetarian Trio. They're pretty busy on the weekends, but they have multiple areas -- a outdoor smoking area out the front, a covered outdoor non-smoking area at the side and about three inside areas -- some of which are child friendly and some child free -- basically, no matter how busy it is, you should be able to find a suitable spot and enjoy a nice brunch and coffee served by really friendly and nice staff.

While I was there, I was thinking about how there isn't any fancier types of gluten-free bread, at least not that I'm aware of. While I love my Venerdi Country Style Six Grain, I wish that there was somewhere that made say gluten-free vegan sundried tomato bread and sold it to cafes to use or even through the supermarkets. Maybe this is a big ask! Does anyone out there know of anything available? I think I will experiment and make my own fancy cafe style breads using my breadmaker -- I'll let you know how it goes!

Triniti Of Silver
911 New North Road
Mt Albert
Auckland
Phone 09 815 8591

Today is one of those working from home days, which I love! So I was lucky enough to be able to eat my lunch in the sunshine in my backyard with my beautiful cats for company. Lunch was a bean salad, made for me by my amazing girlfriend! It was made from black eyed beans, tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes and coriander, both of which we grew in our vegie garden (which is my current obsession). It was left over from dinner last night which was the bean salad and corn fritters. I really am spoiled! I even managed to take some photos today:

These are two of my many cats, Poti and Lea, napping in the shade. How cute.

I decided to dust off my juicer and start making juice again and am really glad I did! For breakfast this morning I had apple, carrot and ginger juice, yesterday morning I had my absolute favourite which is apple, kiwifruit, lime, ginger and banana! I wish I could make juice for breakfast every morning but it's a bit of a hassle since it takes quite some time to cut up the fruit, juice it and then clean the juicer. Maybe if I had a fancier juicer it would be a lot easier? I might make smoothies for breakfast on the days I have work since that seems like it would take less time.

Apple, carrot and ginger juice
Cut up two apples, four medium to large sized carrots and a chunk of ginger -- use as much or as little ginger as you like, but I like the taste and use quite a bit. Then run it all through the juicer!

Apple, kiwifruit, lime, ginger and banana juice
Cut up two apples, three or four kiwifruit, peel and cut half to one lime, a chunk of ginger (again, up to you how much you use) and run it through the juicer. Then transfer the juice to a blender and blend with the banana. This juice is so tasty and refreshing! I'd have this every day if I could!

When making juice there aren't any rules, just use what you feel like! I do find that I usually start with a base of a couple of apples as they provide quite a bit of juice, whether I'm making a fruit juice or a vegie juice. I also like adding lime or ginger or both to most juices I make, it just adds a little bit of zing to the juice, but that may just be my personal taste!

When I was buying the fruit and vegies for juicing, I also discovered Taro chips! They were so good! They also make banana chips which I'm not really a fan of, and kumera chips which I will definitely get next time! Track them down if you're in New Zealand -- they are made by Pika's Own:

PO Box 43051, Mangere, Auckland
11 Quennell Ave, Mangere, Auckland
021 186 6895
epskelton@xtra.co.nz

Episode 3 of the Meat Free Media podcast, "The V Word" is out now. The podcast comes out once a month and discusses animal rights and vegan related issues in New Zealand.

The podcast is available on Meat Free Media's website or if you've already subscribed via iTunes.

This month on The V Word, their topic of the month is battery farming and the increase in attention it's received in the media lately.

They also cover news to do with the current Japanese whale hunt, the proposed code of conduct regarding Kangaroos in Australia, look at vegan treats from Baker's Delight, and take look back over 20 years to SAFE's first office.

They also cover (among other things):

• The Japanese Whale Hunt

• Vegan treats available at Baker's Delight

• The Australian proposed Code of Conduct regarding Kangaroos

• Heroes and Zeroes - Who stands out as a bastion of vegan goodness, and who just doesn't cut the mustard.