Looking for Vegan food in Frankston?

Well there is a vegetarian restaurant, but when we found ourselves there on a monday afternoon a few weeks ago and the vegetarian restaurant was closed we were determined to find something to eat ASAP. One of the first places we come across turned out to be pretty great. Dan suggested this noodle place but I was hesitant because I've had a few 'vegetarian dishes' from asian omni places and then discovered small pieces of meat and I know that asian places tend to love chicken stock or fish/oyster sauce. I knew we were on to something good though when I started to say to the guy in this place that I wanted some noodles without chicken stock, fish sauce and he said 'no animal products' someone who speaks my vegan language! You can order from the menu or just choose specific ingredients. Choosing is much more fun as you can choose your favorite vegies, sauce and noodles.

Dan ordered tofu and vegies with chilli-soy sauce combo, and I ordered tofu and vegie noodles with satay sauce and we shared some vegetable spring rolls, it was all tasty and cheap and fast. What more can a girl ask for? I loved that the tofu was cut in to small chunks and absorbed the sauce unlike other noodle places that have bland cubes of tofu.






Noodle Jone
9a Thomspon St Frankston
11-9 (7 days a week)

Away

I doubt anyone cares but I thought I better share that I will be away for a week or two from this blog while I devote most of my free time to getting a bit chunk of my thesis done.

I will hopefully have lots to blog about when I get back.

Accidentally vegan products

The other day I was given e a small pack of Guylian Solitare chocolates as a thank you gift from someone who doesn't know that I'm vegan. I said thanks and then read the ingredients even though I was sure they weren't vegan and discovered that they were actually vegan. There are 3 types of chocolates in the packet: asian dark, aztec gold, and african ebony. They all vary in the percentage of cocoa and taste and I can't pick a favourite but they all taste great. I found a small pack at coles, but would love to get a bigger box as I think they would make great gift for people who like dark chocolate.

It got me thinking how much I love food products that are accidentally vegan. Here are a just a few others that I enjoy:

* Praise fatfree mayo
* Oreos
* Masterfoods traditional tatare sauce
* Masterfoods Bacon flavoured chips
* HomeBrand ginger nuts biscuits
* Cottees thick and rich chocolate topping
* Coles brand strawberry topping
* Arnotts raspberry shortcake biscuits
* Arnotts lemon slice biscuits
* Arnotts nice biscuits
* Hob Nobs biscuits
* Guylian Solitare chocolates
* Eskal scottish shortbread
* Birds Eye Corn Fritters
* Quick set Aeroplane Jelly
* Skittles
* Starburst Jellybeans
* Coles and Audi brand onion rings
* Coles choc mint crunch lollies
* Pez bonbons
* Coles salt and vinegar chips
* Sherbies (lollies)
* Aldi spekulatius biscuits
* Safeway brand garlic bread


What are your favorite accidentally vegan products? Peta has an American list but we really need an Aussie one.

*Edited to add: I will all of the foods to the list above as you leave them in the comments section. So keep up the suggestions. There has been quite a few that I didn't know about.

Canberra

This weekend we celebrated caroline and tim's wedding with a picnic in canberra. There was so much yummy vegan food including dhal, pasta salad, bulgar salad, tofu veg skewers with peanut sauce, avocado sushi rolls, mini onion tarts and much more:


These mini choc cupcakes went very quickly for good reason:

As did these mini lemon and poppyseeds muffins:
I love the vintage bear wedding figure:


After that we had our first attempt at Au Luc. Mr T and I were not impressed with the meals. The lemongrass chicken dish was too spicy for me but everyone else seemed to love it:


The rice paper rolls were ok:
And the Vietnamese crepe was just boring:

Thankfully we decided to give it another go and we got there in just enough time before they closed for lunch at 2.30. We loved the basil chicken:


And I normally hate mock fish , but I loved the lemongrass fish which was mild and light and delicious:

This dish was in the noodle section and was called something like BBQ meat noodles and was not at all what I expected. The noodles were like a weave of noodles and you put a small bit on some lettuce with sauce, the BBQ meat which was covered in peanuts and mint and it was nothing short of amazing.
The shredded tofu rolls were jam packed and yummy:
I also loved their spring rolls which had small amounts of seaweed in them but I forgot to take a pic of them. Au Lac definitely gets my thumbs up.

Tim also introduced us to the accidental vegan zucchini puffs (Kabak) from Kismet:
Caroline shows us an inside look of the yummy bready zucchini goodness:

Spritz cookies

On the weekend I was feeling a lot better and thought I would go to a party and make some cookies to bring. I decided to give my cookie press a try and make spritz cookies. I followed Kittee's recipe minus the food colouring. It took me ages to figure out to use the cookie press and as you probably tell from the pic below some were prettier than others. Now that I have figured it out though it will be easier in the future and I plan on experimenting with the other shapes and with different flavours. The trick is to make sure the dough is just started to peek out of the disk and then press the handle. Also you need to make sure that the cookie press is actually pressed up against the liner on the tray. It properly sounds really simple, but when you have no idea what to it's not that easy.




They tasted fine, but just a little bit simple. So I coated the back of the cookies with melted white chocolate and covered them with chocolate sprinkles (from rishons.) I didn't coat them completely because it would have taken away from the detail in the front (as you can see in the above pic). I think this worked out better too the white chocolate didn't over-power the taste of the biscuits.



Sadly the cookies didn't get to the party because my energy levels were still really low and I ended up having an early night but I found lots of people to happily eat the cookies the next day. Next time I am going to try spritz cookie sandwiches.