Things I Love Thursday
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!
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