Well now Marilla, this a bit embarrassing. I haven’t posted in a few months despite a goal to post once or twice a week. The truth is that I kinda don’t really want to maintain the blog anymore. Mostly because I’m just too busy and have lost interest and my time and energy is focused elsewhere. As much as I love going out to eat, blogging those meals was a bit of a chore because I’d take the big camera which would get a bit annoying and too heavy! Lately I’ve just been using my phone and posting on Instagram at @veganopoulous  And it seems like Instagram is where it’s at, with finding out about new cafes or products or whatever.

I’ll leave the blog up but for now I’ll go on a bit of a holiday (away from the blog I mean), and if there’s something big I want to blog about, like my hope-I-can-go trip to Japan next year some time, then that will be included here.

Feel free to check out my account @veganopoulous on Instagram in the meantime!

Thanks to everyone for reading, following, commenting and sharing my recipes and posts. Melbourne is such a brilliant place to enjoy vegan food and events and I’ll still be posting about that on Instagram. You don’t need to have an Instagram account to look at people’s photos in your browser, and if you have an Instagram account you can follow whoever you like, without having to post anything yourself (keep your account private if you want). It’s my preferred way of keeping up with what’s going on in vegan land, and posting photos of my cat.

xxxxxxoooooo

I’m still sticking to (as close as possible) whole foods and after seeing a plant based dietitian, I’m following guidelines that allow me to get in all my nutritional goodness needs through whole foods, though I do take a B12 supplement. Lately I’m loving breakfast, which is porridge made with a banana, soy milk, chia seed (if I’m using steel cut oats I soak them in the soy milk overnight with the chia), then top it with fruit, walnuts and some seeds like hemp or pumpkin seed. This fills me up for hours:

I saw a random YouTube video about making big size nori parcels. I had images of mine turning out just as pretty but my folding skills need a lot of work because they looked horrible and misshapen (conveniently not in the photo):

I bought some buckwheat pasta spirals from The Source Bulk Foods in Brunswick and made a quick bowl with mushroom, rocket, cherry tomato and sundried tomato with Italian herbs. We say rocket, other places say aragula. I think calling it rocket rocks, because of Def Leppard and all (and yes I break that song out when I prepare food with rocket, yeah-eh). Did you know Phil Collen from Def Leppard is vegan? And Rikki Rockett (another Rockett, yeah-eh!) of Poison fame is vegan too? Some silly trivia that will hopefully win you a random million bucks one day on a radio quiz:

A ginger tofu orange salad with Healthy Stuff:

So in my last What I Ate post I probably said something sanctimonious about how at home I’m (mostly) whole foods eatin’ without oil/salt/added sugars but that I wouldn’t apply that to going out once in a while because that would be utterly boring and tragical for me, as Anne Shirley would say. I had a voucher for a free burger from Lord of the Fries so I shared this one with family. It tasted good, as I think all LotF burgers do in that vegan fast food sense, but I think eating whole foods/SOS free now has kinda made me far more likely to feel a bit sick when I have something salty and greasy:

I’m still preparing meals in advance so I can always have something available but this was a day where I ran out of food and hadn’t prepared. I used the last of my oil free hummus with truss tomatoes and some zaatar mixed in. I couldn’t bring myself to cut up carrot sticks. I know I know, healthy beta carotene food and all. But eating carrot sticks makes me feel like I’m on a diet. Gross feedbag shot:

And here’s the last of some red lentil smoky chili I made with some brown-red rice blend mixed in. AND A PHOTO BOMBER:

I’ve just bought the Smith & Daughters new cookbook and have been holed up in the kitchen for the past 24 hours, so my next What I Ate will likely feature quite a bit of that!

Hi everyone, I’ve just added a new sidebar to my blog called Melbourne Events. Here I’ll list upcoming events which may be of interest to vegans and plant based folk: things like meetups, rallies, cooking classes and so on. I’ll link them to an information source, like a Facebook event page, so you can get more information.

Enjoy!