Hi everyone, just popping in to say I have a separate Instagram account set up for our trip to Japan: it’s @planthappytravel
You don’t need to have an Instagram account yourself to follow along at https://www.instagram.com/planthappytravel/
The same account will be used for any travel we do.
Thanks!
We’re going to Japan! My daughter (age eleven) and I will be heading off in October. For four weeks, we will explore Tokyo as well as traveling in the Tohoku region, through a few prefectures before heading back to Tokyo via Nikko.
I have a separate blog site I’m setting up for this trip, which will focus on the vegan side of traveling to Japan, things to do that are family/child friendly and of course a ton of photos and reports of food, nature, our hotels and more. That blog will be live when I return, with everything posted in one big hit.
I hope my Japan blog will be a useful resource for people around the world who are traveling to Japan, vegan or not, and looking for things to do that don’t often feature in tour brochures!
For now, please follow/visit me on Instagram @veganopoulous (where I’m still posting) and from there I’ll be linking to my Japan holiday Instagram account, when everything for our trip is confirmed.
It’s now also time to say goodbye to this blog. I had a great time here and met some fantastic people through the veg*n blogging scene, both Australian and internationally.
I’ll be turning off commenting now, and won’t be updating. This year I’ve also had pesky technical troubles with comments and the server backend, then images went all funky at one point.
Thank you for reading my blog, whether you followed from the start or only recently. I appreciate all your comments and shares, and wish you all the very best!
Much love and my best wishes,
Faye
xxxxxx
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!
Here’s a look at the various bits, pieces and munchies that have been floating around my kitchen lately. I’m linking up with Fig Jam And Lime Cordial for the monthly In My Kitchen Series. It’s not vegan specific so there are non-vegan blogs participating but anyone can join in and link up.
I visited The Source Bulk Foods in Brunswick to get a few things (raw cacao, cinnamon and nutritional yeast). Aaaaand I walked out with a heap of stuff. Cacao nibs, which I haven’t had in ages; colourful veggie chips (I loved these, the kids didn’t. Argh!) and almond crisps.
In My Kitchen I have a lot of tea. I like tea in pretty packaging, though I don’t often buy it. I found this Madame Flavour mint and lavender tea in the bargain rack section of a supermarket where it was about 80% off the full price:
(No longer In My Kitchen *cough*) I bought some Zebra Dream salted caramel coconut ice cream as a treat for the family when we had an apple pie night. Zebra Dream is Australian made and I’ve yet to try a flavour I don’t like. It tends to disappear quite quickly too…
In My Kitchen are these chocolate bars by Cocoa Rhapsody, based in Melbourne. I received these as a gift for my birthday:
In My Kitchen are some native spices:
I’m cheating a bit here because this isn’t in my kitchen, but I’ve been taking my lunch to the back room of our house (the sunroom) and here’s some of the view. I have a rosemary plant which survives against the odds, no matter how much I look after all the other mixed herbs they end up dying. Not the rosemary:
To participate in the In My Kitchen series this month, head over to Celia’s August In My Kitchen post (veg*n heads-up: there are images of animal products). For this month, leave your blog link in the comments of Celia’s August In My Kitchen post so others can come to your blog!
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!