Crete, Part I – The B&B

A couple of weeks ago, I went on holiday to Crete. The photos have been on Flickr for a while now, but I’d still like to post about this and give a little more information. I’m going to split the post in parts so it won’t be one huge list of photos of every single thing I ate there – and I’d like to start with the B&B. If I seem a bit overly enthusiastic and you think I’m exaggerating my glorification of this holiday, blame the fact that I’ve been back at school for two weeks now and my fingers pretty much froze off today because it’s so damn cold here, back in the Netherlands. Anyway. This was the first time went to Greece and when we were planning the trip, I was happy to know that I’d be staying at a vegetarian Bed & Breakfast. If it turned out the country wasn’t that vegan-friendly and vegetable dishes would be impossible to get in restaurants, I would at least be able to eat at breakfast. Of course I quickly discovered that this wasn’t a problem at all and that the vegan food in the restaurants was excellent, but that’s for a later post. The stay at the B&B, called The Green Terrace, was truly amazing. The location, the views, the comfort, the hospitality and, of course, the food. I’ll start with that. The lovely couple who own the B&B are English, which is visible in the breakfast they serve. There was a variety of things to choose from, including a nice cooked breakfast.

There was fresh fruit there every morning and I particularly loved these grapes. They were so big and tasty.

And fresh orange juice. As you can see, the weather was lovely this day and we were able to have breakfast outside on the terrace.

This is the cooked breakfast I mentioned, consisting of tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans on toast. The mushrooms were my favorite, the taste and texture were so good. It’s a very filling breakfast so I didn’t have it every morning, but I sometimes long for it now. haha. Go look at this picture in full size, seriously.

And then there was always toast, in this case with strawberry preserves. There were also a few different kinds of cereal to choose from, with soyamilk. Or cow’s milk if you wanted to, and honey, but why would you? Though it’s a Bed & Breakfast, if you want, it’s possible to have dinner there too. The owners, the Cavanaghs, used to run a catering company and I was really interested in the food that they’d serve. We had two meals there. Unfortunately it was evening then and the light wasn’t as good as it was in the morning outside, but I think the photos are good enough to give you an impression of the meals.

First course: Mushroom and almond soup. I loved this, it was nice and creamy and had a ‘warm’ flavour to it.

Teriyaki pasta with two different salads – I don’t remember exactly what was in them, but one was with eggplant and ginger and the other with cucumber.

Dessert: THREE pieces of chocolate cake with a coffee sauce. I loved this and I loved how it was really big while I was actually already quite full and I totally didn’t mind.

There was butter for the non-vegans, but there was always vegan margarine at the ready in a nice little bowl.

A couple days later, we had dinner there again. This time the starter consisted of soy-sautéed mushrooms, cumin bleenies and red bell pepper. I liked the bleenies, I had never had those before. This was quite filling for a first course alone, I think less of it would’ve been enough.

Then the main course: pasta (are these linguine? I think so) with ouzo sauce and tapenade. Now I love pasta and I love olives so I really, really enjoyed this.

And then came pudding. Sticky toffee pudding, to be exact. Apparently it’s very English – I had never heard of it before. It’s a cake that’s a little spongy – in a good way – in a thick, warm caramel sauce. Mmmm-mmm.

That’s all for the food, but here are a couple of pictures to show what the B&B itself looked like.

The building, photo taken from the road. The location is beautiful and very quiet.

The terrace where we had breakfast, on a sunny morning.

The dining room.

The guest bedroom where I slept.

The view from my bathroom window.

From the terrace and from the room where I slept, there’s a lovely view on the sea and the mountains in the distance.

And then there was a olive tree in the garden, which I really liked. It’s so pretty. I woke up just in time to see the sun rise from behind the mountains a few times and though it’s impossible to capture the beautiful images that created, here’s a photo:

It was truly wonderful to stay there. I didn’t take a picture of that, but there was also a guest living room where lots of reading material was available. They had several issues of The Vegan, the magazine of the Vegan Society, which I thought were interesting to read, and also some other vegetarian magazines. If you’d like to know more, I’ll give you the website:

The Green Terrace

Chocolate Spoonprint Cookies

Recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. They’re probably not supposed to be this flat, but who cares – they’re really, really good. Everyone loves them and I’m eating way more of them than I probably should. I made them with apricot jam which, to my surprise, tastes perfectly delicious with the chocolate. It makes the dough a bit softer and adds a bit of a fresh taste to the all chocolateyness that is the cookie. Mmmm, I definitely recommend trying this recipe.

Also, I ordered Veganomicon! Can’t wait for it to get here.