Vegan ice cream and pizza at de Parade

De Parade is a travelling theatre festival that takes place in four Dutch cities throughout the summer. I like this festival not just for the performances but also for the wide variety of freshly prepared food sold at stalls all over the park. All the little restaurants represent a range of different cuisines, and while I haven’t asked about vegan options at every stall, I’ve never had trouble finding tasty eats and drinks.

This year I was excited to learn that the ice cream shop at the festival would be selling vegan ice cream by Professor Grunschnabel, a brand of coconut milk-based desserts I’d been meaning to try for a while. Their products include intriguing flavours such as Fresas del Habanero (strawberry with hot chillies), Indian Winter (coconut, ginger and Indian spices), and SalmiaCoco (coconut with vanilla and liquorice). The ice cream stall does sell dairy-based ice creams as well, and the coconut-based ones aren’t marked as vegan, but they’re pretty easy to recognise by their names and ingredients. The people at the stall may stare at you if you mention the name Grunschnabel (haha!) but they can probably tell you which ones are made with coconut milk. We happened to be there on a pretty chilly day, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sample some vegan ice cream!

I ordered a scoop of berry ice cream (can’t remember the name!) and the chocolate coconut flavour (ChoCocolate). I liked both, but the chocolate flavour was definitely my favourite. For some reason I thought I wasn’t a big fan of coconut milk in ice cream, but this combination worked really well (of course it did! it’s chocolate and coconut!), so I definitely want to try making coconut-based ice cream again very soon. Yum.

For dinner, we went over to Fuoco e Desiderio for some freshly baked pizza. Here’s a photo of their pizza ovens that I took a few years ago at de Parade in Utrecht:

I asked for a cheeseless pizza so they made me one with artichoke hearts, peppers, and rocket. I think there was some chilli oil on there, too, because it was nice and spicy! It was a light, fresh meal – perfect for summer, and doesn’t it make you wish you had one of those beautiful ovens in your garden? (I guess I’d have to have a garden first…)

I also had a gorgeously pink apple and beetroot juice at a tiny juice bar called Little Sister. Pretty!

If you’d still like to visit De Parade this year, the festival is currently in Utrecht and it’ll be in Amsterdam next month.

London: Rootmaster!

This was the place I most looked forward to visiting in London…

Rootmaster Vegan Bustaurant! Yes, that’s a vegan restaurant in a bus and yes, that is indeed as awesome as it sounds. At first I was worried we might not be able to find the bus since I had trouble locating the street (Ely’s Yard) on Google Earth, but we walked there from Liverpool Street and it turned out to be much easier than I’d thought (here‘s a map).

It had started to rain when we got there, so we were happy to step inside and have a seat. Looks so comfy, doesn’t it? The bus was quiet when we arrived, so we had that whole table to ourselves.

We both ordered a Whole Earth Apple & Raspberry drink, which was lovely! I wish I could get these where I live, but I’ve never seen them. Next time I find a store that has them, I’ll be sure to try some other flavours, too (edit: ha! I found them in a local health food store right after writing this…).

We were there around one o’ clock, so we were able to order from the lunch menu. My boyfriend went for the Soup of the Moment, pictured above, which was tomato lentil (with bus baked bread!). He quite enjoyed his soup, although he did mention that it was rather thick, and might be more suitable for serving during winter. Then again, the weather that day wasn’t very summery at all…

Oh well, the rain just made the inside of the bus even cosier!

As my lunch, I chose to try the Rootmaster Burger. It was delicious bean burger on wholemeal bread with bus made mayonnaise and  potato wedges on the side – yum! It was really hard to choose a dish here, because there were so many delicious options (and… everything’s vegan!). I was really happy with this burger, though, and I’d love to go back for their other dishes.

Naturally, we left room for dessert. We both went for the Ice Cream Platter, which was different from what I’d expected, but oh so delicious. The website describes this as a “selection of ice cream with seasonal berries”, which also sounds wonderful, but our dessert was served with a biscuit, two types of chocolates and three slices of orange. The chocolate and biscuit were good (although they did make the dish quite filling), but the ice cream was what made me really love this. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever tried ice cream this good! The brand is Swedish Glace, which I’d heard of before and really wanted to try.

And I wasn’t disappointed. It turns out Swedish Glace makes some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. The vanilla flavour actually tasted like vanilla, unlike others I’ve tried, and it was absolutely delicious. The scoops of chocolate and berry ice cream were nice as well, but the vanilla was my favourite by far. I kind of regret not buying more of that flavour when I saw it in a supermarket, because even though I probably wouldn’t have been able to eat the entire tub, at least I could’ve tried…

So yeah, if you’re ever in London, I definitely recommend checking this place out – not just because it’s a vegan restaurant on a bus and that’s awesome, but they offer such a good variety of delicious foods as well! Have a look at their menus (in the sidebar)… you’ll wish you were there right now.

London: Veg Buffet, Inspiral

On our way to Camden market, we passed by Inspiral vegan cafe, one of the restaurants I really looked forward to visiting. They offer a large variety of dishes – delicious looking mains, cooked as well as raw, cakes (including tiramisu cake, chocolate mousse cake, and a raw key lime pie), raw chocolates and truffels, and vegan ice cream.

I was especially excited about the range of interesting ice cream flavours they list on their website, although they didn’t have all of those in the restaurant when we got there. After contemplating the different flavours they did have, we ordered a scoop of Raw Chocolate Chunk ice cream, pictured below.

We both liked it, but it’s definitely not the best ice cream I’ve had – I gues I would’ve liked it to have a stronger, more distinct chocolatey flavour. Or maybe I don’t love chocolate and cashews together (their ice creams are cashew based). In any case, I didn’t think it was bad, but I think my boyfriend liked it more than I did. I’d still love to try their other ice cream flavours…

I also would’ve liked to try some of Inspiral’s main dishes, but the menu they had that day didn’t appeal to my boyfriend very much, and we wanted to explore more of Camden, so we decided to look for another restaurant for our dinner. We quickly encountered a man holding a sign that advertised an all-vegetarian buffet, which sounded like just the place for us. I had heard of these restaurants before – there’s a chain of Chinese/Thai buffet restaurants in London where you can get a small lunch takeout box for £3,50 and eat in for £6,50 or so. I’d read mixed reviews on this chain, but we were willing to try them out.

Unfortunately, neither of us was very impressed. Sure, this was a relatively cheap meal, everything in the restaurant was vegan, and the staff were quite friendly, but there wasn’t a single thing in the buffet that I really loved. There were a couple of mock meat dishes that weren’t as good as I hoped, and the veggies they had seemed a bit plain and were sometimes overly salty. I think I would’ve liked the food more if they’d done a better job at keeping everything warm, too – most things were cold by the time we got to eat them.

Still, it wasn’t too bad for such an inexpensive meal, and we filled our plates with the foods we liked best – in my case, that was fruit salad, potatoes, spring rolls, and some veggies. So I did have some tasty food and I don’t really regret trying this restaurant, but we both would’ve liked to have had a more exciting dinner this evening – after all, I know it’s possible to get amazing vegan meals in London.

So for dessert, we headed back to Inspiral for some cake!

I looove tiramisu, but it can take so long to make yourself – I’d never  pass up the opportunity to get vegan version in a restaurant! Okay, so this is is tiramisu cake, which is slightly different from actual layered dessert, but it was still wonderful. Not as boozy as I’ve come to expect of tiramisu, but it was much creamier, especially with the dollop of Soyatoo on the side.

I hope someday I’ll get the chance to go back to Inspiral and try their lasagne or their mushroom pastie. And if I do, I’ll definitely get another slice of that cake, as well!