Vegan HQ Border Control

Here are Vegan HQ we like to keep out house free from non-vegan food items as much as possible.  This policy is essentially in our name, VEGAN HQ.  Border control is something we take seriously.

Do you know how hard it is to find a good border control photo online without getting right wing rubbish?  Even this is from the website of a convservative Christian who refers to the US president as Barack Hussein Obama...

Despite out best attempts, sometimes things get through the front door and into the house.  Mostly they are due just to honest mistakes.  I mean, getting an understanding of all the silly names food manufacturers give to animal products can require a PhD in food science.  

I know what you're thinking.  Is Dr. D a scientist or a chef.  And if you're not, you haven't spent enough time at Dosa Plaza.

The other day I came home and noticed a fruit pie package sticking out of the overflowing rubbish bin in the kitchen.  I was excited.  A new unhealthy vegan treat option!  Or so I thought.  I had a quick look at the ingredients, and at first glance it looked vegan.  But then I looked again.

Once upon a time I'm certain there was a frozen apple pie that was vegan in the supermarkets.  Does it still exist?  Not in this form anyway.

Instantly my dreams of hot apple pie and soy ice cream after a busy day of lectures or clinicals was dashed.  TALLOW.  When I first went vegan almost all the soaps on the market in NZ were made from tallow, so the word was heavy on the minds of all vegans.  These days that isn't the case, and one could easily enter into the world of veganism without even hearing the term.  But tallow general means beef fat, or mutton fat.  An innocent yet gross mistake was made and animal fats made their way into Vegan HQ as a result of confusing documentation.

3 strikes and you lose your vegan powers.

Another animal-product made it's way into Vegan HQ today, this time going unconsumed before detection.  And it wasn't paid for either, it was a free give-away that was sent to us in the mail.

New improved recipe needs one minor improvement.  The removal of all the chicken deaths.

As a hungry student, at first I was excited.  Uncle Ben's express rices actually do come in a few animal-friendly flavours.  And when I first scanned the ingredients again I was filled with a little bit of hope that I might not have to go shopping to eat this afternoon.  The only possible ingredient I could see on the list was 'natural flavours', which strictly speaking is about as vague as you can get without just saying 'stuff that has taste'.  So I did what any good vegan would do.  I called the company to find out for sure.  

Do you still count as a customer when you haven't bought anything?

The conversation went like this:

"Hello, Uncle Ben's customer service, how can I help?"

"Uh, yes, hi.  I just received some Uncle Ben's Express rice in the mail for free.  And as everyone in our household is vegan I just wanted to check the ingredients to see if there are any animal products in this sample."

"Sure, what flavour have you got sir?"

"Ah, ironically Savoury Chicken Flavour.  But it doesn't clearly list whether it has animals in it or not."

"Oh, I'm sorry the natural flavour includes real chickens."

"I see.  But it doesn't say that clearly on the ingredients."

"Yes, there is real chicken in the natural flavour."

"Okay.  I guess I'll be throwing this out then.  Uhm, so the next thing, could you please not send us animals in the mail again please?  It doesn't please us."

Things to look forward to now that I'm back at university:

Posts while procrastinating on assignments

Less posts in general from me

Posts about vegan options I have when I'm at AUT campus on the Shore

And I'm guessing posts about the vegan options I have when I'm on my clinical in the hospital

For those special occasions.

Every now and then the situation arises where you want to have a special meal.  You know what I mean, the type that you feel calls for wearing a shirt that has buttons in the front, and a collar, and I don't just mean t-shirts that have pictures of buttons and collars on them.

Occasions like this also call for some fancy shoes.  By fancy, I mean they aren't just the smelly old canvas Chuck Taylor's or vegan-labelled Macbeths.  For a vegan occasions like this are awful.  If you look at the menus of most of the nicer restaurants around town, and by nice I mean places you call up in advance and make a reservation, you'll find dishes full of animal parts, like ox tails, or anemic baby calves.  And dessert is straight out of the question.  For some reason Western gourmet cuisine is entirely focused on cooking up dead creatures, and if you abstain from 'death-for-no-reason' you're out of luck when it comes to eating out gourmet-styles at a nice restaurant.  I mean, just have a look at an episode of Master Chef to get an idea of how death-centric western gourmet cuisine is:

Actually, this video is unrelated, but it's awesome.

Auckland has a load of different vegan or vegan-friendly restaurants, but for the most part none of them are places that you would actually wear a tie, unless you were being ironic wearing a tie with a polo shirt to Sunflower/Vege Cafe on High Street.  But who on earth would even think of wearing a tie with a polo shirt?

Hipsters evidently.

So you can be glad to hear that the Heritage Hotel's restaurant Hectors and their Lobby Bar have vegan specific menus.  In fact, the Heritage Hotel's Lobby Bar menu is strictly vegan.  Have a look for yourself at the menu here.  As a result, I've been hearing of more and more vegans heading out to the Heritage Hotel for those 'special' meal occasions.  For example, Tom from Vegan HQ put on a button up shirt and had a vegan High Tea with Jo a few months ago.

When I met Tom he had a big pink Mohawk.  Still vegan 12 years later.

Vegan High Tea at the Heritage is perfect for those vegans who want to do something that feels fancy, in a setting that is fancy, without having to pay loads of bucks for gourmet food.  You get tea or coffee with a nicely presented stack of vegan nibbles, as you can see in the photo of Jo below:

My theory is that it's called High Tea cause it's stacked up high.

You can read a description of all the bits and pieces included in the High Tea by checking out the menu linked to before.  

This Monday Romelli and I took a trip on our tandem bike for some High Tea.  I called up in the morning to make a reservation, cause that's what you do when you eat at a fancy place.  When I said it was for High Tea the French sounding lady on the other side immediately asked whether this would be a vegan High Tea or a standard High Tea.  Being asked, without prompting, if I wanted the vegan option was refreshingly awesome.

I had to borrow a shirt with buttons on it from my brother for the special outing, as I'm too much of a bum to own a button up shirt.  I stuck the pedals back on the tandem, Romelli put on some new shoes, and we pedaled off for our High Tea.  I'm not normally a button up shirt kinda guy.  Both of the last times I wore a button up shirt I made it into the newspapers.  The last time for promoting safety at intersections.  The time before that is pictured below:

Protesting means I can eat what I want and still stay fit.

When we got there they knew that we must be the vegans.  We opted to have our High Tea in the Lobby bar area, as opposed to the restaurant where Tom and Jo had their High Tea, pictured above.  We sat down on a sofa, and were waited on by the staff.  They brought out our stack/rack thingy with all the plates on it, which I'm sure has a name, but I don't know what it's called.  The sandwiches had the crusts cut off them, and were perfectly sliced.  That is how you turn a sandwich into a gourmet snack.  Each of the vegan sweets were great.  The chocolate on the apricots was smooth and lovely.  The cupcake thing was a little dry, but had nice icing and lemon-y sugary stuff on the top which made up for it.  The scones came with vegan whipped cream.  High Tea isn't something you eat when you are starving.  It's something you order when you want something special, to feel like you are fancy even if you aren't.  It's a great thing for a celebratory meal with family, or something nice for an anniversary.

The staff at the place let us in on a little secret; the current owners of Hectors are actually vegans themselves, hence the increasingly vegan friendly menu of the Hotel.  

So next time you graduate, or want to take out your vegan love interest to a place to make them think you are fancy, you know that you have options available beyond The Burgerie on K'road.

Ways to tell you are at Vegan HQ - Number Three

For a period of time this evening, starting around 9:50 pm, for some unknown reason, my Facebook account went down.  In the vacuum that was created grew a desire to bake something, and my mind had been thinking of macaroons since earlier this morning.  Checked online for some recipes, found one for which I had all the ingredients, speculated that they would taste even better coated in chocolate, and I was GO!

The result:

Vegan HQ: Where your dreams come true and we eat chocolate coated macaroons at midnight on Monday nights.

Recipe:
3 cups of shredded coconut
1/3 cup icing sugar
1 cup of coconut milk
2 tblsp of No-Egg, arrowroot or whatever other egg-replacer you use
2 teaspoons vanilla essence

Mix the shredded coconut and icing sugar in one bowl, the wet ingredients and the egg-replacer in another, then combine.  Spoon onto a baking tray that has some baking paper down on it.  Bake in the over for about 20-25 minutes, or golden brown on top, at about 165*C or something like that.

If you want chocolate just melt chocolate and dunk them in.  Best way to melt chocolate is to put chocolate in a metal bowl, and place that bowl into a pot of boiled/super hot water, and bam it melts.