Not burgers- vegan again?

Just a super quick post to ask if anyone knows if not burgers are vegan again?

Here is the ingredients list:

Water, vegetable protein (17%) (wheat gluten, soy protein), wheat flour, vegetable oil (sunola), tapioca flour, flavours (contains soy), rice flour, wheat breadcrumbs, sesame seeds, starch (potato, maize, wheat), yeast, sugar, salt, vegetable gum (guar), minerals (zinc gluconate, ferrous gluconate), yeast extract, preservatives (280, 260), emulsifiers (472e, 480), herbs, spices, flavour enhancer (disodium ribonucleotide), vitamin B12, colour (100).

Contains wheat, soy and sesame.
May contain traces of peanut, egg and milk.

They used to be vegan and I used to love them, but then they added milk or egg to them but it used to be obvious, it looks like the ingredients have changed but I know that one of the additives might be animal derived.

I will email them but if I find out sooner I can munch on them straight away. So please tell me they are vegan :-)

Edited to add: BrisVegan answered my question, they are!

Goodbye Vegan Mofo- sausage dhal

This is an oldie but a goodie, one of the earliest vegan dishes I learnt how to make and one of the few savoury dishes that ALL of my omni family enjoy, my mother still makes this dish regularly even though I no longer live there.

It is actually a recipe from the sanitarium website but this time I used frys sausages, here it is served with basmati rice.

It tastes different to regular dhal thanks to the rogan josh curry paste, and it's super quick, cheap, full of flavour and make a great weaknight meal.

Soy Sausage Dhal

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

2 tablespoons rogan josh curry paste

300g vegie traditional soy sausage original, cut into 1cm rounds

3 cups vegetable stock

1 cup red lentils

1. Heat the oil in a saucepan, cook the onion and garlic until softened.
2. Add the curry paste and cook, stiring for 1 minute or until fragrant.
3. Add the soy sausages, stock and red lentils. Simmer for 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft.
   

Goodbye aus/nz veganmofo- be sure to check out the other aus/nz mofo-ers if you haven't already. Lisa has the full list over on her blog

Monsieur truffle, I have expensive taste

Monsieur Truffle is just around the corner from my work which is very dangerous because if I feel that I really need chocolate it is just a little bit too close and at $10 a bar it is the most expensive chocolate I have ever purchased.

Unfortunately I am slowly becoming addicted to there chocolate. I have been slowly trying their different flavoured chocolate bars, caramelised almond, hazelnut etc. The caramel specks is probably my favourite, with crisp caramel bits, maybe it is because I haven't seen another dark chocolate caramel bar that is vegan:


I tried to get an inside shot but struggled because apparently button likes the chocolate too
My only problem is I still eat it like it is regular chocolate, consuming a bar in 1-2 days. Yes I need an intervention!

They also sell dark chocolate almond clusters, a whole range of exotic dark chocolate bars and rich dark chocolate flakes to make an incredible rich hot chocolate. Most of their dark chocolate options appear to be vegan!

Monsieur Truffle Chocolate
90 Smith St
Collingwood
9416 3101
Open: Mon-Fri 8am-5pm;
Sat 9am-5pm; Sun 10am-5pm

It's almost the end of Aus/NZ Vegan Mofo (Month of food) and I'm pretty proud of my increase in number of posts but it will probably mean that I will need to decrease my posts in October and spend a little more time on my neglected thesis. I've really enjoyed the experience though, I think it helped me to get out of my food slump.

Lord of the Fries- Northland

We where over an hour late for the potluck because the stumpy cake was so time consuming and we slept in, so we missed out on most of the savoury options but overloaded ourselves in sugar and thought that lots of salt and deep fried savoury would fix the problem. We started chatting with Cindy and Michael about the new lord of the fries store at Northland or 'Norflands' as the locals say and decided to give it a go.

I was relieved to see that it was actually a small cafe with seats unlike the city store, and the interior was actually quite nice, with a mix of tall tables and low tables and a bright red wall. In addition to the usual range they also had a 'chicken ' burger and 'hotdogs' on the menu although the 'chicken' burgers were sold out on the day. I was tempted to get a 'hotdog' but was worried that it might be the sanitarium ones, in hidnsight I should I have just asked.

The place was sadly empty but it was around 3.30pm. Mr T and I decided to share the chips with gravy and 'cheese', 'chicken' nuggets, and a mega burger which I think is a version of the big mark burger. It was all tasty, hot and the serving of cheezly was very generous on the fries. It's a pity I no longer work around the corner.

I really hope the place does well, it would be great to have another veg option in Preston.

Lord of the Fries-Northland
2-50 Murray Rd
East Preston
near the cinema entry

Stumpy dog cake and adventures in caramel icing

It was Lidia's potluck birthday party today so Mr T and I decided to bake her a cake that looked like her dog stumpy. I got a pic of Stumpy from one of Lidia's old blog posts:
I then cropped the pic just around his head and enlarged it so that it fit on A4 paper. Mr T then traced the outline onto baking paper and I then placed the baking paper over the top layer of the cake and used a toothpick to make lots of holes around the outline.

We made kittee's chocolate cake but figured that Stumpy's colouring is properly closer to the colour of caramel than it is to chocolate, and I remembered that Lidia loves caramel. So last night we make caramel icing based on this recipe on recipezaar, it was perfect and soft but then once we put in the fridge overnight and it hardened up so much that I couldn't use it. We did still use it in between the two layers of cake which was probably a mistake but it just seemed so wasteful to throw it all away.

Then this morning we decided to have another go and I learnt that caramel goes very quickly from nice caramel to burnt caramel. So we decided to go on the side of caution and made caramel where you could still actually feel some of the sugar. It was way too gooey though and I couldn't put it in my icing gun and it was the biggest pain to do a picture with. Luckily I had Mr T to help me.

I used vanilla frosting from vctotw for the white parts though and that worked well, I then also made a blue outline using the vanilla frosting and blue food dye. And I used black writing icing for the nose and inside of the ears.

Probably the biggest problem apart from the caramel was the eyes, when I put the second layer of cake on top of the first layer cracked right down the middle where the eyes needed to go. So I piped some vanilla icing into the hap and then put the black eyes on but it just looked creepy so we played around with them so much that they still look kind of weird.

Still I'm kind of proud since it is my first decorated cake that I made with regular soft icing as opposed to marzipan even if it does look a little like a horse or some sort of other animal instead of a dog.

I really think I need to get some sort of cake decorating book or the women's day cookbook though to help out with the next one.

Taste wise, the chocolate cake was ok but I think I prefer her vanilla cake (without vinegar) and the caramel icing was kind of sickly sweet but that's just caramel, right?