VVOC.org

I find delicious hot chips difficult to track down, so I felt the need of a list of places where I have successfully found delicious hot chips. Please add to the list if you know of others! (I like my chips to be crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, taste of fresh oil and love them best with their skin on.)

• Gallery Walk Cafe, Carindale Shopping Centre (thick and crisp)
• Shingle Inn, Garden City (thick and crisp)
• Songbirds, Mt Tambourine (fat, crisp and with skin on) Tambourine Mountain Road, North Tambourine
• Snack Bar, Sunnybank Hills  (thin and crisp – I do ask for them to be cooked a little bit golden otherwise they are a bit pale for me) Corner Beenleigh Road and Wynne Street

This is the most delicious, decadent, chocolate ice-cream. And it’s easy to make! It’s made on coconut milk and soy milk. Visit this website!!

http://vegandad.blogspot.com.au/2009/07/decadent-chocolate-ice-cream.html

I swear this tastes even better than the strawberry ice-cream at the ekka!

3.5 cups strawberries, chopped (I like to buy pesticide free strawberries from the West End Markets)
4 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
0.5 cups honey (divided into 2)
1.5 cups milk
2.75 cups double cream
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract

Place the strawberries and lemon juice in a bowl with 0.25 cups of honey. Stir and allow to sit for two hours. Strain the strawberries and keep the juice. Mash the strawberries in a bowl roughly.

Using an electric beater on low, beat the rest of the honey, milk, cream, vanilla extract and strawberry juice until mixed. Mix in the mashed strawberries. Taste the mixture. If you wish for a sweeter ice-cream, add extra honey a tablespoon at a time.

Pour the mixture into an ice-cream maker for 25 – 30 minutes or place in freezer. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, put the ice-cream in the freezer. After 1.5 hours in the freezer, beat the ice-cream with an electric beater and return to the freezer, repeating 2 more times to stop the formation of ice crystals.

I got this recipe for poached pears from my sister and it is delicious!

4 peeled pears
4 star anise
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon stevia

Place ingredients in a saucepan, cover the pears with water, then simmer for 20 minutes. Remove pears, increase the heat and reduce the liquid. Remove star anise and drizzle the liquid over the pairs. Done! Mmmmmm…. If you wish, serve with cream or ice cream.

Thank you to John who kindly hosted today’s get together. We were treated to a wonderful lunch including a Tomato Soup with Avocado Salsa for starters with olives and bread, a warm Lentil and Onion dish with sides of Cucumbers dressed in mint, Roasted Capsicum and generous bowls of hummus. All this was followed by Dates with Tahini rolled in Almond Meal. Thank you John!

Minutes

1. Our first agenda item was a thank you to John for his continued efforts with restaurant review postings.
2. Then, an apology for the lack of other content going up!
3. Finally we spent some time reviewing categories each of us would post about on a more regular basis.
So far we have the following…..
John – Restaurant reviews
Jacki – Highlighting Orthodox missionary work
Melissa – Recipes
Helen – Saint feast days
Vasilios – Vege or Orthodox based art and site maintenence
Anastasia – Campaigns and other Orthodox material
Jason – Vegan and vegetarian orthodox saints

The goal is to have each of us posting at least once a month, which should see something new on the site every week. We also hope to create a balance in the content between vegan/vegetarian material and Orthodox material.

All in all, it was a wonderful afternoon with warming food shared amongst friends.

246 Friedrichstrasse, Berlin

Don’t be alarmed at the signs outside promising Pasta and Pizza, for this is a proper Middle Eastern restaurant with a variety of vegetarian dishes. Order falafel and a plate arrives with six pieces of freshly cooked falafel on a sliver of pita bread, hummus (what I would call mayonnaise), potato chips, rice, and two large bread rolls…more carbohydrate, anyone? But the side dishes include a wonderful puree of capsicum, onion and tomatoes, full of flavour without being hot and decorated with sprigs of broad leaf parsley; its moisture goes well with the slightly dry main course. The drinks menu ranges as widely as it usually does in Berlin, with the addition of bottled water from Turkey! While not being up-market, this is the most formal of the Turkish restaurants reviewed in this series, and like the others it makes vegetarian food available in an environment which veggies won’t always find particularly friendly.

Apologies to Turkish readers; I have spelt the name of this restaurant using the letter i, not being able to generate the similar Turkish letter without the dot.

The nearest U-Bahn is Hallesches Tor.

44 Taunsstrasse, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Among the variety of Turkish restaurants in Germany serving vegetarian food, this establishment, while unpretentious, is a step above Habibis, reviewed recently; you order your meal at a counter and find a table, to which it will be brought. The vegetarian range is very good. They do a hearty lentil soup (linsesuppe) that hits the spot on a cold day; beautifully red and bursting with flavour, it comes with a large piece of Turkish bread, a wedge of lemon, and a chilli. There are fresh salads with plenty of greens, with or without cheese, and enormous plates of potato chips (pommes frites) with sauce. Of the range of drinks in the fridge the fizzy apple juice has a strong taste that goes well with this food. While the staff prefer to speak German or Turkish they are friendly and easy to communicate with.

Only one thing holds me back from giving this restaurant top marks. It’s located close to the main station, and the lights are neither green nor orange in this district. Ignore the sleaze.

24 Goltzstrasse, Berlin

Germany has become the largest foreign market for Turkish Airlines, and the change in population of which this is a symptom has had excellent results for vegetarians. Different types of places serving Turkish food have sprung up, the most basic of which is exemplified by Habibi. You walk in off the street and join a queue at the counter; when your turn comes say you want falafel, and when asked ‘Komplett?’ say ‘Ja!’ Your falafel, warm and of generous proportion, will come in a triangular piece of flat bread with tomato, cucumber, onions, a large pickle and sauce. Vegans should know that whereas Arabs use tahini for this purpose, Turkish sauces are based on yoghurt.  You hold the bread in a piece of grease proof paper, which you throw into the bin by the door as you walk out if you decide to stay in the cafe rather than munch your falafel as you walk down the street.  There are countless places like this in Germany, some of them outdoor stalls, all of them providing tasty and nutritious falafel. Amazingly, the one served at Habibi will set you back just €2.50!

The nearest U-Bahn is Nollendorfplatz.

19 Wienerstrasse, Berlin

Located in  part of eastern Berlin that looks as though it has seen better days, this entirely vegetarian restaurant is run by people who give an air of being very committed. What better place to veg out on some junk food? The Hot Chili Burger comes on a roll of brown bread, the patty has a fine taste and texture, and comes with lettuce, tomato and a sauce of just the right heat. It is smaller than the serve of potato chips (pommes frites) I had assumed would be a side dish, which are accompanied by a moderately hot dip. The restaurant also offers many dishes that imitate meat. and while I can’t vouch for the organic beer available from the fridge the the fresh orange juice is of the blood red variety and its intense taste is excellent, going well with strongly flavoured food. This is a worthy restaurant, popular among vegetarians, that deserves support. But it occurs to me that there may be other ways forward for vegetarian food in this part of the world.

The nearest U-Bahn station is Goerlitzer Bahnhof.

Sihlstrasse 28, Zurich, Switzerland

What could a self-service vegetarian restaurant in the land that invented muesli be like? Well, you pick up a tray and wander around trying to choose between dishes of hummus, mung beans, quorn, paneer curry, asparagus in sesame oil, beetroot, cucumber, potatoes, wasabi beans in their pods, carrots, mushrooms and several dozen others, both hot and cold, before taking your tray to a cashier who charges according to weight. Every one of the dishes I tried was fresh, attractively presented and extremely tasty. The restaurant also offers freshly squeezed juices, among them an apple juice bursting with flavour; other juices were of tropical fruits, which must have accumulated a fair few air miles on their way to Switzerland. At lunchtime the place is full of a mixed crowd of students and workers in suits for whom it is obviously a favourite. And despite the restaurant having been founded in 1898, at about the time that Bircher-Benner was perfecting his muesli, there’s not a bowl of moistened oats to be seen.