A Vegan Called Bacon

Food with a story: Seeds and Sewage

2008-11-18T19:15:27Z

I love growing my own food. I’m really bad at it, but I love it. Personally, I don’t think the difference in taste between home-grown and shop-bought is particularly obvious; what really gets me excited is the story behind it. Suddenly it’s no longer a potato. It’s sweat, cursing, improving the soil over months, agonising over if I should buy animal manure, choosing seed potatoes, planting seed potatoes, weeding, protecting, and then plunging my garden fork into the dark earth to produce little nuggetty golden-white eggs of potato goodness. That’s a potato.

The other thing that’s exciting is getting weird-shaped vegetables:

The same back-story thing goes for wild food, which has a story all of its own; especially mushrooms, with all their could-it-be-poisonous mystique and crazy habits. (Incidentally, I’ve recently found the best edible mushroom book ever written. Seriously. It has great photos, a brilliant key, a practical jacket. My favourite book of the year.)

Now winter’s starting to peer round the corner, and I’ve found probably my last edible mushrooms of the year (Wood Blewits, above), it’s time to write about the exciting stuff we did in the autumn.

It’s been a great season of getting close to the land and to food with a story. When we got back from our travels in August, we set off on a mission to learn about different sorts of sustainable communities, and on the way, had some great food.

Check out this amazing Victorian walled kitchen garden at Canon Frome Court:

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Canon Frome was an amazing place; somewhere we felt we could live.

One of the most inspirational places we visited was Brithdir Mawr in Wales. They, too, have two incredible vegetable gardens (plus some great buildings… at the top of this garden is a very cool geodesic house):

They also had a beautiful farm kitchen, with a big wood-burning stove for preparing the communal meals:

One important aim for this community is to be as carbon-neutral as possible. I think I remember them saying they grow 80% of their non-staple food (they do buy in a lot of rice, oil, etc). Communal meals are 4 or so times a week, and were all wonderful when we were there.

What made Brithdir Mawr particularly interesting from a food point of view was the seed company that is run from the property. The concept of seed-saving and heritage foods is best explained on their own site. Suffice to say it’s an important and fascinating subject, but it also means that they have available a steady stream of interesting vegetables you’ve never heard of. Check out, for example, these achocha: a type of cucumber, the skin of which you fry as if it were green pepper. In the foreground is raw achocha; on the plate in the background, some achocha fried for breakfast with home-made beans on home-made toast. Home-produce-tastic.

While we were there, we also took the opportunity to buy some laverbread. This is a local speciality: essentially, laver seaweed, boiled for hours until it is a greenish-black pulp. You buy it in the butcher’s, for some reason. They advised me to mix it 50/50 with oats, make it into little balls, and fry them in bacon fat. I didn’t want to look like a vegan English wuss, so I just nodded, went home, and tried it without the bacon bit. They were absolutely delicious, and I am quite gutted that I forgot to take any photos.

That got me going on the subject of collecting seaweed myself. Here’s Kim collecting sea lettuce. It was really nice, but I stopped eating it when someone told me about the raw sewage pumped into the estuary where we were collecting it.

Still, food with a story, eh?

Making Something That Looks Like Dog Food Palatable

2008-11-06T10:10:09Z

The other day, Kim wanted “Something With Gravy” the other day for dinner. Her great-aunt Vera calls this kind of comfort food a “Brown Dinner”, which we find a particularly appealing name.

Our usual Brown Dinner is some shop-bought vegan sausages with mash and home-made mushroom gravy. However, the only meaty (read: excuse for gravy) thing in the house was some old TVP chunks. So I rehydrated some shiitake mushrooms, and then rehydrated the soy chunks in the leftover mushroom water plus some vegetable bouillon powder. I fried up some onions, the shiitake mushrooms, then the TVP. I added some left-over broth, and threw in some peas and chopped tomatoes, and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil, thickened it with some corn flour, and served it in the middle of a nest of mash. It wasn’t bad.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The preliminary point of this post is that when I got the leftovers out the following day, I realised that we had been eating something that looked, and even smelled, like dog food:

And now, the main point of this post. The main point of this post is, look how much nicer it looks on some instant noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds. It looks like dog food on noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds, which I think is a whole lot nicer:

I’m going to investigate more instant noodle topping ideas. It made a proper good meal.

Saf Restaurant: syringes, smorgasbords, and serious spectacles

2008-11-06T10:15:26Z

Meat-free restaurants don’t usually span a very wide range. At one end it’s an earthenware bowl of earthy nutty lumpy splodge with a nutty crust and some earth. At the other end, it’s big white plates with vegetarian versions of classic British favourites (i.e. things we borrowed from other countries in the early 90s): something Asian with the rice in a pretty pile, or roasted things with peppery leaves and a balsamic reduction.

All of which can be very tasty, but all of which I’ll make at home some time or other. So I was hopping from foot to foot and squealing a little bit when we decided to go to Saf, a vegan restaurant that does the contemporary cuisine thing: little fiddly towers of things I don’t normally eat, plated with smears of contrived juice I’d never bother to make myself.

When we arrived, the place was all mood lighting and elegant furniture, and packed with Shoreditch’s finest. (For the benefit of non-Londoners, this means beautiful people with surprising haircuts and serious spectacles). It looked very clean and a little bit special. Which, being nothing like our kitchen, is a good prelude to getting food I wouldn’t get at home.

First of all, we were presented with a fancy cocktail list. It’s extensive and exciting, and nearly makes you drunk reading it. (That, combined with the dim lighting means my photos are rubbish). Unfortunately, we had to wait nearly 30 minutes for them, after which a lot of the hand-rubbing anticipation had worn off. Kim’s Mojito Rosa (a mojito with sour cherry infused rum) was the best – still recognisably a mojito, but you could really taste the cherry. My Jasmine Pearl Martini, however, pretty much tasted like a Martini. Overall, these cocktails were very good, though not really as excitingly different as their names would suggest.

We loved our starters. The raw butterbean hummus was creamy and the wafers of bread were crunchy. The gazpacho (above) was very interesting: it involved tomato, red onion, and melon if I remember correctly. It looked stunning and tasted good. Most exciting of all was what I assume to be something of a signature dish: cheese and caviar on biscuits. The cheese was made of cashew nuts, the biscuits were raw and very, very crispy, and the caviar was introduced to us personally. Apparently someone had injected some kind of fruit juice into some kind of seaweed-based jelly, thousands and thousands of times, to create these little clusters of wobbly balls.

The mains were definitely less unusual and exciting. The best dish was the buckwheat risotto, which was creamy and had a lovely bite to it, was definitely something I might have made at home. The Buddha Bowl (tofu, sambal, kimchee etc; below) was also excellent, but again, a disappointingly ordinary concept.

The two raw dishes we ate were the most exciting-sounding things, yet not so pleasant to eat. A mushroom stack gave us a thrill of excitement followed by mild nausea, both feelings due to its profoundly mushroomy mushroomness. You could just about manage half a forkful. The lasagne, presented beautifully (in a stack, again) was a fairly unappetising mix of dull and similar earthy flavours, and was on the chewy side of chewy.

When it comes to desserts, I’m not so sure that novelty and interest are necessarily good things. I guess Saf agrees, because the dessert menu was largely ordinary but delicious-sounding, and desserts turned out to be largely ordinary and delicious. The ice cream was excellent and the Ganache Tart made everyone make little moaning noises. But, because I’m obsessed with novelty food, I stupidly went for the Superfood platter. I can’t remember exactly what it involved any more, other than some goji berries made an appearance, but I can remember that it was a smorgasbord of tough, dry, dull, and sickly morsels. (And some nice ice cream).

We finished with a pretty hefty bill, but to be fair, this was because we’d all got carried away with the booze. The actual food, considering the work that’s gone into it, was pretty cheap.

Overall, the experience left me impressed, excited and cynical at the same time. A bit like the prospect of an Obama presidency. On the one hand, exciting-sounding food often tasted disappointing, and the best tasting stuff was quite ordinary in concept.

On the other hand, it was wonderful to see absurdly elaborate food and drink, presented impeccably to a packed out venue of trendy-somethings, who were presumably either unaware or uninterested in the fact it was mostly-raw vegan. Interestingly, most of the marketing literature calls it ‘botanical’ food; I am very happy with this because I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the label ‘vegan’, and what’s more, I doubt it would be so full if it was called “The Virtuous Vegan” or something.

In the end, the caviar and cheese dish is what really streams out rays of slivery light in my memory. It made me think that taste and presentation are only two thirds of the ingredients of a really good meal. The other third is a good story. A hand-syringed drop of fruit juice encased in seaweed jelly makes me think of a bent-over, squinting, line cook, swearing under her breath about the smug scientific chef who came up with the bloody idea. Caviar just makes me think of dead pregnant fish.

Experimental Mass Catering: Japanese Curry

2008-10-29T18:41:34Z

I just love the idea of going all scientific about cooking. That’s why I did a comparative table of Chinese cheese a few months ago, and why I tried making mapo tofu without boiling the tofu first. I don’t really know why; I just think it’s kind of cool. Like, cool to do comparative cooking experiments with vegan ingredients. This is the kind of reason I never used to get Valentines cards at school.

So, my very good friends at Mungo’s Hifi Sound System have been doing a night called Dub and Grub in Glasgow for the past seven years. They take over a pub venue, play dub music, and cook a set meal for super cheap (£8 for three courses). And it’s completely vegan: partly because of the dub reggae / Rastafarian / vegan connection, but mainly because they play in a vegan pub (The 78, which was recently listed in the top ten veggie restaurants in the country).

Now we’ve moved to Glasgow, I’ve been helping out with Dub and Grub, and last week got to design a menu. You have to be prepared to make 100 mains, maybe 30 starters, and 30 desserts. Cooking for that many people means your mistakes get amplified, so you need to be sure you’ve got the recipe right. So, the day before, cue cool experiments!

For the starter, I wanted to do vegetable tempura. I’d been amazed when we went to Japan by how easy it was to make. Our friend Seiko made a batter which contained only flour and water, and said the most important thing was to keep the batter cold (which she did by floating ice cubes in it). But other recipes variously call for baking soda, beer, soda water, and corn flour.

Because I’ve got more experiments to write about, I’ll skip the tables and jump to the conclusion. It does matter about the temperature of the water; if you have a warm batter, the tempura tastes a little burned. Corn flour doesn’t make a noticeable difference, but fizzy stuff does: still-fizzing beer and/or a small spoon of baking soda both make bubbles in the batter as it fries, making it lighter and crispier. The one on the left is with water, the one on the right is with beer.

The next experiment was the curry. For years we have been making a Japanese curry taught us by Taka, a fellow student when Kim was at university. It’s astonishingly tasty for something so simple. Simply fry up roughly chopped onion (maybe letting it brown a little); add equal amounts of potato and carrot in large chunks; nearly cover them in water with a few good dashes of soy sauce; add a drop of sesame oil and sugar to taste. Boil until slightly mushy.

Then, in Hong Kong (of all places), we had an amazing home-style Japanese curry which was richer and spicier than Taka’s curry. Trying to recreate it when we got home, I found that the secret ingredient is S&B Golden Curry Sauce. Roughly chopped onion, carrot and potato, in water, with an S&B curry cube dissolved in it. Super simple, and apparently what everyone in Japan does – even, apparently, chefs. But it resembles cheating, and what’s more, S&B curry cubes are 50p per person; a silly amount to spend when you’re mass catering on a budget.

So, my next experiment was a three-way face-off between Taka’s curry, an S&B curry, and my own attempt to recreate that elusive S&B flavour using only my wits and an internet search engine for inspiration. Here’s the showdown in action:

I was pleased that my own curry worked. I also trialed frying breaded slabs of aubergine to replace the breaded pork that would traditionally be served with curry in Japan. I did actually prefer, slightly, the S&B version, and it is super-simple (Vegan Lunch Box blogged the cube method recently). But I had used a packet curry powder, and decided that I could do better with my own spices and some inspiration from Justhungry.

Making it all for Dub & Grub on the day was an adrenaline rollercoaster. My recipe included a whole load of apples and bananas to provide the sweetness (instead of sugar), and for a while it was touch and go if it would taste like a weird, sickly stew; but it all came together in the end. We prepared as much as possible in advance, such as this vast stack of breaded aubergine slices:

In the event, it rained slabs of icy water for a couple of hours before Dub & Grub, so the place was pretty quiet; we only sold about 50 covers, which was disappointing. On the other hand, we got a whole load of enthusiastic feedback, with superlatives and happy faces filtering through the serving hatch. So I was really happy, and would love to do it again. So, if you have any suggestions for future Dub and Grub meals (3 courses, tasty, doable in quantity, on a budget), I would love your inspiration.

Here’s the recipe:

Japanese Katsu Curry (serves 100)

For the stew:

15 large cooking apples, peeled and cut into chunks
10 large bananas, peeled and cut into chunks
5 litres of weak stock
25 large onions
40 medium potatos
40 medium carrots
1 bottle brown sauce
350ml light soy sauce
3 cups of potato starch
4 tablespoons ground turmeric
4 tablespoons ground coriander
2.5 tablespoons ground cumin
2 tsp ground cardamon
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground fennel

For the breaded aubergines:

25 aubergines, cut into 1/2” slices crossways
150g plain white flour
salt to taste
6 x 250g bags of Japanese Panko (breadcrumbs)

To prepare:

Boil the apples and bananas in the stock until mushy
Blend them together with the brown sauce, soy sauce, potato starch, spices. Add more sugar to taste if necessary (this is supposed to be a salty/sweet curry).
In a separate pan, fry the onion, then get the potato and carrot sweating
Add the curry sauce and continue to cook until the veg are soft
Make a batter by whisking water into the flour and salt until it’s just runny
Dip aubergine slices in the batter and then into breadcrumbs; press the breadcrumbs onto the slices
Deep fry the slices until golden brown
Serve with Japanese rice, with plenty of curry sauce all over both the rice and the aubergine slices

Bonus picture:

The bottom of the curry pan was satisfyingly encrusted after a few hours of keeping the curry hot:

How do you support your vast bulk?

2008-10-13T10:32:12Z

I use my horn-like projections.

From And I Am Not Lying via Two Doctors.

How To Remember A New Type Of Mushroom

2008-10-09T08:08:57Z

Hooray, mushroom season. I absolutely love searching out the little blighters. It’s like a gladiatorial content ‘twixt man and fungus. I just know they are hiding from me. The tasty ones (like chanterelles) send out their inedible friends (russulas, usually… that’s the slimy red or yellow ones) as decoys. But I get them in the end. Hunting, vegan style.

Plus, you get the thrill of sometimes deciding, for a change, to select some ones you haven’t eaten before, and to try eating those, and seeing if you die or not. For example, the other day, I picked a few Amethyst Deceivers. And if that’s not a name to make you think maybe they’re inedible, I don’t know what is. (Apart from “Destroying Angel”, I suppose). Just take a look at them, they’re purple for god’s sake:

They were pretty tasty, in the end. A nice firm texture, and a bit nutty.

So, whenever I find a new and interesting-looking mushroom, I take photos or a specimen and identify it. And then forget what it was called. The other day I found a new way of remembering them. Here’s what you do:

Go picking with children, including an 11 month boy. (Remembering to give all the children lots of lessons and reminders about not touching a mushroom unless an adult says it’s OK)
Find an interesting new specimen and pocket it, separately from the edible ones
Go home. Have a beer and cook dinner. Get hot and leave your jacket on the floor.
Have the baby boy remind you that the mushroom was in your pocket by seeing him with it in his mouth
Become numbed with dread. Spend 2 hours positively identifying the mushroom and feeling like a dangerous fool

This is a 100% successful method. I shall never now forget the Shaggy Scalycap:

And it turns out it’s not toxic. Probably. Very much.

We’ve also enjoyed some shaggy ink caps, hedgehog mushrooms, ceps, and some chanterelles:

If you’ve not gone shrooming before, the only decent way to start is by going with an expert. In the UK, at least, it’s pretty easy to find Fungi Forays led by obsessive professors in old woodland areas, during the season. As for cooking them, I think it’s a shame to shroud the interesting flavours that you’ve spent so long hunting down. I prefer to fry them up in a neutral-flavoured oil, with only a small bit of garlic (if you really must) and maybe a splash of white wine. And salt and pepper, of course. And if you can cook them outside, all the better for that wild-man-or-woman-of-the-woods vibe.

I hate glass chopping boards

2008-10-06T10:32:16Z

I just wanted to get that off my chest.

All Hail the Supreme Master

2008-09-30T12:35:19Z

Before we went to Mongolia, someone told me that when I returned I would open my bag, and would be knocked over by a warm, greasy wind of gaseous mutton fat.

And experience did prove it to be a pretty counterveganistic culture. I learned that there are traditionally two distinct food seasons in Mongolia: winter, the time of mutton in all its glorious variations; and summer, season of hard cheese and fermented mare’s milk.

In general, we found that there were three types of food shop. One, a shop selling various semi-dried, fatty, meat and blood and gristle sausages and pickles. Two, a shop selling slightly rancid butter and a variety of dairy products heavily based on rancid butter. Three, a shop selling vegetables. The vegetables they sell are mostly limited to cabbage, carrot, and potato. Sometimes you got a kind of supermarket with all three shops rolled into one. (In fairness, there was a State Department Store with a decent range of stuff, and one OK market, too)

For lunch on our first day, I had a plate of grated carrots, and Kim had two fried eggs. By this point we were starting to feel a bit down about the food.

But then I actually bothered to do some research on the internet, and found a wild claim of FIVE vegetarian restaurants in Ulaan Bataar! And I found a website with them pinpointed on a Google Map, too!

The first we tracked down was the MARS cafe, a slightly grimy old cafe hidden at the back of the third floor of a run-down clothes market. Everything was written in Mongolian, but I did enough sign language to assure myself it was vegetarian. We ordered a plate of something or other (”looks like little poos” said Kim) by pointing at a photo. I asked them if they minded me watching them cooking it, and it turned out to be a sauce of tomato ketchup and water, thickened with flour, and seasoned with powdery white stuff (I assume sugar and salt). Then a bunch of soya balls were boiled in it, and it was served with salad and rice. It was hardly amazing but I guess at least it was authentically Mongolian-ish. I was delighted. We ate it while a huge photo of a lady decked out like the Virgin Mary gazed benignly down upon us.

We were puzzled as to how veggie food could appear in such an unlikely location. Later in the day, we visited another vegetarian restaurant (and vegan/vegetarian tour agency) called Luna Blanca (we ordered take-out tofu and satay ‘chicken’.) While we waited we chatted to the staff, and it emerged that they are vegetarians and vegans because they are practitioners of what they called “Quinin“. They said it was a form of meditation, but I couldn’t get a clear idea of what it was all about. That is, until I saw some leaflets with a woman decked out in some fancy regalia, entitled ‘The Supreme Master Ching Hai’.

Whom I recognised as the Virgin Mary from the Mars Cafe (there she is, above).

Clearly something strange is afoot in Mongolia. A scary-looking person who looks like a slim Imelda Marcos is promoting vegetarianism in the land of meat and milk. Oh, if only we could have a million Supreme Masters to rescue and love all the dogs that abound! We later found out another new age guru and promoter of vegetarianism, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, is also popular here.

In any case, thanks to the Supreme Master, I managed to have some amazingly delicious Mongolian-style dumplings, which were big and fat and stuffed with fried cabbage and carrot (and some unecessary TVP chunks). I also tried a Mongolian soup (rather bland); doughy noodles (traditional but not really my thing); a stir fry containing potato chips, mushrooms, pepper and TVP which reminded me of Peruvian Lomo Saltado; and a borscht (delicious).

But still, it made me uneasy. I don’t want people to be veggie just because The Supreme Master tells them so. However much I like her camp outfits and culty internet TV channel, once people realise she’s a complete fraud, won’t they start to think being veggie might just be a thing for campy, imperious, culty wierdies?

Come to think of it…

Elvis dumplings

2008-08-31T21:47:47Z

When we stayed with our friends in Okinawa, I wanted to cook them a meal. I’d seen pumpkins everywhere, which reminded me of a wonderful stew we had at Brown’s Field (of which more in a later post).

But while we were shopping I saw jiaozi wrappers. For a while now I’ve been thinking that the potential for unusual fillings in these delicious little parcels as been criminally under-explored. As everyone knows, Elvis was a big fan of fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. It just came to me as if in a dream as I stood in front of the refrigerated pastry selection: why not replace the toast with jiaozi wrappers and fry them instead? I am proud to announce that my latest jiaozi innovation, Elvis dumplings, was a great success.

They were very simple to make. 1) Buy jiaozi wrappers. (2) Mash a banana. (3) put a small blob of peanut butter and a small blob of banana in a wrapper, and fold into a dumping (my friend Diana has already put online the best explanation I’ve seen on how to do this. You can use water instead of egg for sticking the edges together). (4) Cook them pot-sticker style. (5) Eat and be happy.,

I love pot-stickers - dumplings which have been fried rather than boiled. To cook place them carefully in a thin layer of fairly hot oil in a large pan or flat-bottomed wok, and fry them for maybe 5 minutes. The aim is to get a lovely, crispy, brown surface on the bottom sides. When they all have golden-brown bottoms, pour in some water (say half a mug) and cover quickly (watching out for spitting oil). The cooking is completed by steaming the dumpings in the pan, until the water has all evaporated or been absorbed.

Incidentally, at the same time, I made a savoury filling of shiitake mushrooms, red cabbage, green onions, pine nuts, ginger and garlic, very finely chopped and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. It was a good filling. What I liked most was the red of the cabbage showing through the dumping wrapper. I’m planning on trying other colourful fillings in the future. Any ideas? Blueberries? Beetroot? They’s all purple/red though. I need more colours. And flavours. I’m thinking tomato and marmite; chilli and tea; curried potato (we;re talking mini samosas here); whiskey and ginger.

My favourite Beijing Restaurants

2008-08-31T21:48:31Z

Thanks to the excellent Beijingveg.com website, during our five weeks in Beijing we were able to amass enough mock meats to satisfy any gluten glutton.

Pure Lotus is supposed by most listings magazines to be the best vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We found the food quite good, but the way it was served was distracting. The menus are the size of small tombstones and as easy to hold. The dishes have names like “grand swallow nose treasure hot hot cold cold.¨ (I made that up but they honestly were that silly). And the serving dishes were enormous splats of porcelain with design features like big holes in the side through which scalding hot liquids could pour.

The vegetable dishes were disappointing, but the mock meats were pretty good. This was where we had the most delicious mock fish we’ve tasted: a soft, flakey ‘meat’, with a thick ’skin’ of pleasantly chewy seaweed, served steaming hot, in a delicious sweet, dark, bubbling sauce. The mock ribs were decent, but I wasn´t sure about the ´bones´. Having a bit of wood in my mouth just felt wierd. (Elsewhere we´ve had versions with edible ‘bones’ such as celery or lotus root. Much better.)

So, Pure Lotus, while it had some excellent dishes, was overrated, over priced, and silly. Having said that, I do agree with my friend Diana that the dry ice fruit at the end was good silly. And the teacups were cool.

My personal eating highlight in Beijing has been eating with the Vegan Social Club of Beijing at Still Thoughts. The food is reasonably priced, and there’s a good selection of dishes. I ‘m not sure it’s the best vegan food in Beijing; but eating in a group of 10 - 20 other veggies means you get to try pretty much everything on the menu. Highlights included a ‘crispy duck’ of fried tofu skin wrapped around dark, meaty mushrooms; large, soft, slightly spicy green peppers in a black bean sauce (something like a Chinese pimientos del padron); and long, thin aubergine, sliced crossways, with garlic and seitan stuffed between the slices. The green vegetables here were fresh and crunchy.

If that was my favourite eating experience, the restaurant that worked best without needing a big, fun crowd of fellow veggies was Bodhi Sake. It was in a beautiful setting: the courtyards and rooms of a Buddhist temple hung with lanterns and art. The menu had a good selection of vegetables and mock meats. The food was presented beautifully. We had the most memorable mock meat we’ve had yet: pork belly. It was served in an earthenware vessel on top of a bed of salty greens. The ‘belly’ was a type of gluten with a slightly smokey flavour; the ‘fat’ was konjac (or possibly rice-based) and melted in your mouth. We also had a delicious dish of long, dark, string shaped mushrooms, fried until nearly crispy.

As for my favourite individual dishes, the best greens we had were at Lotus in Moonlight. They also did a fantastic dish of tiny cubes of soft tofu, fried to a salty crisp on the outside, while keeping the inside silken.

My favourite mock duck was the duck at Beihe. It had a good savoury taste, a pleasant texture, and was served with celery instead of cucmber, which worked very well. I suspect the real reason I liked it so much was that it came in a comedy “duck” shape.

The best spicy dish was fish at the restaurant by the Big Bell temple. It blew my head off. I liked it so much I went back again on another visit to Beijing. It had a nice atmosphere (maybe a bit too dark though) and that dish was amazing. Also good was the little chunks of ‘lamb’. The place was hard to find, but fantastic value and really tasty.

An honourable mention goes to Cat restaurant, which to my knowledge is the only organic vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. They spoke great English, were incredibly friendly, and served the freshest vegetables I had.

A finally, a dishonourable mention to Gong De Lin. It is often mentioned in guidebooks as thir token vegetarian restaurant, but I have no iidea why. It was without doubt the worst meal we’ve had in a Chinese vegetarian restaurant - for example, a mock fish which was a lump of mashed potato with a gluey coating, in a pool of watered down tomato ketchup. Don’t go!

I´m missing Beijing. It´s an interesting city, and a great place to be vegan.