Questing in Munich: Happy Cow and panacotta

A sculpture, or me after a long day of questing?

This post is partially The Trew and Faithfull Storie of a Maiden on a Queste to Find Awesome Vegan Foode and partly an homage to Happy Cow, that website/app that helpeth the lonelie travelling vegan to findeth a vegan restaurant. (Yes, I do like the Olde-Tyme spelling too much. I'll try to stop.)
Since my first trip abroad as a vegan when I went to Italy, I've always looked up veg restos on Happy Cow. It's a very helpful resource because it has its own review system, so you can look up restaurant without even leaving the site and 2: it's in English, so I don't have to Google Translate a website to read a menu in garbled Babelfish-speak.
So on the one day I was exploring Munich by myself while my Mom was day-tripping outside the city, I decided to voyage forthe and finde a vegane restaurant. So I looked up the vegan restos on the Happy Cow app and decided I would go to the art gallery and then get a late lunch at Max Pett, only a 15-minute walk or so from my hotel.

Interior, Pinakotek der Moderne, Munich

Excellent plan! I walked to the art gallery, taking gorgeous photos on the way, and thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the gallery itself. When I was done, I plotted my course to the resto via a major thoroughfare and coincidentally passed a vegan clothing and accessories shop-which I would have if I bothered to look up stores on Happy Cow and not just food establishment, and which I would have gladly stopped in if it had been open. It turns out quite a few places close on Sunday in Munich!

 Vegan panacotta: worth questing for

Eventually I got to the university street that Max Pett was located on, despite my lingering frustration with overly long German street names (which pale in comparison to overly long and really similar Dutch street names) and then I couldn't the restaurant.
Okay, I thought, sometimes universities are quirky and roundabout and they hide entrances in the back of a building, or through a quad, or in the basement of a building that you have to walk through a music hall to find. So I looked--peering through fences, looking for signs, even walking into the foyer of what I think was a dorm, unharassed by dorm security probably because I was carrying a tourism guide and it would be too much trouble to ask me what I wanted if I don't speak German. I looked and looked and just when I thought I would faint from hunger pangs--since we know vegan breakfasts are often too light to sustain a traveller's miles of walking--I looked some more, adn realized I had to give up. I backtracked on this cute university street and as I approached the street I entered on, I saw the restaurant. It was cute and charming and not a quirky university resto at all. Problem was, it wasn't on the bock the map said it was. I would have found it if I had even glanced before turning right to follow the map. Ah, the challenges of exploring on your own! If I had been with my mother, she would undoubtedly turned left instead of right despite my clear navigation and I wouldn't have wandered loste and hungrie amongst the universitie's faire bildings.
But it was worth the quest: Max Pett serves up delicious vegan fare. The restaurant is a little hipster-precious, but when you serve the only vegan panacotta I've ever seen on a menu and it happens to be amazing, you can get away with a little 'tude. Even after a very long queste.

The best meal I ever ate

The best meal I ever ate wasn't a meal. It may not have been technically "the best" either, but it was by far the most surprising.
It was also recent, on my trip to Europe with my mother in June of this year. Mom and I were wandering around Munich's downtown core our first morning there, already tired and looking to sit after having wandered around the Viktualienmarkt in circles. Mom saw a little cafe just off the main market street, where they were making delicious-looking pastry right inside the large front window. We went in, mom probably delighted for a chance to rest with a coffee and a sweet; me with the knowledge I likely wouldn't be able to have anything, since coffee without soy milk is too harsh for my stomach. As expected, they did not have soy milk but the waitress was fluent in English and told me the pastry were vegan. Whaaat?? Yes, no milk or butter and eggs. She didn't even need me to prompt her--she knew what vegan meant, and what the ingredients were. Well hot damn, I'll take three! No, I had one, but it was amazing.
Even more amazing: while we watched the cook behind us pull the dough into rounds, my mother said, I think my mother made these when we were young. My mom's parents were German, and she remembered sitting around, watching her mom cook the dough in a pot full of fat, waiting with her siblings for the dough to cool down before they could eat it. So it may not have been the most nutritionally complete meal, but it was pretty sweet.

(Road) Avocado: small-town vegan pastry

Today is a road trip day. I packed myself in a car with two other adults and a baby and we headed off. At the obligatory Canadian road-trip stop--Tim Horton's--I did the obligatory vegan ingredient check. I figured I would be left with the same options as usual: bagel with peanut butter, or oat cakes. (And incidentally, who the fuck actually eats oat cakes? I've never seen anybody eat one, but they are at every single store. SRSLY.)
But this time, it was like the heavens opened and showered vegan pastry over all the earth: the allergen guide showed no animal ingredients in the apple strudel. STFU, Mr. Horton's!! No really, it's true. So I asked my travel companions about a dozen times if they wanted a vegan apple strudel, and then I went and ordered one. And it was only eighty cents. Lord have mercy!!

Vegan food will save the world

I make vegan food for sharing a lot. We have potlucks at work, and I bring food to bookclub, and last week someone came in to see me at the office and as a thank-you I brought home-made biscotti. Yes, I brought darling little green tea biscotti from vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. As a bribe, I can tell you baked goods are very effective. It's especially great when people don't know it's vegan initially--they pronounce it delicious (of course it's delicious! It's free goodies that someone gave you--hell yeah, that's always delicious!) and then you're like, "It's delicious, and it's vegan. BAM!" Because they are only so many reasons why vegan eating is hard. Animal products are the default, they are subsidized and artificially cheap and get added to everything; and people think vegan food can't be delicious. Once people realize that eating vegan is easier than it used to be, that you should know what's in your food and that adding, for example, a milk ingredient to potato chips is weird and wrong and why the hell would they need to do that anyway?? ...and also how easy and delicious vegan food is, then we're halfway to eliminating animal products. And saving the world, of course.

Spinster buns

I bought a stand mixer last week. It was on sale for Mother's Day--$199 down from $349!--and since I'm going to be a cat-hoarding childless spinster forever, I figured I might as well buy it for myself. I finally set it up on Saturday, and this being a long weekend in Canadia, I have had two and a half days to play with it. And play with it I have! I have already made seitan, focaccia, and cinnamon buns.


I've never made cinnamon buns before. When recipes involve making dough, kneading dough, and rolling it out, my eyes start to glaze over and, zombie-like, I pull out my cupcake cookbook.


But this was delightful. The stand mixer kneaded the dough for me, twice! And then mixed the icing too. I used VegNews' recipe here; I found it less fussy than the other one I checked. And now I have cinnamon buns to share with my friends and co-workers, which is who you share baked goods with when you're a spinster.

Peanut butter cups of awesome

I posted this photo on Tumblr and those Tumblr vegans loved it. Come on, I got 21 notes! I know that doesn't compare to the few thousand or so notes Animals Talking in All Caps gets. (And no, I'm not jealous, why do you ask?) But for me it's pretty good. Someone even asked for the recipe! It's not a recipe as such, but here it is, cross-posted from Tumblr:

It’s really easy! They’re just labour-intensive—it usually takes me an hour or so to make a batch. Mix some peanut butter with some maple syrup or agave—maybe 1/2 cup peanut butter to 1/4 cup agave. It’ll thicken and get hard to stir, but that’s what you want, so it won’t leak out of the chocolate cup when you bite it. Melt vegan chocolate chips or semi-sweet baking chocolate in the microwave—about a cup or one and a quarter cups. I usually nuke for a minute then stir and repeat until it’s melted and smooth. The key to getting them to look right is to use silicone muffin/cupcake cups. Smooth some melted chocolate into the cups until you’ve used up about half your chocolate. With a spoon, scoop out some of the peanut butter mixture and gently use another spoon to scoop it into a chocolate-d silicone cup. Repeat until you’re out of peanut butter mixture, or you’ve used up all your choclate-d cups. (If you have leftover melted chocolate or peanut butter mixture, you can make more of what you don’t have—until you run out of silicone cups!) Cover the peanut butter mixture scoops in the cups with more melted chocolate—just enough to cover. If the chocolate has cooled while you were scooping out the peanut butter mixture, do another nuke-and-stir to melt it again. When you’ve run out, you’re done! Just allow the peanut butter cups to cool so that the chocolate hardens, but if you’re impatient you can put them in the fridge for a few minutes instead of leaving them at room temperature. Pop them out of the silicone and if you’re not eating them the same day, you can leave them on the counter, but cover them with plastic wrap. Enjoy!

Microwave vegan brownie

Microwave vegan brownie. The video doesn't lie--it's not gourment by any means. But it's a single serving (okay, maybe two servings) and it's nom-worthy. Especially for those nights when you have no sweets on hand and sweets are definitely required--and you're comfortable eating a brownie out of a mug by yourself on the couch. While watching Buffy season 3 and crying.
...Enjoy!

Convince them with baked goods

Baked goods are the thing that omnivores don't get. They understand beans; they understand tofu, even if they don't like it; the totally understand healthy benefits of eating more veggies. But whenever I talk to people about cupcakes, cookies, banana bread--even waffles--they ask, "But what about eggs?" In people's minds, everything with flour requires eggs. Or it will fall apart. EMERGENCY! THE VEGANZ BAKED GOODZ WILL FALL APART!!

Ahem. They won't. Cupcakes, cookies, banana bread and even my beloved waffles stick together fine--just various combinations of flour, liquid, oil, sugar and baking powder and baking soda. The only thing I can recall needing something to bind it is biscotti. I think it's because it's a much drier recipe--only 1/2 cup or liquid to 1 1/2 cups flour. And then, 2 tablespoons of flax seed beaten with water save the day.
And vegan baked goods surprise the hell of out people. I make lovely layered cupcakes, like the lemon-blueberry babies pictured (recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the world), and people can't figure out how vegan baked goods can be so scrumptious. I think once, a long time ago, someone made cookies with hemp seed and granola and kale and dried seaweed and fed them a thousand or so people and forever cemented in the public consciousness that vegan baked goods are gross. But no--I promise you, I don't eat things that aren't delicious. So I convince them with baked goods!
Convince them with cupcakes like these, by making lemon cupcakes, lemon icing and blueberry sauce. When the cupcakes have cooled to the touch, use a spoon or small knife to cut a piece out of the top of each cupcake. Pipe or spread in some icing, spoon in a little sauce, and replace the piece. Add some more icing and sauce and top, and serve within a couple hours so the sauce doesn't disintegrate the cupcakes. And they will be convinced.