All you need is l💜ve… and Vegfest Brighton

Tags

Aneesh Popat, Bristol Bakehouse, cake, Cat & The Cream, Chocolate, Dosa Deli, Dragonfly, Ms Cupcake, Soapnut powder, Sunshine Kitchen, Teen VGN, The Honest Carrot, Vegan Society, Vegfest, Vegfest Brighton, Vegfest Bristol

Another fantastic event from the organisers of Europe’s largest vegan festivals.

Long overdue! Visiting the Viva! Roadshow in Gloucester has inspired me to pick a few photos from last month’s Vegfest in Brighton to share some of the sights with you.
I am a huge (no, try that again… HUGE!!!) fan of the Vegfest events that take place in Bristol, Brighton and London.
My journey to Brighton was somewhat turbulent but it was definitely worth the trip and every minute of waiting for the recovery van 😉

The gorgeous ladies from the Sunshine Kitchen

Alix Meek, the Vegan Society’s Business Development Assistant

The TeenVGN stall. Truly inspirational, you’re superstars!

Soapnut powder – a truly environmentally friendly choice. Probably the most innovative product I’ve seen at the show this year.

Soapnut powder in laundry tabs… ultimate convenience

Merryhill Mushrooms – Grow your own. Looks such fun. I wish I could have taken some home with me.

Caught ‘blue handed’: Ms. Cupcake with her ever popular cakes.

These stunning cakes were for sale on the VBites stall.

It appears that vegans don’t just eat nuts and leaves 😉

Incredibly fast, this man is a master of the Woks

Bangwok toppings.

Great name, great food 🙂

Nice as pie!

Dosa Deli. If you get the chance… just do it! Mmmmmm 🙂

Part of my Dosa lunch… there was something deliciously crunchy in there. Never got a chance to ask what the secret ingredient was.

Lunch… Oh my goodness this was so incredibly tasty. Full of flavour, variety of textures and just all round yummy!

Looking good!

Vegan Catering at its best. Cashew Catering from Lewes.

Mouthwateringly beautiful

Chocolatier Aneesh Popat

Some of Aneesh’s chocolates. How fabulous are these!?

Aneesh with his lovely fiancé

A day out at Vegfest is like elixir for the weary vegan traveller’s soul… When I arrived at the Bristol venue last year, I felt an incredible sense of ‘coming home’ and belonging! My family and I live in a tiny little community in the Cotswolds and we don’t usually mind being the ‘only vegans in the village’. But just occasionally I wish I could simply sit down to a vegan meal in a cafe without lengthy explanations. Sometimes, it would be amazing not having to explain why I choose not to eat animal products, where I get my protein from or whether I eat fish!
But here I find no judgement, no critics… simply a crowd of caring, open minds.

Just a small selection of images from Bristol 2013.
Blue skies, sunshine, live music and over 140 stalls, caterers and talks.

Amphitheatre with live music

Cat and the cream

Stunning colours in the May sunshine

Dragonfly

Ms. Cupcake

The Bristol Bakehouse

Aneesh Popat

Live music, a bar and blue skies… Life is good!

Another view over the Amphitheatre.

I’m incredibly lucky to work with organisations, charities and magazines who feel just as passionately about living without cruelty as I do. Because of that and thanks to this blog, Twitter and Facebook, I’ve got a real sense of connecting with ‘my community’. Click here to follow me on twitter and catch my latest Facebook updates… It would just make my day 🙂

How do you link up with like-minded people? I’d love to hear what works for you.

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Hope to see many of you at the next Vegfest event!
Vegfest Website
Twitter @VegfestUK

Nuts about Hot Chocolate…

Tags

Choc-a-Nut, Chocolate, cinnamon, cream, dairy-free, Food photography, hot chocolate, National Vegetarian Week, peanuts, Soyatoo, Sun-pat, Vegan, Vegetarian

Do you love chocolate? And how about peanuts? If you are a big hot chocolate fan, prepare yourself for the ultimate taste experience!

This week I’d originally made plans to share my best Nutloaf recipe with you but instead I’ve been very happily creating the food photography for National Vegetarian Week (19th-25th May). It’s the second year running that I’ve been involved with this hugely popular campaign and I was over the moon to be asked again. In 2013, the Vegetarian Society reached over 66 million people during the run-up and throughout the week! Totally amazing.

Helping to develop a veggie menu for a local school for NVW.

I really love what I do for a living – you probably have guessed that already!
Cooking and photographing delicious vegan and vegetarian recipes is my passion and I truly believe that gorgeous food images actually make a difference to people’s perceptions of veggie and vegan food. When an organisation like the Vegetarian Society reaches all these millions of people it’s awesome. If only one of them finds a photograph which makes them go ‘mmmhhhh, that looks scrummy!’… that’s a wonderful achievement. I assure you there’ll be lots of mmmhhhs and aaaahhhs this year as the recipes are great and the photographs look good enough to eat (if I say so myself 😉 ).

Better get back to my Hot Chocolate though!
I must have been very nice to my boyfriend as he bought me a little present this week. It’s clearly new, otherwise I would have spotted this ages ago! So for anyone who loves peanuts and chocolate…. (yep, that’s me jumping up and down excitedly!) there’s something new for you to try. This chocolatey peanut butter is a little firmer than ordinary peanut butter but it spreads easily on toast and melts beautifully into this hot chocolate. Poppy (Bunny Kitchen) has a lovely post on her blog that inspired me to try this combination.

A couple of weeks ago I bought some vegan spray cream for a chocolate mousse. I just love the way the cream looks and have been planning lots of fun dessert pics already. But for today I’ve gone for the big ‘Hot-chocolate-with-lashings-of-whipped-cream’ look!

‘You Must Be Nuts’ Hot Chocolate
For 2

500ml dairy-free milk
1 heaped tbsp cocoa powder
sugar or agave nectar to taste
1 tbsp of Choc-a-Nut
Whipped soya spray cream
ground cinnamon to sprinkle

Mix the cocoa with some of the milk to a paste. Add to the remaining milk in a saucepan and heat. Add the chocolate peanut spread and stir until it has melted. Sweeten to taste.
Pour into two heat-proof coffee glasses and top generously with cream and some ground cinnamon. Time to unplug the phone, switch off the computer and find someone you really love so you can share this. Sit back and enjoy!

Yes, this really is vegan!

What do you think? Do cookbooks need pictures? And do you find good food photographs really inspire you to try a recipe? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For more ‘yes, that really is animal-free’ pictures and temptations visit www.flavourphotos.com

Love is in the air…

Tags

Chocolate, chocolate mousse, dairy-free, dessert, Food photography, protein, tofu, Valentines Day, Vegan, Vegan Recipe Club, Vegetarian, Vegetarian Recipe Club, Viva!

… and so is the smell of chocolate in my house! With Valentine’s Day just round the corner this rich, indulgent chocolate mousse is the perfect dessert treat for two! But it’s so good that you might not even want to share this with anybody else!

Last week I worked on a fabulous commission for Viva!, the largest vegetarian and vegan organisation in Europe. I have always had a soft spot for this passionate campaign group from Bristol, as they were one of my very first clients. Without their support in the early days and regular commissions, who knows if I would still be photographing food today. Scroll right down on my page of published articles to see these very early beginnings. Haven’t photography styles changed!

Viva! produces a large number of guides on all things animal-free, health, nutrition and diet. My mission was to create an updated image for the cover of their ‘How to be dairy-free’ guide. The chocolate mousse recipe is from their Vegan and Vegetarian Recipe Club and is the quickest, most indulgent way to turn tofu and chocolate into a mouth-watering treat that will make you go weak at the knees with delight. Yes really… tofu!

If anybody ever asks me again where I get my protein from I might just show them this picture!!!

Luxury Chocolate Mousse

1 pack silken tofu (approximately 350g)
150g vegan chocolate
3-4 tbsp maple or agave syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
Pinch salt

Blend tofu and salt until completely smooth and creamy, scraping the sides of the bowl to ensure everything is blended properly.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler: Heat a couple of inches of water to boiling point in a saucepan. Turn the heat down and place a heat-proof bowl over the pan of water, making sure that the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the base of the pan. Now break the chocolate into chunks and place it in the bowl with the syrup and vanilla extract. Stir gently with a rubber or plastic spatula until the chocolate has completely melted.

Add the chocolate mixture to the tofu and blend again, using the spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl, as before. Taste and add more syrup if necessary and blend again. Refrigerate in individual serving dishes of your choice for an hour or so – nice shot glasses or little expresso cups look lovely.

I’ve used a piping bag for this mousse and added some dairy-free squirting cream.

Have you got a favourite tofu recipe, sweet or savoury? I bet there are some fabulous ideas out there!
Would be lovely to hear your comments. I hope you stick around for a bit and follow me on twitter or Facebook. Lots of love, Chava

Recipe from the Vegan and Vegetarian Recipe Club.
Link to Viva!’s Guides