i have a serious brain disease. please bring me a cat.
Whenever I’m visiting Virginia, if I go nowhere else, I try to get by Harrison Street Coffee Shop. They have a good assortment of breakfast and brunch items, sandwiches, soup and salad. Not big heavy meals, but exactly the amount of food I want. And almost everything is vegan. Oh yeah, and they usually have some baked goods around. And the coffee is good. They only down side is that the hours can get sketchy when VCU is out.
No, I’m not doing anything for Cinco de Mayo other than posting this photo I took in Puebla. Well, I’m baking a banana bread. That doesn’t count though, does it?
Just for the heck of it, here’s another favorite from that trip. Swine flu be damned, I wanna go back! See the whole set from that trip here.
As glorious as it was to escape Atlanta for a nice warm vacation, it was definitely jolting to come back to the cold and/or nasty of this week. If you want to relax, turn your brain off, read a bunch of books, and be warm, I can highly recommend a caribbean cruise. I was in the sun with a book whenever possible. What I don’t like is that if you do an excursion, you really don’t get to experience the port.
Okay, what you really want to know is what did I eat, right? Even though Royal Caribbean says on their website that they don’t cater to vegans, they really do. You will be able to fill yourself up just fine from the buffets. My typical breakfast was a big pile of fresh fruit, steamed rice and stir fried veggies, bagel with peanut butter, potatoes in various forms, some other whole grain bread with margarine (they had a brand, Bibo, that’s vegan), sometimes cereal, soy milk (just ask for it) and coffee. Lunch, I’d have a big ol’ salad along with whatever cooked vegetables were on the buffet. Sometimes Indian food. We at dinner in the dining room. Every night they had a pasta dish as a choice, so that was always an option. Also, on our cruise, they had an Indian dish every night that was usually vegan if you had them keep the raita. The first night was the hardest, but after that they started preparing special dishes for us. Every night we’d get a platter of roasted or grilled veggies along with the other dishes. Desserts were various fruit bowls. No, you won’t get any vegan cake. But while the omnis were gorging themselves every day on the extensive dessert bar and gaining an average of 8 pounds, I actually ate healthier than I do at home, ate tons of food, and lost weight.
Sadly they did attempt two things for us that were not good. In the past, apparently the pastry chef had whipped up some fruit wrapped in phyllo dough that was a nice dessert. We tried to explain that to them, but what they brought out was fruit wrapped in plain phyllo. Yep, no canola spray, no margarine, just plain. Er, no.
The other thing they tried to do was make cornbread. Vegan cornbread is pretty easy to make, but apparently they had no idea how to approach it. So we got this little loaf that seemed to be made of corn flour, not corn meal. And I don’t know what they used for the fat and binder. It pretty much tasted like nothing and had an odd texture. But, they did try. And honestly, we didn’t need these extra items. There was plenty of food for us.
So what about eating in port? In San Juan, Puerto Rico, we met up with friends of Danielle that took us to Cafe El Punto. Their specialty is a half an avocado filled with beans with rice and fried plantains on the side. Yum! Please excuse the blurry pic.
In St. Thomas, we were diving so we didn’t get to eat lunch there. (We saw a sea turtle, a moray eel and an octopus! No sharks this time though.) But there’s a place you have to hit called Rootsie’s Ital. Matt and Danielle got to go and loved it. Rootsie apparently cooks everything in a clay pot and then brings it to the shop. I’m so jealous I didn’t get to eat his food. Check out a pic of him here. You’ll find his place on the main road behind the big shopping area just past the catholic church.
We did an excursion in St. Maarten, so we didn’t eat there. Although they did serve sandwiches on the sailboat on our way back from snorkeling and enjoying the beach. Matt talked them into making us sandwiches with just lettuce and tomato. The bread was nice, so it actually wasn’t bad.
At Labadee, the ship caters the food so it was similar to what we have available on board, just much more limited. Oh yeah, there’s also a Johnny Rockets on board. But after eating all the lovely fruit and vegetables, the Streamliner was rather meh. I want someone to chop up fruit and veggies for me every day. I could totally live like that.
I almost forgot…we got to tour the ship’s galley! It is unbelievably huge. And, you’ll be happy to know, everything is separated. Meats and veggies and dairy are all kept in separate refrigerators. There are also separate cooking areas.
Anyway, it was really hard coming back. I never used to take tropical vacations, but they are starting to grow on me. 😉 A bunch more pics are in my flickr account. I’ll leave you with this sunset.
It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was frantically putting out baked goods samples for a packed room full of people shuffling by our table. Aside from a couple of disasters like having a whole box of whoopie pies arrive destroyed and running out of food way too early, I think it went fairly well. Everything seemed to be well received. The cinnamon rolls & Teese bread were the first to go. Leigh has a great post about our adventures, so I’ll be lazy and point you over there. Kevin and I shared a room with Leigh & Ken and Josh Hooten. Normally I’d say I’m too old for those kinds of sleeping arrangements, but it worked out just fine.
What I will do is give a run down of what I ate in Boston. Which wasn’t all that much with all the travel and stress. But we still managed a couple of restaurant visits.
Friday night we went to T.J. Scallywaggle’s. It’s a vegan pizza place. It has limited seating and probably does most business as take out. I had a chicken parmesan sub.
Kevin ordered the cheeseburger pizza.
We were starving, so any food was good food. I traded half my sub for a couple of pieces of Kevin’s pizza. I think my biggest complaint would be that the sauce wasn’t very flavorful. I like my pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. More complex. I wish I could remember what the crust was like because that’s also a huge part of what makes a pizza good. But I was totally in scarf mode.
At the festival, after we ran out of stuff to sell and give away, Kevin ran off and got us a falafel wrap and some Teese nachos from the Chicago Soy Dairy guys. The falafel was pretty good, but no Ali Baba’s. The new Teese nacho sauce is pretty amazing. It seems to melt to the perfect texture. I think it wants some spicing up though. Still it gives you a great base to season the way you like.
Saturday night we all dragged our exhausted selves to My Thai for vegan Thai food goodness. We’d been drooling over a menu all day and were really excited at the concept of all those yummy Thai options. We we got there, Eric Prescott was working. We’d met him earlier at the show, and he ended up helping our table. It was kind of surreal. I think he probably doesn’t sleep with all that he has going on. We were also joined by Sarah Kramer and Jae Steele. We’d been hanging out with them a bit here and there throughout the weekend. Both of them are totally sweet.
We started with stuffed fried wontons. Yummy!
And then, my entree arrived, Mee Krob. It was HUGE. To be fair, about a third of the plate was greens. Still, I powered my way through most of it. There were so many wonderful flavors on my plate. The lemongrass beef had many layers of complexity. The rice paper stack I got was stuck together, so I gave up pretty quickly on making little rolls. Still, I enjoyed stacking my fork with various combinations of things from my plate so each bite was a little different.
We were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get a proper brunch because our flight left fairly early. We did get bagels with tofu spread. Of course, I can’t remember the name. I had the veggie tofu spread and thought it was pretty tasty.
Or at least on Paradise Island and in Nassau. We stayed at Atlantis and ended up eating most meals there. If you can completely ignore how much stuff costs, you will probably be okay there. Even so, I’d suggest bringing in provisions. Here I’ll just tell you what we did. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to someone.
We got in Tuesday around lunch time. Atlantis has a Johnny Rockets on site, so we just hit that. A little shy on veggies, but it got the job done. Plus it was really filling. So when we had a function with hors d’oeuvres later, we ate the one we could eat and were good with it.
Wednesday morning we had our first diving lesson, so we wanted to eat light. Okay, I’m about to launch into a testimonial for Pro Bars about now. I already knew they were tasty. But I didn’t know they’d really hold up as a meal replacement, even through a bunch of physical activity. And they were the perfect thing to have if you don’t want a big ol’ full stomach.
I think we just snacked a little in the afternoon and played in the water. For dinner, we went to Carmine’s in the Marina Village. It’s Italian food served family style. The waiter was very accommodating. The menu was not exactly veg friendly, but we were able to piece together something. Apparently they make their pasta, so it’s all eggy. But they did have some dried pasta on hand. I think it was gluten free. They tossed that with oil and garlic. It was okay and filled the tummy, but not even close to as good as something I could whip up at home. They have sides of veggies you can order. If you ask for steamed it’ll be vegan. So we got broccoli. I chopped some up and tossed it with my pasta. They also had an appetizer we could have which was actually really good. It was grilled portobello mushrooms on a bed of spinach (although the menu said arugula) tossed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. I’m not a giant portobello fan, but these were really nice.
Thursday, we weren’t diving until the afternoon so we got room service. They do have soy milk, so I had granola. Kevin had plain bagels with jelly. Oh, and there are at least 2 Starbucks at Atlantis so you can get your coffee and soy milk fix. Before diving, we just had Pro Bars for lunch. Again, they held up through the activity just fine.
Thursday night we decided to venture across the bridge into Nassau for dinner. We saw an Indian restaurant, Clay Oven, on the way in from the airport and decided to try that. We’re a little spoiled when it comes to Indian food since we have some really amazing restaurants here in Atlanta. But this was good, if dumbed down a bit. But they were really nice and had a number of things they could make vegan for us. Kevin had Aloo Ghobi (potatoes & cauliflower) and I had Vegetable Korma. And we were able to have Roti as well.
Friday morning we snacked on provisions and ate leftover Indian for breakfast. I don’t remember eating lunch, but we headed into town again that night, this time to Thai Lotus. We stepped in there after Indian food the night before to see if they had anything we could eat. Again, we had options. They had tofu and would basically sub it into any of the dishes. And they were cool about leaving out the fish sauce. We had vegetable spring rolls and then Kevin had a Stir Fry Ginger with Tofu which was good, but was a pretty standard stir fry. I had the Thai Green Curry with Tofu and it was as good as any I’ve ever had. Afterwards, we headed to the ice cream shop in the Marina Village and had some sorbet.
Saturday morning we were diving again, so bars for breakfast. After diving we went to Johnny Rockets again for lunch. Dinner was a function. The resort caterers seem to think vegan = flavorless. But it was the veggie burgers from earlier were filling enough to carry us through so we weren’t starving.
So that’s what we ate. There’s also the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat right down the beach from Atlantis. They have a vegetarian buffet you can get for brunch or dinner. We didn’t try it because the woman sounded a little sketchy about what may or may not be vegan and gave the impression that we’d have a hard time finding out about the ingredients. But it might actually be a good option.