Another international weekend so we went up to Filey to stay with some friends. I don’t see them as often as I’d like but its always nice when I do. When I first knew them they were really big meat eaters and didn’t have much time at all for vegetarian food. However over the years they’ve started to cook veggy meals at home and sometimes visit vegetarian restaurants. They’d made a really big effort on Friday night to make a vegan spread for us. They’d done a tagine from World Food Cafe, falafels, baba ghanoush, a courgette dish, carrot and rocket salad and a soya yoghurt sauce. It was all lovely.
On Saturday we had a tourist trip round Scarborough and had a lunch at Nutmeg vegetarian cafe. It was a bit of a green place and had run out of 2 out of 3 main course specials! Didn’t really matter as we’d only wanted a snack. I had a baked potato with hummus and carrot.
In the evening we got the train to York to visit Vanilla Black. The menu was very similar to the one on the website with one or two ingredient tweaks. I had vegan versions of the dhal followed by the pie. They were both delicious but the dhal was probably the highlight of all of our meals. It was nicely spicy, the potatoes were so soft and creamy and the candied chilli was hot! The pie had brilliant pastry – if I could criticise it slightly the mushroom filling could have been more moist but it was a delicious dish. The mushy peas were proper mushy peas, not just normal peas which had been mushed up. I was too full to bother about pudding! I couldn’t taste the other dishes but they seemed to go down well with everyone andeven the meat eaters enjoyed it and said they’d go back.
Cooking the Vegan Books 