Eating Out

Okay, so this post starts off really boring but it gets better at the end, I promise!!

Dining Out as a New Vegan (written July 25, 2010)

After my last post I met up with Toby and his dad at a coffee shop where I had a piece of delicious vegan slice. We went to the movies and I had nothing- of course, no popcorn because of all the butter!- and then we grabbed some dinner at a Thai restaurant. I had a bit of trouble but I chose a tofu dish, as did Toby- however, when mine came out I panicked because it was in a creamy sauce, and I wasn’t sure what it was made from. I asked the server and he didn’t know, so I asked Toby if I could swap with him and he agreed. However, they had bought the wrong dish out for him and the one they gave him had chicken! I assumed that I had read the menu wrong so I took the chicken off and then dug to the bottom to try the noodles- but they were warm, whereas the dish he ordered was a cold noodle salad. So, I called the server over and explained the mistake, and he told me that he would bring me out something new, and then he said that the dish I had originally ordered was vegan after all!! I should have known- if it weren’t Friday evening I may have been thinking more clearly, because all of the curry dishes I cook are made with coconut milk, so I guess this one was as well. So the server bought me out a new plate, which turned out to be incredibly spicy, but I ate it anyway- and in the end we only paid for 2 meals out of the 4 we were served. That was nice! And I was really grateful to Toby for swapping meals with me, especially because he didn’t like the dish I gave him- but he ate it anyway.

Yesterday Toby’s dad came up to our place and the boys ordered pizza while I had pasta with tomato sauce. Then for dinner I cooked couscous with grated carrot, chopped almonds, cranberries, salt, pepper and basil. Tasty, but I will get some raisins to add to the leftovers because it didn’t taste quite right without them!

We decided to do brunch today, so last night I spent over an hour looking online for brunch places that serve food that I can eat. It was so hard!! Breakfast, it turns out, is a difficult meal for vegans! It was almost impossible to find a place that served regular brunch food for the boys (eggs, pancakes, etc.) and vegan food for me. In the end we went to a place called Josie’s on the Upper West Side. Their online menu was a little different to the menu we got in the restaurant, but we all ordered the brunch special which had an appetizer, an entrée, a choice of juice beverage and a coffee or tea for $20. I had a dairy-free butternut squash soup, a tofu salad with spinach and grilled vegetables, a Mimosa (which I barely touched) and a coffee (which had free refills- yeah, I had a few!). Quite nice.

Because I’ve been eating out so much lately I really want some kind of easy way to check whether something on the menu is likely to have animal products. If I had an iPhone I would look for an app. But I don’t. So I have trouble and sometimes eat animal products without knowing. Today I had some biscotti which came for free with the coffee we ordered because I was really hungry and the restaurant I was in had nothing that I could eat on the menu. I looked it up afterwards and it has eggs. I was hoping it was made like bread but I should have known better. When in doubt, avoid the food.

For dinner I had a panini with greens, tomato and mushrooms- I asked them to remove the mozzarella from the sandwich that was on the menu. It came with coleslaw which I handed straight to Toby! This is a fairly good vegan dish, so long as they don’t grease the grill at all- or grease it with olive oil. Also, some people could make the Ciabatta bread using milk, but usually it’s made with water. If you overanalyze everything you’ll never get to eat out at normal restaurants with your friends and family, unless you eat plain old salads every time!