Vegan Treats From Levenshulme Market

Hi readers. I'm afraid I lost my blogging mojo for a while with life stuff and the usual chronic illness/fatigue getting in the way. I don't want to stop blogging though and I have lots of pics of stuff from the last few months. Instead of trying to tackle a backlog though I thought I'd dive in with something current. Yesterday Matt was on All FM radio in the morning. I went with him as I always enjoy visiting there and it also meant I'd get to go to one of my favourite bargain stores as there's a huge B and M Bargains not far from the station. As we were parking up we noticed there was a market on so we decided to pop along after the show as we'd heard good things about it. Oh my goodness, I was not prepared to discover POUTINE! I gained a fondness for poutine in the late 1980's when I spent a year as an exchange student in upstate New York. The nearest big city was Montreal so there were many treks to Canada for nightclubbing and gigs and many bowls of poutine consumed at the end of those nights out. Coming from somewhere where chips and gravy is practically a regional dish the addition of chunks of cheese only improved on such comfort food.

Matt had never heard of it but is now a big fan. I don't know what vegan cheese they used but it tasted great and the skin on chips were perfectly drowned in mushroom gravy. We will definitely be back for more of this. As well as the poutine stall there were lots of great artist run stalls and various other world food stalls and a bar. We were amazed to see vegan options clearly listed on most of the food stalls. We spotted noodle dishes, Indian snacks, empanadas, fantastic breads, cake and icecreams. We didn't have a great deal of cash on us but we decided to try two cuisines so alongside the poutine we picked the Polish stall. Here we picked up of box of mixed vegan pierogies to take home. These came with gerkins and pickled veg. They were mushroom and buckwheat and cabbage and sauerkraut if I remember correctly. It was my first introduction to pierogies and I loved them.

The Polish stall was also selling Kombucha for just  £1 a bottle. I tried the maple flavour in this brand last year and adored it so I'm excited to try this Schisandra flavour. I'd never heard of Schisandra but apparently it's a berry used in traditional Chinese medicine and is good for colds.

Hopefully the kombucha will come in handy this weekend as I've had a stinking cold for the last week. I'm taking it easy today trying to get over it whilst Matt's out playing at a festival then tomorrow we're hoping to tackle the overgrown mess that is our backyard tomorrow if the weather holds. Being a British bank holiday weekend it's probably unlikely!

It'll be homemade roast veg and chorizo sausage pizza for tea tonight. The chorizo seitan sausage is from Viva Vegan. I made a batch the other week then chopped up the sausage and froze the chunks so I can just grab a handful for pizza or tofu scrambles. The picture above is our dessert. It's the chocolate peanut butter brownies from the Superfun Times Vegan Holdiay Cookbook which I got for Christmas and this is shockingly the first thing I've actually made from it. If any has any recommendations for other recipes please leave them in the comments.