Vegan MoFo '14

Ahoy there! It's time for Vegan MoFo again, and I hope to be blogging about food shaped like or linked to animals but that doesn't contain any animal ingredients over at my other blog - dropscone

I'm just putting this here as a little placeholder, because it's easier to comment on Blogger blogs using this ID than my Wordpress one, but if you're here it's probably because I commented on your blog, and if you want to see mine it's mostly over there! :)

Worcester Weekend

I had a super weekend in Worcester. I'll be dining out (oh, I'm sooo clever) on the food pictures over at my other blog for Vegan MoFo for a few posts, but I took a couple of other shots of nice places, so here they are! 

I was very taken with this bit of waste ground - I'm sure the profusion of various wildflowers wasn't natural, I'm guessing someone broadcast a load of seeds over the land, but that doesn't detract from how pretty they were to walk through. It's something I wish more places would do. 

There seem to be some very attractive buildings in Worcester. It doesn't hurt that we managed to catch some sunlight on Saturday.

Not pictured, but awesome: a shop space run by Healthy Planet that was giving away free books! You can find out where your nearest one of these is on that page, there's a map. I got some great cook books, including one for making sweets from the 70s that's really reminiscent of one my mum used to own (or maybe still does?).

We stayed in a Travelodge, which was adequate, if a bit on the sparse side. One of the friends we had gone to meet up with heroically offered to take any room-service biscuits off my hands, but I had to inform her that actually none had been provided, the only complimentary things were a few packets of instant coffee, tea and sugar, and in the bathroom one solitary, utilitarian-looking miniature bar of soap. Fortunately I had made and brought along flapjacks, and was able to make real coffee with a bag of Machu Picchu and a tea strainer, and B had a bottle of Original Source shower gel, so we left the dinky soap intact.

I found cheap chestnut puree, so now I'm hunting for recipes...

Here's the first hopeful (the sorbet). Not sure if chestnut cream is the same as chestnut puree. If only people would post product shots...

Breaking Bread: Chestnut Dark Chocolate Frozen Petit Fours: I have to admit I was skeptical about this cake, because I generally don't like frozen butter cakes - even brown butter cakes. But Aaro...

Beautiful morning at the Botanic Gardens

Since I started blogging for Vegan MoFo over at http://dropscone.wordpress.com/ I've been itching to post non-food related things as well, but I don't want to annoy people who are following me. Since most people are aiming to post at least five times a week the last thing readers need is to be bogged down with non-food related ramblings, so even though I wasn't going to do anything with this, I've changed my mind.

This morning was a beautiful crisp and sunny start to the day, and my significant other (B) and I finally got to the University of Leicester Botanic Garden (I've been meaning to visit this place for about 12 years! We tried earlier in the summer but it was just about to close).

If I'd have known how flipping great this place is, I would have been there WAY sooner! It has loads of really lovely stuff!

They were hosting a sculpture exhibition, and some of it was pretty nice, but the huge variety of plants and trees was the most impressive thing about the place.

dropscone on blogger

I'm taking part in Vegan MoFo this year, over at my wordpress account but a lot of people have blogger accounts, and I'm having trouble keeping track of MoFo-ers who use blogger with that reader (i.e. I've missed a bunch of new posts on blogs I thought I'd subscribed to).

I'm just going to use this account to comment on blogger posts and see if I have more options like this.

Must be getting old. People were talking about feeds and...er...other stuff and I have no idea what most of it was. I think I've signed up to a bunch of stuff that's meant to consolidate other stuff but there are so many competing now and I don't really know what's going on (and feel like I'm too busy to learn at the moment). Waaah!