European food II - vegan snacks from London

When I proclaimed my love of London, I didn't make it to the details of what I actually bought when I was left to wander supermarkets and food stores for an hour.

Here, we have some of the products that we I purchased. Not all, mind you, because a number are being carried back to Australia and it seems more sensible to review products after they have been eaten than before. For the purposes of Vegan MoFo, I am also overlooking the ones that were vegetarian but not vegan.

A subset of Waitrose purchases

First up, that raw, vegan food aisle.

I bought the beetroot flax crackers, a raw cacao bean bar, and a small pack of raw vegan truffles (shown in the top photo but not the one immediately above). The chocolate bar and truffles both featured cacao beans, coconut, nuts, and dried fruit (raisins and dates). I found them to taste like the raw truffle balls I so love to make at home, but more chocolatey. They were dense and soft and chewy all at once, and rather wonderful all up.

Despite my enjoyment of the cacao-based snacks, I actually liked the flax crackers even more. The crackers were made of flax seeds, raw air dried beetroot, apples, banana, cinnamon, lemon juice and coconut. They managed to taste of all of these ingredients, which gave a quite magical result. I ate them with a chai latte and highly recommend the combination.

Waitrose also provided me with my first proper cereal since we left Australia. Spain and Portugal didn't seem to do cereal outside of sweetened children's varieties, and occasionally muesli (neither of which I like). The flakes I bought featured raisins, dates, dried apple, and a mix of wheat flakes and bran. I ate them in London from a bowl (as we had a kitchen) and around the country out of cups and mugs (when we didn't have bowls) and the box lasted me right up until the end of our trip.

I had a lot of trouble deciding on a flavour of Nakd bars. They had chocolate mint, apple pie and berry, amongst others, but banana bread won out on a whim. I would love to try the rest of the range as these were definitely a step above your standard fruit-based cereal bar. They even managed to taste of banana bread, which was fortunate, because if they had just been banana I would have been a bit disappointed.

Most of the chocolate I bought is being carried home, but we did choose some to eat on our travels and this Divine 70% cocoa chocolate with ginger and orange (sorry, Hannah!) was one of the ones selected.

It has quite a long ingredient list as the orange is provided as 'orange granules', but the block is dairy free and I found the orange and ginger to be subtle - desirable, in my view - with the chocolate being of the deep and intense variety. Indeed, it was almost reminiscent of coffee with the depth of flavour.

Waitrose also provided me with Marmite rice cakes. Marmite, for those not in the know, is a yeast spread that could be called an English version of Vegemite. I have blogged about it and Australian Vegemite and Promite previously. It turns out that it works wonderfully in rice cake form.

In a related category to rice cakes, I bought 'Heat 'n Sweet' popcorn and Thai Sweet Chilli chickpeas for further savoury snacking. The popcorn was mildy spicy and included paprika and lemon in the ingredient list. The chickpeas were barely spicy but seriously enjoyable.

I ate the chickpeas as part of a slightly random picnic lunch, accompanied by the Marmite rice cakes and some Marks & Spencer's grapes and carrot sticks with hummus. The lunch preceded a walk in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, which was probably one of my favourite activities for the trip.

Scenery like this makes Yorkshire fully deserving of its reputation for beauty...

...as does this.

On that note, it is with some sadness that I leave travel snacking for the time being. As this goes out, we will be about to board our flight home, something that I suspect will make my heart ache. I shall remind it that we have been fortunate to have such a wonderful month - as indeed we have been.

From a blog perspective, stay tuned for some vegan recipes to commemorate the rest of Vegan MoFo, before a return to travel posts in November!

This post is part of my Vegan Month of Food contributions for October 2012.

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