Brief holiday post

The both of us were going crazy at work so we decided to take a 2 week holiday :) Luckily I actually had enough holiday hours clocked up so I didn't have to miss out on any pay.

We were going to do an east-west train trip but alas we didn't have enough (any) money so we opted for a Bed n Breakfast a lot closer to home, in Tamborine Mountain (Gold Coast). Basically we spent a week drinking wine and bush walking. It was freezing. It was awesome.

We stayed at a place called Wallaby Ridge retreat - aptly named.

It was a self contained room, so I cooked most of our food. We had a couple of lunches out, but there isn't many options for us. I forgot to look places up before we left.

I made a pasta dish with the delicious mushrooms the BnB owner supplied us with every morning (she gave us mushrooms and tomatoes instead of eggs and bacon). It's just brocolli, mushrooms, chilli and tofu cooked in a white wine and chiken style broth with capers. (I did take our whole kitchen with us). On the side I stewed up one of the street stall chokoes with nuttlex, salt and pepper. Yum.

She also gave us fresh home baked bread nearly everyday! She must have thought we were such greedy gutses. It was so so good though. 

Another dinner I cooked up - a chickpea vege curry type thing with a can of tomatoes and garam masala. I left out the rice because we were eating so much bread - didn't really need any more carbs!

Another pasta - I made this after a bottle of wine so I can't really remember what's in it. Sweet potato, black beans, corn, tin tomatoes and oregano I think. Our room ended up smelling of oregano - it's the only herb I took.

Now this looks revolting but it's the best idea I ever had. We took most of our lunches with us, picnic style on our many walks. This is a take on chicken salad - I sliced up some chickpea cutlets (from Veganomicon), mixed through some capers, grated carrot, red onion and homemade mayonaise. Amazing on a sandwich and with a spoon.

We decided to do a winery tour (be driven around to taste copious amounts of wine? yes please!)* and it included a lunch. We emailed ahead to make sure they could do vegan for us, and they gave us the vegetarian option with the cheese taken out. It was divine. A vegetable stack of grilled eggplant, sundried tomatoes, pumpkin, zucchini, sitting on top of a potato rosti which was on top of a giant lettuce leaf and little cubes of capsicum with balsamic vinegar. Unfortunately they forgot cheesecake and custard wasn't vegan so no dessert :( I can't for the life of me remember which winery we had lunch at, but I'll update later with the name.

It was such a nice trip, and I have a million photos of the wallbies to go through!

*Sadly, almost, if not all of the wine available was not vegan friendly. I won't be reviewing any of those. I think a couple of the wines we got had no mention of egg, fish or milk on their labels, but unfortunately you can't go by that as gelatin is not required to be written on the labels since it isn't considered an allergen.