I’m dusting this here blog off for an announcement…

This is also my way of hoping you’ll all forgive me for being so slack in blogging and organising drinks nights… It’s all because my little brain has been busy plotting a big idea: Australia’s first Vegan Conference!

I love going to the Cruelty Free Festival and Vegan Expo. It’s good times, good food and a chance to catch up with people. But I’ve been craving opportunities for collaboration – a chance to get some of the brilliant vegan minds that exist in our community into a room to talk about what we can do as a movement.

This is all still very much a seedling of an idea, but I’d love to see speakers, panel discussions, workshops and interactive opportunities to really look at veganism from a whole variety of levels – animal activism, health, environmentalism, hell let’s get representatives from restaurants in to tell us how we can lobby for better vegan options, let’s look at campaigns that are working will within other movements, and the ways that veganism is going mainstream in the U.S. Let’s just all have a big ol’ campfire chat.

So there’s lots to work out still… like should this have more of a multi-day “camp” feeling which seems to be a trend amongst conferences these days or is that too big a commitment? When should we hold it? I’m pretty positive it’ll be in Sydney, so would you be willing to travel from elsewhere… And so on…

If you’d like to contribute your opinion you can take this here survey. Or as a replacement for this month’s Vegan Drinks let’s get together to discuss some ideas over beers. Friday May 27 I’ll be at The Courthouse Hotel in Newtown. Come swing by if you want to chat. Pretty informal. Hope to see you there!

Look, I organise a Vegan Drinks night. I love drunken reverie as much as the next person. And as a non-native Australian, I don’t feel quite right coming in and slagging off one of the country’s most celebrated customs. But as vegans, I think we all agree: Melbourne Cup is fucked.

And if you don’t, I’ll simply link you to this (difficult to watch) YouTube Video  and let you come to your own conclusions.

It can be an especially awkward time of year for vegans in the workplace who don’t want to come off as joyless buzzkills, but at the same time, can’t endorse the cruel “sport.” Our vegaroo contributor Tim recently lamented to me,

“I have a choice of either going along with the office and not really enjoying it, or ostracising myself by refusing to participate. While everyone else takes the day off to go party (and the next day to recover) I have to either stay in the office and work or take a day of leave. Either way, I feel like I’ll be judged poorly for not ‘playing with the team.’ “

So what are some alternatives?

For you Melbournians who have the day off, HorseRacingKills.com has a list of demonstrations and events you can attend.

If you’re in Sydney, I recommend this Not the Melbourne Cup Celebration at University of Sydney, which is what I’ll be attending. I also just learned about this Melbourne Cup protest happening that morning in Martin Place.

You can also sign Animal Australia’s pledge to never bet on horse-racing or donate to Charlies Angels Horse Sanctuary in Queensland, which is also the beneficiary of the next Sydney Vegan Bake Sale.

I’m sure there are far more events happening around the country, so I ask you to please share other alternatives in the comments.

I recently got married in Perth in June.

Photos by Carla Adams (http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlaadams/)

It was a beautiful day, not only because we managed to have beautiful weather (22 C and sunny – in the winter!); but because we pulled off a vegan wedding without complaint from the guests. In fact, we only heard rave reviews about the food and the simplicity of the wedding in general. Considering less than half of our guests were vegan and some of the others were enthusiastic carnivores, I consider this a great success!

I struggled a little with planning my vegan wedding – primarily with the catering – so I thought I would share my perspective with vegaroo! readers. I will focus on Perth’s catering options, but I’ll also provide tips for vegan wedding planning in general so it can apply to readers in other places as well.

Please bear in mind that there is definitely a whole heap of things that I know nothing about when it comes to planning a vegan wedding in Perth, mostly because we had a very small, very affordable wedding. Also, my husband did most of the planning! So please feel free to ask questions and I will seek an answer. Better yet, leave a comment with your advice for holding a vegan wedding in Perth or elsewhere.

Let’s Talk Catering

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Few things make me feel warmer and fuzzier than bringing together an awesome group of people for a great cause. On Friday night, we had a crowd of over 60 people gather together at The Hive in Erskineville for October’s installment of Sydney Vegan Drinks – some traveling from as far away as Canberra! 60 PEOPLE!!! I didn’t even think there were 60 vegans in Sydney!

We raised $318 for Pet Rescue – many thanks to Tim for coming to rep the organisation and “pass the bucket.” So many people also came promoting wonderful organisations, campaigns, and projects, as evidenced by our literature table.

It was really wonderful to meet so many new people, and hang out with an awesome, diverse crowd of vegans in a casual atmosphere.

I’ve had a number of people ask me “When are you going to do an event in Queensland?” or “Hey, why don’t you start a drinks night in Melbourne?” Would that I had the disposable income to travel around the country planning and attending happy hours. But if anyone from another part of Australia is interested in setting up a vegaroo! drinks night, I’m happy to do all I can to promote. Check out the official Vegan Drinks website  too, for tips on setting up an event in your area.

A million thank you’s to everyone who stopped by, chatted, promoted the event and helped make the evening a smashing success!

I took heaps of photos, which are up on Facebook -  I didn’t want to post them here without people’s permission. Become a fan of vegaroo to see them! Small informal poll: Would early December work for our next Drinks Night, or are people generally starting to get busy with holiday parties and plans? Hope to see you at our next event, regardless!

UPDATE: Forgot to add, I had a few people who couldn’t attend Friday ask how they could donate to Pet Rescue. Why, by clicking here!

This past Sunday was the VegOut picnic in Sydney’s Centennial Park, wrapping up the two week VegPledge as part of 350.org’s Global Work Party on 10/10/10. The sun came out in full force for a few hours to allow for a beautiful afternoon. Hundreds of Sydney-siders attended to form a giant 350 in the park for this awesome photo (which was featured on Ecorazzi – well done!)

It's like a real life "Where's Wally?" I am at the top of the 3, third from the left!

By my last count there were over 300 pledges on the VegPledge website and looking around the event, I saw lots of VegPacks. I did my part by ordering 4 for two people. The sacrifices I make for sustainability. The one pictured here was from Laurie’s Vegetarian Takeaway in Bondi Junction and there were others from Nourishing Quarter, and Fatima’s, a Lebanese restaurant, both on Cleveland Street. There was also a sweet pack from Addiction Food that was full of win. And chocolate.

There was also a Sydney Cyclist event called Keep it Wheel that joined in with the VegOut picnic, so it was great to know that there were vegan meals and good vibes going out to a group that might not necessarily eat vegan meals otherwise. Yay for positive veggie outreach!

Overall, it was a great day and event. Congrats to Tim, Bob, Donna and Nikki for organising it!

350 photo shared by 350.org on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.  To see a large, hi-res photo click here.

Last week I got together with a group of readers to do a bit of vegaroo! brainstorming. It was a great session and I walked away with lots of new ideas, some short-term, some long-term, for how we can improve the site and make it a valuable resource for vegans in Australia, (or the vegan-curious).

Based on that meeting and my own ideas, here are the five goals I’ve set out:

1. In general, make vegaroo! more interactive so that users can post their own events, volunteer opportunities, notices, etc. I’m struggling a bit to find a good plugin for this so if anyone knows a good wordpress developer, that would be swell. We have started a mailing list feature though, so you can sign up (top right corner of this page) for a weekly digest of new articles and events listed here.

5. And this is the one I’m most excited about. Next week I’ll be launching a restaurant outreach campaign. There are lots of restaurants in Sydney that could easily become more vegan-friendly with some simple menu changes. I’ve chosen one that I’d like to specifically target and will be calling on vegaroo readers to lobby them towards a more vego menu. I’ll get into more details next week and we’ll take it from there in terms of developing a strategy for reaching out to more restaurants and what incentives we can provide.

I’ve also got some other event ideas cooking and truly long-term thoughts. I always welcome feedback either in the comments, or if you’d like to email me directly at sharon@vegaroo.com with your ideas. What does the Australian vegan community need?

Thanks to everyone who’s given me feedback so far. I’m still a relative newbie here, but have loved getting to know the community over the last six months!

Sometimes I buy cookbooks and they sit on the shelf until I finally get around to using them. Recently I used a cookbook for the first time after owning it for three years.

This was not the case with Viva Vegan! by Terry Hope Romero, co-author of Veganomicon, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.

I’d seen photos from recipe testers and everything looked delicious. I pre-ordered Viva Vegan! from the Book Depository (free worldwide shipping!) and patiently waited for the book to be released.

The day it arrived I eagerly sat down to mark recipes that stood out to me, I found myself marking almost every page as each recipe sounded better than the last.

Viva Vegan! consists of over 200 vegan latina recipes, being a Venezuelan-American, you can tell Terry really knows what she’s talking about. Each category has a detailed description of the food you’re about to make including how it’s traditionally prepared and eaten.

The first meal I made consisted of the Basic Onion-Pepper Sofrito, Venezuelan-style Black Beans, Creamy Avocado Tomato Salsa and Crispy Fried Green Plantains (tostones).  This was such a delicious and filling meal. The smell of the sofrito cooking will make your tummy rumble in anticipation and adds so much flavour to the black beans. The tostones went perfectly with the zingy salsa.

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I had my first Go Max Go Bar while visiting New York last year in a vegan old-timey ice cream and candy shoppe called Lula’s Sweet Apothecary. [Sidenote: Um... Who wants to open a vegan ice cream shoppe in Sydney??? And yes, it must be a shoppe, not a boring shop.] It was love at first bite.

Like any good infatuation, I couldn’t get enough. When I returned to San Francisco I would make trips to Whole Foods just to stockpile the delicious confectionaries. There’s nothing like walking out of a health food store with handfuls of candy bars. (They’re vegan, so they’re healthy, right??)

So imagine my delight when I learned that Go Max Go bars are available in Australia! You can buy them from the Cruelty Free Shop (who I forgive for forgoing the extra -pe because they are awesome) or at any of the locations listed here.

The flavours all have analogues to traditional candy bars. Mahalo = Almond Joy, Bucaneer = Three Musketeers, Jokerz = Snickers and Twilight = Milky Way [Doh! Thanks to Mandee for pointing out my American-centrism. Apparently the Aussie flavours correspond thusly: Twilight = Mars Bar, the Buccaneer = Milky Way and the Mahalo = Bounty]

Asking me to pick a favourite is like asking a mom to choose her favourite child. Because, duh, of course I have a favourite (and so does your mom, don’t let her try to fool you.) The Jokerz bar is a little slice of heaven in a wrapper. But it could be that I have an emotional attachment to Snickers Bar. In my early days of vegetarianism when I was super-poor I would sometimes have just a Snickers Bar and can of Diet Coke from the vending machine at work for lunch. And by sometimes, I mean several times a week.

Luckily, I’ve learned a thing or two about proper nutrition since then. So these days the candy bars suffice as more of a rare treat than meal replacer — something good for a special occasion. In fact I recently celebrated some good news with a Jokerz bar: I have a new job! Details forthcoming, but that is one of the reasons I’ve been quietish here on the blog lately. The days have been busy but, at least my beloved Go Max Go Bars have been there for me.

Over 120 bake sales have taken part in this year’s Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale and there are still more to come.

This year Australia had 8 bake sale sign ups in in 5 states. Next year I want to see every state participate, Tasmania, A.C.T and N.T – I’m looking at you!

Kayla and Kaeli in Adelaide held a picnic with bands, bellydancers and baked goods. They raised $533.45 for the Australian Marine Wildlife Research and Rescue Organistation (AMWRRO).

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Hey, did you know we are in the midst of the Fair Trade Fortnight? It’s true. Why would I lie about that? They’ve got “Big Swap” events happening all over Australia and New Zealand, plus other events you can find on our calendar, which I’ve been told will have veg-friendly food. Sweet!

It’s a pretty exciting time of year for vegans. What else could I be talking about, but the start of avocado season! Did you know you can join an Avo Club? Go join it! And then go make me this green tea noodle with avocado sauce recipe! Om nom nom…

Please vote “Yes” in this poll on banning jump-racing, spurred by another tragic case of a horse needing to be put down. Seriously, who are these a**holes voting “No.” I’m going to throw a saddle on their children and ride them around until their limbs break! Even The 7PM Project brought some coverage to it this week – weigh in in their forums.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article on the chef at veg-friendly Japanese restaurant Wafu in Surry Hills, who apparently runs a pretty tight “clean plates club.” Anyone experienced her wrath? I went once and the food was great, so I had no troubles. Brown rice sushi is awesome!

What’s the deal with Perth getting all these awesome events lately? Is there a vegan revolution happening there? This Environmental and Animal Issues Forum sounds like something I’d be all up on. What do people from Perth call themselves? Perthians? Perth-people? Perthlings??? Perthlings: who wants to go to this and report on it here?

Canberra’s getting in on the awesome event action with the RSPCA-sponsored Million Paws Walk on May 16! Bring your furry friend! Or they invite the dogless to show up to gawk at other people’s dogs. So you don’t have to sit in the park on dog meet-up days and watch jealously and creepily from a bench… uh, not that I’ve ever done that the first Sunday of every month or anything.

It is getting cold!! Do you need some cute new winter gloves? Cate from Aduki Press made these and they’re adorbs!

Bundle up, make yourself some awesome vegan soup, and enjoy a great weekend, everyone!