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!

It’s summer! That means everyone, myself included has been out and about cooking up vegan barbecues, picnicing in the parks, and soaking up Vitamin D.

I haven’t even gotten a chance to update you on the last Vegan Drinks Nights, when BAM! There’s more upcoming events to tell you about!

Sydney’s event went great, raising $350 for Manly’s penguins!

Making a speech at the 4th Sydney Vegan Drinks!

Detials on our next event coming soon. And I’m so excited that melbourne’s first Vegan Drinks Night was a hit. From organiser, Carla:

“Held at the Sporting Club in Brunswick, they were very accomodating in creating a vegan menu and giving us drinks lists and suggestions of what alcohol was vegan so a huge thank you to them. We had over 35 people, raised $121.80 for the QLD RSPCA and got to meet many awesome new people! I look forward to the next drinks! Many thanks to everyones support.”

Hooray! Melbourne’s next vegan drinks night will be held on 25 March at 7:00 at Gasometer. More info here on their Facebook event.

Mark your diaries for these other upcoming vegan events!

This Sunday 20 Feb Vegan Society NSW is holding a Vegan Picnic in conjunction with the Mardi gras Fair Day. Their Facebook event is here. Did you also know that Vegan Society NSW is on Twitter now? Follow their updates here!

Speaking of Mardi Gras, don’t forget to come out and support the Queer Animal Lib NSW float in  the Mardi Gras parade on Saturday 5 March. Guaranteed good times, and a chance to see me and some other vegaroo writers in yellow feathered tu-tu’s. Err… maybe leave the cameras at home though

That same morning, it’s the next Sydney Vegan Bake Sale! Funds are going to help the Queensland floods and it’ll be at the usual time and location: 8am – 1pm at the Newtown DIY Markets. More info on the Bake Sale blog.

And last but not least, on 19 March come on out for the launch of Kathy Divine’s new book Forever 21. It’s at 6:00 at Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, Mitchell Theatre. Word on the street is there will be delicious vegan cakes! You can RSVP here on Facebook.

If you know of other upcoming vegan events around Australia you’d like to publicize, please drop me a line at sharon@vegaroo.com

Members of Sydney’s LGBT or animal rights communities may recall the controversey in 2010 when Animal Liberation NSW was asked not to participate in the city’s annual Mardi Gras parade, after years of participation. The reason: not being gay enough.

Animal Lib in the 2007 Mardi Gras parade: Not gay enough

It’s pretty ridiculous when two groups fighting for social justice can’t see their overlapping goals and find ways to support each other. But alas, the decision was made. This year, journalist Katrina Fox formed a new group: Queer Animal Liberation NSW and its members will be rocking their float with pride!

Though a good sized group has been assembled so far (including yours truly), they’re still calling for more participants. Here’s what you need to know:

• Mardi Gras takes place Saturday 5 March from 5pm to 11pm
• Anyone can participate – queer or straight, male or female, or any shade of grey in betwee
• If you’d like to participate there are also 2 work nights happening 23 and 24 Feb to work on building costumes, etc.
• Participants are also being asked to give $12 each to cover production costs
• This year’s theme is ‘We as queers agree, set the chickens free’. The aim is to highlight the plight of battery hens. All I know is, I better hear some “cock” based puns.
• If you want to take part, please email Linda Stoner at lynda@animal-lib.org.au

Happy New Year! I hope that you all enjoyed a festive and relaxing holiday season. I know it was a much needed break for me, but I’m excited to now hit the ground running back here on vegaroo and announce the next Sydney Vegan Drinks night!

We’ll be back at The Hive Bar who hosted our last awesome event, at 93 Erskineville Road. The event is from 7-10 (or likely later…) on January 28th.

As usual we’ll have yummy vegan snacks and a list of vegan wine, beer, cocktail and mocktail options.

We’re asking for suggested donation of $5 from attendees.

I started asking for suggestions for beneficiaries, but when my friend Derek of Inner West Live alerted me to a recent attack on the penguins of Manly, I knew immediately that these were the animals I wanted to help! Penguins are my spirit animal, man!

You can view some news footage about the attacks here.

The money we raise will go to the Manly Environmental Centre who have a Penguin Warden program! I know what you’re thinking, “Where do I sign up???” Easy. Click here to learn more about penguin protection!

I’m really excited about this particular event and hope to see/meet many of you there.

If you’d like to come it would be cool if you RSVPed on our Facebook event and invited your friends!! If you’re not on Facebook you can just leave your RSVP as a comment here.

UPDATE: We just learned that a Vegan Drinks night is starting up in Melbourne, hosted by the lovely Carla of Easy as Vegan Pie. Their first night is also Jan 28 and you can read more here on their Facebook event.

After a whirlwind weekend of vegan events, I’m finally catching up. Sadly, our final Sydney Vegan Bake Sale of 2010 got rained out and I only got to snap photos of the baked goods my housemates and I made. Luckily, some of the goods were able to be transported to Naked Espresso where the wonderful staff sold them, and we still managed to raise $361!

And the timing worked out well, so that anything we didn’t sell we could bring to the Vegan Society NSW stall at the Cruelty Free Festival!

The event was a huge success! It was my first one and I volunteered to be there at the butt-crack of dawn to help with load-in, which was cool because I got to meet a lot of awesome vendors and community organisations.

Some of my favourites were:

Rubyfruit! I pretty much raved about their cheesecakes to everyone I saw that day. They’re based in the blue mountains and don’t have a storefront, but sell out of local cafes. They also do cupcakes and muffins and while they don’t appear to have a website, you can find out more info on their Facebook page.

The Cruelty Free Shop always hooks me up with hard to come by vegan products, like my beloved Go Max Go bars.

I didn’t get to attend a lot of cooking demos, but I went to Leigh Drew’s biscuit demo, which was unsurprisingly fabulous. Somebody get this lady a cooking show! And while I was a non-participant in the vegan speed dating, I think it was an awesome idea and hope there were some vegan love connections made.

I also walked away with a lovely dress, child’s colouring book, bottle of garlic infused olive oil, a jar of mustard pickles being sold by an adorable little old lady at the MAWA stall, and a tummy full of spring rolls, bliss balls, quiche and gozleme.

A huge round of applause to Sarah and Animal Liberation for organising such a wonderful community-building event!

[Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from friend of vegaroo, Zarah, about her experience with the Vegan Speed Dating event at this weekend's Cruelty Free Festival. We'll have more event highlights coming soon!]

So you have a great boyfriend. He’s really good at fixing things, he cooks you yummy vegan meals all the time, and he has a pretty impressive beard. But then he dumps you. He’s not so great anymore. (Oh and he still eats cheese, yes that definitely removes him from the category of ‘greatness’).

Finding yourself suddenly single after a long stint of monogamous relations is pretty rough for most people. It can be hard re-entering the comparatively unstable and confronting world of dating. But when that world is reduced dramatically by your preference for a likeminded vegan partner, you’ve got yourself quite a challenge on your hands.

Thank goodness for the first appearance of Vegan Speed Dating at the 2010 Sydney Cruelty Free Festival!!! This could be quite fun. However you have noticed that vegan females seem to do a pretty good job at outnumbering vegan males and suspect that this may be the case in this scenario. You’re not wrong. The ratio is definitely not in your favour; your side is outnumbering the other by about three to one. An announcement is made on the main stage in front of a crowd of hundreds in the hope of attracting some more gentlemen to the mix. Come on men, there’s an abundance of single women by the rotunda, get over there! At one point it seems there are more people gathered to observe the spectacle than to participate in it. People even come to take photos to capture your desperation (thank you Matt).

As one male speed dater put it “there’s an imbalance of resources”. Single vegan men are indeed a resource. (However if the turnout for the later same sex session was any indication, you should be thankful you are not here to find a same-sex vegan dating partner.)

So we’re underway, with a total of 5 eligible vegan men on offer, but wait, there’s a late entry, taking the total to 6! (You later discover a third of them are not really vegan.) You do feel for them, all this attention, an inundation of eager ladies, having to answer “how long have you been vegan?” twenty times over. No wonder one guy makes an early exit (he “has to be somewhere” he explains).

There is definitely more to uncover about people than the three minutes allows. Hmm and you sense a reluctance on the ladies’ part to stick to the time limit and move onto the next gentleman when time’s up. Not one to muck around, you’ve got a date lined up this week with a renegade contender who didn’t want to play by the “we’ll email you your matches” rule. Success story maybe, let’s see if we can cut it on a ‘real’ date where we can’t conveniently just get up and move to the right when we’ve got nothing left to say to one another.

I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the addition of speed dating at this year’s Cruelty Free Festival (it didn’t quite top Suzy Spoon’s cooking demo, but it was definitely up there!) Making superficial judgements about potential dates in a short period of time and being left wondering what else there is beneath the surface does have a weird attraction about it. Short of waiting a year for the opportunity to try my luck again at the next CFF, I think I might sneak into the realm of ‘non-vegan specific’ speed dating. We don’t all start out as vegans, right?

(Thank you to Sarah and Animal Liberation for once again putting on a super awesome festival, and for Sundara and Co for making the trek up from Canberra to introduce Sydney’s vegans to speed dating!)

This past weekend, over 4,000 showed up for World Vegan Day in Melbourne! In the rain! SHUT UP! That is a crazy turnout. So it’s up to us in Sydney to step it up this weekend. We’ve got two great events on!

First up on Saturday, it’s the last Sydney Vegan Bake Sale of 2010. I’ve hear rumours of cinnamon buns, donuts, the usual delicious cupcakes – maybe even some CUPCAKES IN ICE CREAM CONES – WHAT???

I will also definitely be making some of these bad boys:

Those are caramel apple muffins, slightly modified from this recipe. And since I’m planning on making roughly 4,000 of them, y’all better show up and buy!!! As usual the sale is from 8-1 at the Newtown Markets across from the train station. This time we’re raising money for Charlie’s Angels Horse Rescue in Queensland.

Then you can work off some off that sugar by walking to Belmore Park on Sunday for the 2010 Cruelty Free Festival! From 10am-7pm there will be over 60 stalls, many of them food-based, including vegaroo favourites, Funky Pies, Addiction Food, Nourishing Quarter, and many more!

Hope to see you all there!

I typically find it disappointing when I go to a place recommended to me as vegan, that turns out to largely cater to omnivores but have vegan selections, or to understand what ‘vegan’ means. Doesn’t count in my book.

That said, Yulli’s Bar in Surry Hills was a pleasant surprise. I’d been told by friends it was great; I was also thankfully warned that it was busy, and hence had a reservation. We did have to sit outside on what as possibly the coldest, windiest day in the history of Octobers in Sydney, but such is life. And while Yulli’s caters primarily to vegetarians, they had a vegan menu, which included more than one option for each course, which is honestly about all it takes to make me happy in life.

The mixed chips plate, consisting of pumpkin, beetroot, taro and other unidentified deep fried goodies, was crisp and delightful with a side of seasalt, although I do subtract points for their forgetting the ‘vegan’ nature of our request and serving a tzatziki like sauce. I was sad that it was quite so spare – approximately 30 ‘chips’ for $13.50 – but it was also delightful.

We chose to follow this up with ginger and leek dumplings, and a falafel plate. To be fair, these were also sparse; four dumplings and four falafel does not a hearty meal make, but they were also wonderful. The leek dumplings were definitely my pick of the night, steamed and tender with an amazing plum sauce. The falafel were also great, if not quite my thing; I have an uneasy relationship with coriander, and they were laced with it. Served with a spicy relish and pineapple, wrapped in betel leaves, they were an unusual treat.

It’s worth noting that all of our selections were from the entree section of the menu, which might explain the scarcity of actual food on our plates; however, neither my girlfriend or I could see the point in ordering Pad Thai or a Vegetable Sambal when we were trying to branch out and try something new. Still, judging by other’s plates, servings of mains continued to be small.

On balance, it was a lovely meal and a pleasant experience. However, the dark room and somewhat haphazard service take away from what was otherwise quite lovely. And we had to stop for vegan icecream on the way home, so factor that into your budget.

Yulli’s Bar

417 Crown Street, Surry Hills

9319 6609

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.

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!