Tag: vegetarian

To Stachi veggie restaurant

One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

Was it really a week ago that I was in To Stachi eating one of the best vegetarian meals of my life? I don’t think I’ve stopped salivating over it yet.


We discovered To Stachi when wandering around the Venetian Harbour on our first morning in Chania. The friend I was travelling with remembered an organic food shop on a street set a little way back from the harbour and we went to see if it was still there. We found it, but it’s no longer a shop and instead has been converted into a small restaurant.


The place was empty as it wasn’t yet lunch time, but we went in and ordered coffee and sat with it at the tables outside the front. The owner, cook, herb-picker, vegetable grower and slow-food aficionado brought us a free piece of freshly-baked cake with our coffee and stayed outside to chat with us. 

Stelios owned the shop that was previously on the site and decided to turn it into a restaurant a year or so ago. He’s passionate about vegetarianism and food that is local, organic, traceable and slowly cooked with love. 

He explained that the name To Stachi means an ‘ear of wheat’ and told us about his family land where he grows a lot of his own produce. We’d also learnt during the week that Cretans are great at foraging, making use of all the wild herbs and greens that grow rampantly on the island.


Helen was so enamoured with the place she decided this was where she wanted to come on Friday evening to celebrate her birthday. Stelios was delighted and promised to make something very special.

On the Friday evening five of us arrived for dinner and were looked after wonderfully by Stelios and his daughter; he brought a constant stream of food to the table and took time to explain what every dish was. Unfortunately as I didn’t write everything down, I’m already struggling to remember what I ate. What I do remember was that it was all amazingly delicious. Here are photos of just a few of the dishes we were served. 

Best of all, at the end of the meal, Stelios brought out a birthday cake he’d made specially. It’s called galaktoboureko and is made from filo pastry and a thick gooey layer of semolina custard. It’s making my mouth water just thinking about it. 

galaktoboureko

The quality of the photos is poor because not only had I not taken a notepad and pen, but I’d also not taken my proper camera. I expected the food to be good, but really thought I’d be focussing more on the conversation, so I only had my mobile phone with me. Now I’m regretting that decision. 


To Stachi can be found at 5, Defkaliona Street, Chania. 
Here’s the Facebook page

Eating lunch in Reykjavik

Three places in Reykjavik for a delcious vegetarian lunch.

Swarta Kaffi

Swarta Kaffi must have an owner who has spent time in South Africa. It’s a small place on the first floor of a building on Laugevegur. It’s very cosy inside and has a definite African theme – there are masks and other African artefacts all over the place. What makes me think it’s a South African connection rather than African in general? Well, it’s the food. Swarta Kaffi is famous for serving soup in a bowl made from bread. Each day they have a meat soup and a vegetarian soup – generally cauliflower. The ‘bowl’ is a loaf sized bread roll with the middle pulled out. It is then filled with soup and the extracted bread is served on the side. This is an Icelandic play on the bunny chows of Durban. Durban has a large Indian population and so curry is pretty much a staple. A bunny chow is a loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with curry; the extra bread is also served on the side. I haven’t seen this done anywhere else. I might have thought it coincidence except for the African theme in the cafe. Last time I was here I did ask the waitress about the origins of their main dish, but she didn’t know.

The soup and bread is delicious. The staff are friendly and the atmosphere is welcoming. It’s a bit more expensive than buying soup in some places so it’s somewhere I don’t make a habit of going to, but it’s definitely something to look forward to once on each trip.

Groen Kostur

This place is hidden at the back of a kind of small shopping centreoffice block, opposite a car park and a branch of Bonus (the cheap supermarket chain). It’s only a minute or two walk from Laugevegur. The place is small and modern with small, round, high tables and high chairs. So it’s not the most comfortable of places to sit. A lot of people seem to get takeaway from here so I suppose comfort isn’t the priority.

The food is all vegetarian and vegan and there’s a good choice. There are always several choices of ‘plate’ as well as snacks, cakes, soup and so on. The ‘plates’ are made up of a mix of salads, quiches, rice, potatoes, and so on. They are served with a small bread roll and each type of ‘plate’ has a fixed price. There are a selection of dressings on the counter and a selection of jugs of water. One jug has plain water and the others each have a different fruit such as lemon, orange or apple floating in them.
The food is delicious. Each time I’ve been here I’ve tried one of their plates of food, but the soup served with bread and houmous also looks really tempting.

Gardurin

Gardurin is located about five minutes walk from Laugevegur and is another tiny lunch place. It closes in August each year for holidays so I wasn’t able to come here last time. Each week they produce a new menu with a different dish for each day of the week. This means there isn’t much choice but the food for each day sounded good and so I suppose it saved making a hard decision. The main dishes are served in full or half portions and there are soups and cakes as well. Everything is vegetarian.

The place is very hippie-ish with incense burning and Indian pictures and artefacts. The tables are small but as they are regular height this is a nicer place to sit than Groen Kostur.  It was quite friendly and the food was good, but if I had to choose I think I would go for Groen Kostur (even though it means sitting on a high chair) because although the food here is good, the food at Groen Kostur is even better!

The one I’ve aleady done

A day spent gathering wild food and learning new recipes.

When I started this blog I had one task on my list that I’ve already ticked off. I did wonder whether to keep it on or if I should free up the space for a different task. But as I’d actually put together my list about a year before I started to blog I didn’t really want to change it. So it stayed.

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was eighteen. It was actually at my 18th birthday meal that I last ate meat  (it was turkey, one of the few meats I actually liked). I tried to be a vegetarian before that, but it was always difficult when my mum was in charge of cooking and she wanted me to eat meat. I never really liked it and used to feed it to the dog under the table when she wasn’t looking. When I was 14 the dog died. I tried to feed my meat to the cat instead, but she ate too slow and couldn’t eat that much. So I became a part-time veggie, forcing meat down at home so that I would be allowed to leave the table, but rarely eating it outside of home.

About a week after my birthday meal I realised that I’d not eaten meat at all since that meal. If I could do it for a week, I could do it forever. I wasn’t eating so much at home any more and not long afterwards I moved out. I didn’t tell my mum, I just let her figure it out over time.

I always enjoyed cooking and my new life as an official veggie gave me lots of reasons to research and try out new recipes. Veggies weren’t much catered for in restaurants then, and there certainly wasn’t the choice of veggie products in the supermarkets that there are now, so it was much more challenging. Through my reading and research I came across the Vegetarian Society and found out that it’s based in Altrincham (not very far away) and has a cookery school. Although the courses aren’t particularly expensive, they were always well out of my affordability range. So it became one of those things that I kept saying I’d do one day but never getting round to. Last summer I’d been a vegetarian for 25 years and as I’m living back in Manchester and just down the road from the Vegetarian Society I thought that this would be a good year to finally do a course with them.

I chose the ‘Food for Free’ course because it also involved walking and learning about plants. The course took place on a Sunday and started off in the Vegetarian Society lounge where the dozen participants were served coffee before being introduced to Patrick Harding, wild food expert and our tutor for the day. After a talk and a slide show we were on to the practical side of the course where we headed out into the countryside looking for food. We didn’t walk very far, though it took a couple of hours because we kept stopping to pick wild flowers and leaves and listen to Patrick talk about them. Once back at base we were served a big, late afternoon, buffet lunch using all the ingredients we’d picked. So that we wouldn’t have to wait around too long for lunch we were actually served with food made from ingredients that had been collected earlier than our walk, but they were the same things.

Although we didn’t get to cook the food ourselves, which is something that I would have liked to have done, we did get to eat plenty of it and were given the recipes to take home. If we’d cooked ourselves it would have been an evening meal by the time it was ready, so I can understand why we didn’t get to participate in the actual cooking.

I really enjoyed the course and it was definitely worth waiting 25 years for. Now I’m tempted to do another one.

The Cordon Verte cookery school can be found here.