November Week of Veganness (A round-up, much too late)

Gah! Missed out on all of October. Curses.

Anyhoo, November brings with it the annual Melbourne Cup, and a focus on the alleged "entertainment" that is horseracing. Media coverage is near-total, a huge amount of money is spent on outfits and gambling, some animals are raced along a track for our "enjoyment" — hell, in Victoria, it's a public holiday. Somewhere amongst it all are those of us who hate seeing animals used in this way, or indeed find the whole thing quite ridiculous (summed up nicely in this excellent piece by Marieke Hardy — has any Australian vegan not read this by now?).

This year, some lovely souls at the University of Sydney Animal Welfare Society hosted the first Not-the-Melbourne-Cup, and a group of us gathered in a beautiful courtyard under a just-blossoming jacaranda tree, ate vegan food, mingled, toasted the horses (all horses) and just generally had the pleasure of avoiding any footage of the race itself, Fashions on the Field, office sweeps, or associated goings-on. Congratulations to the AWS, and may there be more of these in future years.



A few days later on Saturday 6th, our final Sydney Vegan Bake Sale of the year was for Charlie's Angels Horse Rescue in Queensland. Sadly, we were rained out. We made a handful of sales, but by 9:00am, with water pooling at our feet and on the table, and soaking our clothes, we made the tough call. Happily, to add to those few sales, a few customers at Naked Espresso also stepped in to buy some things, and we at least had $361 to pass on; some people made a point of donating directly to Charlie's online, too. Thanks all.

With the weather so bad, we didn't really get photos of our table (it was mostly just the tops of unopened plastic carriers, anyway) but I took some of my own offerings once I was home. I had lemon cupcakes, peanut butter chocolate pillows and peanut butter blondies from my recently-acquired copy of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, and chocolate cupcakes, plus lemon and chocolate minis.




Since I was seeing some family members at an event that night, I took a lot of pleasure in putting together two care packages of yummy baked goods for them to scoff. Both of these had a layer of the PB blondies underneath. Look how pretty — anyone want to put something like this together for me one day?



Finally, the rain cleared in time for the Cruelty Free Festival in Belmore Park on Sunday. I'd gone along in 2008 and the atmosphere was as lovely as I remembered; the weather gradually improved to gloriously blue-skyed, and my friends and I mostly wandered around picking up a few supplies (Twilight bars, some Angel Food marshmallow mix, and two cans of non-Nestle condensed soy milk for me), signing up and watching and reading and generally informing ourselves, and stuffing ourselves silly with great vegan food... including but not limited to vegan gözleme with a choice of five different fillings! I had the potato-tomato-shallots (scallions/spring onions) variety, and it was delicious.



People were raving about the "cheesecakes"/cheezecakes from a still-newish business based in the Blue Mountains and supplying to cafes there. They're called Rubyfruit and I'm sure we all hope to see their vegan baked wares gracing the counters of some places in Sydney before long. They don't have a website yet, but you can follow them on Facebook. I didn't get around to trying anything myself (full of gözleme, I guess) but the photo speaks for itself, I think...



All in all, a lovely week full of great food, great people, and a reminder of what a vegan-friendly place Sydney can be.