Cheese and ice cream (though not at the same time)

Right, now I've finished my coursework, been on my holidays and got a couple of days off per week (or that's the theory anyway) I can start doing this blog thing properly. We've just spent a couple of weeks driving round France being strange foreigners, having a look at what vegan food you can actually get there (in a country where 'vegetarian' means "you only want small pieces of ham, then?") whilst having the comfort and safety of our van, a camping stove and a few crates of food we stocked up on before we set off. Not that we needed to take that much food, as we found out, but more on that later.

There's a couple of products I've discovered lately, the first is B'Nice rice cream, a vegan ice cream made from rice milk which comes in chocolate, strawberry and vanilla flavours. For the sake of research I made a point of sampling a bit of each at the Bristol Vegan Fayre last May (and have since bought more to eat at home!) and I have to say this is good stuff. The chocolate and strawberry flavours in particular taste just like 'normal' ice cream, that is to say rather nice soft scoop ice cream. The vanilla one had a bit of a taste to it that you wouldn't get with 'normal' ice cream, although it was very nice in itself, so if I was feeding this to non-vegans I'd go for the chocolate or the strawberry flavours first.

The other thing I discovered at the Vegan Fayre was the Sheese range of vegan cheese. I know Sheese have been around for quite a while but I'd never tried it before, partly because I only occasionally buy vegan cheese (usually for stuffed crust pizza) and partly because a vegan friend had told me it wasn't very nice, so on the rare occasions I did buy any I didn't bother looking at the Sheese as I didn't want to risk wasting my money buying something I wouldn't like. I have now seen the error of my ways! They had lots of free samples out on their stall, and every time we walked past the stall I'd have to wander over and try another one! My favourite one so far is the smoked cheddar, and I quite liked some of the samples of cream Sheese, I think there was a spicy one I particularly liked.

A lot of people seem to be put off by the concept of vegan cheese and think it can't possibly taste any good, but the Sheese stuff was pretty realistic and just tasted good regardless of how closely it resembled dairy cheese. The only thing with vegan cheese is that it doesn't melt in the same way as dairy cheese, it tends to go soft but not spread out like dairy cheese does, although Cheezly (the other main brand of vegan cheese) do some 'super melting' cheeses which do a reasonable job in a stuffed crust pizza. The best test of it so far: my mum, who has eaten cheese sandwiches for lunch practically every day for the last 40-odd years, had some toast with sliced smoked cheddar Sheese for her lunch today when she came to visit, ate it all up and said it was pretty good. That's a good test for a vegan product (or vegan cake for that matter), when you can feed it to an omnivore and they don't notice there's anything 'wrong' with it. I had a slice of grated Sheese and fig relish on toast, yum!