Last Sunday Hanford and I went to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. I haven’t been in a couple of years and I forgot about how completely horrible the traffic is! We eventually got the the festival after waiting in almost 2 hours of traffic on highway 92 (we only had to drive 6 miles). A couple of our friends warned us but I didn’t think it was going to be that bad

Despite the traffic; we had a really good time. The festival was packed with art/wine type vendors and typical American festival food. They did have a couple of vegan food options but nothing really amazing. We scored some sauteed artichokes, sauteed Brussels sprouts (they looked totally nasty, but tasted really good), and some garlic fries (pictured above). Lara Bar was also had a booth there and was handing out samples. I got two of their flavors, tropical fruit tart and peanut butter & jelly (pictured above), and they were awesome! The tropical fruit tart flavored one tasted like a tiki drink, yum!

This last Saturday was the SF Vegan Bakesale; a benefit for Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue. I am happy to say that the bakesale was a huge success and $2,600 was raised. Not only was a bunch of money raised but all the baked goods were sold out by 2:30pm (bakesale started at 11am). The Bay Area must really love vegan baked goods!

Pictured above is the yummy noms that I picked up from the bakesale. I got there around 12pm and a ton of stuff was already sold out (I was dying for one of Sugar Beat Sweets cinnamon rolls). I ended up buying two caramel apples (a green and a red one), a pumpkin sugar cookie, and a German chocolate cupcake. I had to take a close up picture of the green caramel apple, it was my favorite item I bought. Sadly, I don’t know which bakeries made the items that I bought (there were over 40 bakers who contributed items to the bakesale). If you know who made what then feel free to comment, I want to credit those bakers.

Check out vegansaurus.com’s recap of the event: http://tinyurl.com/yz6qjvj

I don’t know what your plans are for today, but if you are anywhere near the SF Bay Area then I suggest that you make your way to the SF Vegan Bakesale. Over 40+ bakers are donating items to the bakesale, including items from Sugar Beat Sweets (swoon), Fat Bottom Bakery, and the editors of VegNews magazine to name a few. Did I also mention that I designed the flyer? I didn’t have time to whip up anything from my kitchen, so I donated some design work.

The proceeds of the bakesale go to benefit Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue. Do it for the Kitties!!!!

A couple of weekends ago I headed over to the East Bay to hang out with my derby wife, Molly Mayhem (retired Bay Area Derby Girl). Her and I had a hang out date and we decided to trek over to the Alameda Antique Fair. Normally I love to sleep in on Sunday mornings but we wanted to hit the fair semi-early so everything wouldn’t be too picked over. I picked Molly up from Bart at 9am and we were off to the fair. Despite the massive size of the fair and getting there early; we didn’t end up buying anything too excited (I did score some cute buttons and a vintage owl decoration for halloween). Although I did fall in love with a red vintage table and chair set but it was $1000! The most excited part of the fair was the food! There was a food vendor that was selling vegan banana beignets (pictured above). The beignets were slightly crispy bits of fried batter and banana; similar to a donut hole. There were a couple of food vendors that were selling vegan food (an African food booth and an Indian food booth) which was nice to have options.

After walking around the fair for a couple of hours, Molly and i were hungry again. We headed over to our favorite pizza place in the East Bay, Lanesplitters (the Oakland location). We split a vegan Chicane pizza (sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, artichoke hearts, and Lanesplitter’s vegan cheese) and I had a tall glass of pink lemonaide (pictured above). Overall, it was a wonderful way to spend a sunny summer day in the East Bay.

One of my new favorite businesses in San Francisco is Miette Patisserie and Confiserie. I first read about Miette on The Black Apple’s Blog and I knew that I had to make a trip there! Even though I doubted that this cake and candy store had many vegan options, the decor of the place looked too cute to pass up. I dragged Hanford to Miette’s Hayes Valley location (they have multiple locations in San Francisco) last weekend and I was wowed with all the different vegan options. They not only had Go Max Go candy bars (swoon!) but they had lots other vegan candy I have never even seen before!

Crystal, one of the shop girls, helped me find a plethora of vegan candy options. She is also owner of Violet Sweet Shoppe; so she knows her vegan goods! My apologies for the jankie photo of the candy I scored but I took a quick picture so I could start chowing down on my candy. The most odd thing that I purchased was a tie between the dark chocolate “sardines” (sardine shaped dark chocolate) and the licorice dark chocolate lentils (think m&m’s that have a licorice flavor). They both seem alittle odd but they both tasted good!

The candy picture (listed clockwise) is: vegan salt water taffy, vegan gummy stars, dark chocolate “sardines”, handcrafted vegan salted caramel and chocolate, vegan chocolate/caramel/nut bar, vegan chocolate and lavender bar, and the licorice dark chocolate lentils. I highly recommend checking out Miette if you are in San Francisco and want to score some quality candy!

Donna Diggler and I went to the San Fransisco Craft Fair last weekend. This year it was held at Fort Mason in the larger pier pavilion. The pavilion was crammed with tons of talented vendors and I was totally overwhelmed as soon as I stepped foot into the fair. Donna and I scampered from booth to booth finding cute little treasures and handmade wonders. I very much enjoyed Cakespy, The Black Apple, and Twinkie Chan’s booths (I bought Twinkie Chan’s tater tot and pickles pillows). I was disappointed though that there wasn’t any vegan food vendors; like they usually have at the Bazaar Bizarre. We built up quite the appetite running around the fair, so Donna and I went to have Lunch at Weird Fish in the Mission District of San Fransisco. Melisser, the Urban Housewife, met up with us for lunch; which was really rad because we haven’t seen each other in a year (I have been really lame at getting out of the house).

I had previously been to Weird Fish on a date night with Hanford, but it was a nice change going in the afternoon. The restaurant wasn’t crowded at all and we got to super fast service. Hanford and I went on a Friday night and we had to wait over an hour and we ended up being crammed into a pretty small table (moral of the story: go to Weird Fish in the afternoon). Anyways, Donna and I split an appetizer of vegan Buffalo wings (seitan with buffalo sauce and vegan ranch) and I ordered the vegan fish & chips (soy-batter and gluten free seitan with vegan ranch). I have ordered vegan Buffalo wings at many other restaurants but Weird Fish is the only place that I know of that has vegan fish & chips. The idea of vegan fish & chips is totally odd but what do you expect when you go to a restaurant named “Weird Fish”?!?!? Everything was really tasty and I highly recommend ordering the ginger lemonade too!

Sorry folks! I have fallen behind on updating Say It’s Not Soy again. I just had two super busy weekends in a row and haven’t had much time in between to do an update. Two weekend’s ago was Tiki Central’s 9th annual Tiki Crawl. My boyfriend (Hanford) runs Tiki Central (a tiki social networking site) and the crawl is a fun time to get together with all of our Tiki friends. The crawl is four days long and 11 tiki bars are visited (who knew there were so many in the Bay Area). This was my third year of attending the crawl, so I had been to also all of the bars that were visited. Some of the highlights of the crawl were visiting Notch’s tiki bar (built in his custom car shop) (top picture) and Trader Vic’s in Palo Alto (not pictured).

Since I have been to almost all of the bars before, I wanted to focus some of the awesome food that I had on the crawl. It’s totally like me to post nothing about the drinks on the bar crawl and post only on the food. I also didn’t get any good bar shots since all the bars are poorly lit. The above picture is of the cheeseless picture I ordered from Pizza Rustica. During the second night of the crawl we visited the Conga Lounge in Oakland. The Conga Lounge is a tiny tiki bar with Pizza Rustica located underneath it. Inside of cramming into the Conga Lounge, I decided to sneak off and get a pizza downstairs. The pizza had a gluten-free crust and lots of veggies.

Pictured above is the vegan calzone I ordered for dinner at Lanesplitters in Oakland. Hanford and I took a break from the crawl and snuck off with some friends to have dinner Sunday night at Lanesplitters. One of the best things about Lanesplitters is that they made this own red sauce and vegan ricotta. Another bonus is that their calzones are huge! The above pictured calzone is on a regular sized dinner plate. Overall the tiki crawl was really fun and I’m looking forward to it next year. Find more information on the crawl at the official Tiki Crawl Website