sooo much good food

i loved trying all the different vegan options everywhere we went on our trip. in vancouver, our friends took us to a place we'd never tried called the foundation. it was all vegetarian and very vegan friendly. the service is always a bit slow but the food was soooooo tasty. i think we went 3 times during our trip. portland had LOTS of options for vegans. before we left australia i was looking at happy cow for ideas and printed of an entire page of purely vegan restaurants. the first full day we were there we wanted mexican for lunch. we decided to try to food carts that are in the downtown area. we found a mexican one and just asked for vegetarian burritos with no cheese or sour cream. the guy replied with his thick spanish accent"so you want to vegan burritos?"-- he knew exactly what we were going for! we got to go to hungry tiger too which has its own vegan menu in addition to the meat menu. the nachos even had really good melt-y vegan "cheese" on them! we went to a nice cafe on hawthorne (don't remember the name) where we just went in for coffee but they had so many vegan options on their menu that we ended up eating too (unfortunately our first choice, the vegan quesadilla, wasn't available because they'd run out of vegan cheese but we had a really nice tofu scramble instead). the picture above is zac in front on "zach's shack" hot dogs. this was the only thing we could find open to eat at 2 am (we tried 3 different mexican places). this hot dog place/bar was great because any of their 8 or 10 dogs on the menu could be done veggie. portland also has it's own "vegan mini mall" with food fight vegan grocery (i think we bought/ate more than a healthy amount of vegan jerky from there), herbivore clothing, a tattoo place (with vegan inks) and a bakery. right around the corner is red and black cafe which is a vegan, worker owned and run cafe. we also went to voodoo donoughts a couple times to get a sugar fix (vegan bear claw). portland is a great city for vegans.
when i got to victoria (i went a day before zac so i could try to organize more of my things to bring to australia) my mom took me to planet organic to pick up some random foods that weren't at the supermarket (like a soy based cheese that didn't have casein or other dairy bits in it). i ended up getting a nacho cheese that was SOOOOO good (we used it on quesadillas while we were camping and made a massive platter of nachos at my mom's on nite. we went to dinner at green cuisine (pay by weight vegan food). zac also had to go back there every time we were downtown so he could get a "not-naniamo bar" to snack on. we also went to hernandez (little mexican place recommended by sarah kramer. we had it for the first time on our last trip up to cananda and now we're hooked). we also HAD to try the joint after sarah kramer talked about that place too. i wish we'd gone to it sooner than on our last day cuz they have sooooo much good stuff and they can veganize any of their pizzas, calzones and quesadillas. they use some of the fake meat stuff and they make their own vegan cheese. we had a vegan-ized taco pizza--- sooo good! we also finally tried rebar which seems to be victoria's most well known vegetarian friendly restaurant. it was good but i liked some of the other places better.
we also had some good home cooked meals too. the evening we arrived in portland our friend's mom (who had been visiting from the east coast and was getting back on a plane in a couple hours) made us a nice pasta dinner with some vegan saussage in it. my mom made some really nice vegetable soup using her juicer to make a thick, tasty stock. we ate well (fairly healthy and LOTS of food) through our whole trip.