Eating out in Northern Virginia

We're up in Northern Virginia this weekend, and thanks to VegDC.com we found a couple of good places to eat yesterday. Lunch was at a nice little cafe in Falls Church called Kasha's Kitchen (inside Kennedy's Natural Foods). We had some very tasty veggie sandwiches (mine with tofu) and some lentil soup. I was a bit disappointed though because the web site said they had a vegan "chicken" salad sandwhich, but in fact it wasn't vegan. Why they use soy mock chicken and then mix it with regular mayo is beyond me.

For dinner we went to Woodlands in Fairfax which is an entirely vegetarian Indian restaurant with an extensive South Indian menu. If you've never had South Indian food before you should definitely seek it out the next time you're in a bigger city. A mainstay of South Indian cooking is the dosa which is sort of a savory crepe from a batter made from ground and fermented rice and lentils. If you're interested in knowing more, I just found a good blog entry all about dosas. We had a masala dosa which is filled with a potato and onion curry, and also an uthapam, which is a thicker pancake sort of creation made from a similar batter to the dosa and topped with veggies.

One of the more challenging things about eating a vegan diet is travelling and eating out, but there are so many good resources on-line today that if you poke around on the web before you go you can usually find something, especially in bigger cities (VegGuide.org is a good place to start).

Another tip we use when travelling (especially for finding breakfast) is to seek out bagel shops. Bagels are usually vegan and you can also usually get them with peanut butter. If you go to Google maps and use the find businesses link you can type in "bagels" and the town you're interested in and up will come a map with a bunch of bagel shops located.