By Jill

One the things we like best about Toronto is how easy it is to be a vegan in the city. Sometimes we complain, but mostly we love. We were reminded of this over and over this past weekend, during a healthy two-day bender of Torontoist vegan extravagance.
Saturday morning started late with brunch at Fressen, which we usually start looking forward to sometime around noon on Wednesday. It’s not that we can’t live without the barbeque tofu scramble so much as we’re just unwilling to try.
This was followed much later with dinner at Gypsy before our monthly immersion into classic hip hop at Never Forgive Action. We don’t know if the dragon bowl is always vegan or if the bowl we got was different from the bowl on the menu, but it was coco-licious, generated no grief from the kitchen and was very satisfying after a long day of manual labour.

On Sunday afternoon, celebrity vegan cookbook author Sarah Kramer was sighted brunching at Fresh on Crawford, apparently in town for some vegan shoe shopping at Left Feet.
We treated ourselves soon after to a vegan chocolate bar from the Organic Boutique (970 Queen Street) and then headed home to whip up a batch of seitan, ingredients for which are readily found at our favourite organic stores, like Essence of Life in Kensington.
Our plans never materialized for a soy latte and a slice of New Moon Kitchen banana bread at the Beaver Café, where they are always happy to hold the mayo, but the weekend was nevertheless an exemplary specimen of better-weather-than-usual-than-usual weekending– one which we hope to repeat, with variation, many more times through the very promising upcoming spring and summer.