I spent last weekend in Austin, Texas speaking at BlogHer Food with one of my favorite vegan chefs and friend Christy Morgan, and exploring tons of fun vegan spots.
Christy and I spoke about video equipment, which was a great way for me to feel comfortable for my very first time speaking at a conference. It went well, and more importantly we all had fun talking about cameras and mics, which I think is a pretty good success, right?
You can even check out the notes, audio and slides from our session! (Audio and slides to be posted in the next couple of weeks.)
You can read Christy’s recap of our session and our weekend on her site.
Then we got to just enjoy the rest of the conference! I went to lots of great talks about mobile food photography, blogging on the go and caught a fantastic session by Whitney Lauritson about video editing.
JL was also at the conference, and all of us vegans went out for some fun meals together – at La Condesa (they didn’t have the vegan tasting menu anymore, but our server was really helpful in picking out some great dishes and brought us a selection of vegan ice creams on the house for dessert).
We went to the Whole Foods foodtruck, Arlo’s food truck, and Beets Cafe for a wonderful raw meal.
One of the highlights for me was that I was invited to happy hour with the national mango board! I almost died of happiness when I got that email… happiest hour ever!
Whitney and I had a lot of fun, we won a photo contest, and I got a special shipment of fresh mangoes from them in the mail yesterday 🙂
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Christy took me to Juiceland and Sweet Ritual for juice and vegan ice cream (and I stocked up on some local kombucha).
With Whitney, we checked out Casa De Luz, a macrobiotic restaurant that was phenomenal, along with a stop at In.gredients, a store that sources things as locally as possible and uses minimal packaging..
We didn’t spend the whole time eating, though. Christy brought me to Beyond Fit for a really awesome high intensity interval workout.
They’re all about plant-based nutrition, too, so on our cool-down jog we were discussing hemp seeds and veggie burgers – how fun is that?? I felt tired but energized afterwards, which was fantastic.
On my last day in Austin, Christy and I filmed a recipe for you from Amber Chea Crawley’s new cookbook, Practically Raw Desserts. We made some superfood snack bars that were amazingly good.
Christy will be posting our video and the recipe very soon on her site, and I’ll update this page when it’s up. In the mean time, if you subscribe to her email newsletter you’ll get her free ebook with some yummy spring recipes! Just look at the right side of her homepage.
So – Austin is an amazing place for vegan food! There were lots more places we didn’t get to, so if you’re heading through Texas Austin is definitely the place to stop. You’ll have to hunt down your own mangoes though 😉
Follow me on facebook, twitter or instagram if you want to keep up with me via photo – I’ve been finding it easier to stay in touch that way 🙂
