There's another vegetarian restaurant in Brisbane's Southside that recently opened: Su Life located at Palmdale Shopping Centre: 2120 Logan Road, Upper Mount Gravatt. Su Life is another Asian-style restaurant that started as Hu Fo that was open in Sunnybank until February 2011. Ange and I went there to check it out last Thursday plus had a great time exploring Palmdale. We both chose an entree/starter and a main meal each and shared them.

We started with Ange's choice, the Golden Pancakes AU$5:

I was inspired to be creative and create some art that could be used for marketing the vegan message when I heard about the PaperGirl Brisbane great idea of free art to random people delivered by bicycle. Here's how it works:

1. Collect artwork and writing.
2. Exhibit all the submitted pieces of work.
3. Deliver all the work to random people via bicycle.

I’m looking for Vegan Fitness individuals (Male & Female) Professional or non-professional to share their tips for maintaining fitness with a vegan lifestyle & to answer some fitness-related questions for upcoming articles on Viva la Vegan!

Some potential areas of fitness/exercise include:

• Basketball
• Bodybuilding
• Cycling
• Football
• Marathon runners
• Mixed Martial Arts
• Olympians
• Running (endurance)
• Triathlons
• Weight lifting
• Yoga & Pilates

If you are interested in being involved, please Contact me. Responses are due by Wednesday 29 February 2012.

Please spread the word.

Animal Liberation Victoria have just put their Be Vegan brochure online for download. This is one of my favourite outreach tools that I always have on hand:

DOWNLOAD (PDF)

This morning at 9:30am Brisbane time (Tuesday 3:30pm LA time) I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Heather Lounsbury, L.Ac. who is an Acupuncturist, Herbalist & Nutritionist in LA. Heather runs the website Live Natural Live Well and conducts interviews twice a month as DocHeather on BlogTalkRadio.

Here's the Interview Link where you can listen to the 30 minute interview. It was a lot of fun with 300 people listening in!

Vegan naturopath, Eve Adam who runs the informative Renew Vitality website has just released a wonderful 8-page booklet full of cute drawings and beautiful poetry entitled Please Don't Think I'm Rude

This weekend sees the opening of the second Sentience: Hidden Lives exhibition in Perth, Western Australia featuring work by a variety of international and Australian artists across a range of mediums including Lorikeet Gaze a Digital paint media on Giclee print by Philipp Pahin (below)

2011 was a great year for myself and Viva la Vegan! I've interviewed many inspiring vegans (many of whom are my friends), spoke at various events in Australia and the USA, wrote an excessive amount of blogs and generally tried to continue with my positive information, education and vegan outreach in the best ways I know how. As a Sagittarian with a Gemini Moon and Ascendant it's all about communication for me - in all forms!

Thank you to everyone who has shared my blogs, recipes, articles, videos, links, interviews, talks etc etc on Social Media websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, Google+ and even MySpace. Thank you to those who have listened to my Podcasts on iTunes. Plus thank you to those who are subscribed to my videos on YouTube. 2011 was inspiring, I truly appreciate all those who have helped spread the vegan message and am humbled by hearing from each one of you. 2012 is going to be the year when some big shifts are coming. Are you ready?

My #1 blog for 2011 is: Adventures to Kind Living Cafe and Maleny:

My #1 video for 2011 (by far) is: Interview with Carol Glasser from Vegina:

Here's the Viva la Vegan! top 10 blogs and videos for 2011!

I have never been into Christmas. Mum will say that when younger I loved all the presents my sister and I received, and there were a lot of presents. Why were they never from my parents though? Just some mystical guy with a beard who decided if we were good enough, or not. If the presents were known to be from my parents earlier would I have appreciated them more when I was younger? Why does everything in our society seem to perpetuate the black vs white, bad vs good, Devil vs God mentality? I can just imagine how wonderful children whose parents have no money to buy presents for them feel...

(photo of the Koch & Charles family Christmas dinner 2010 above)

Christmas is that time of year when some people remember that:

• they're religious
• they haven't paid their credit cards from last Christmas, but that doesn't mattter because they also remember...
• that everyone will be at the local shopping centre, so they must be too
• they can't stand their family/friends/the world's population
• for some reason this time of year is an excuse for gluttony in all it's forms
• they love animals, somewhere after they've gorged on just about every creature they can
• even though they're religious, love animals and such "thou shall not kill" just does not apply to anything they like to eat

I try not to be despondent at this time of year. But years of previously working in music retail, seeing people who can't afford to pay their credit off from last year, filling trolleys with more stuff that they do not need really gets to me. It gets to me that people force themselves to see people they can't stand, buy rubbish they don't need, eat food they don't need etc etc just because they're told they're meant to either from some deity or shopping/marketing deity. I realise that people celebrate Christmas, often begrudgingly, especially us vegans who know that even more of our animal friends are killed to fill already-indulged bellies at this time of year.

So, here's a collection of some Cruelty Free & Vegan Christmas ideas, recipes (raw and gluten free options) and tips to get through the silly season. I wish us all the luck in the world!

To celebrate my birthday this year on Sunday 4 December, I decided I was going to host an Ice Cream & Pool Party to celebrate with my family and some of my closest friends. I've had a lot of people ask me for recipes, ideas and other information on my party, so here it is!

The photo above is of Janenne's wonderful brownies with coconut cream that I had requested her make for my birthday.

Here's the Why Vegan? talk I gave as part of the Brisbane Raw Food and Healthy Living Group event:

Please share with your non-vegan friends and family.

The Vegan Society of New South Wales are celebrating their 30th birthday this year!

Here's the birthday video featuring some great Australian and International activists:

There's a new vegan restaurant in town, out in the suburbs, very close to Loving Hut. It's called Green Vegetarian Restaurant and Bar and is located at 1299 Logan Road, Mt Gravatt. I went here for dinner last night with friends Ange and Steve on the anniversary of the restaurant's first week open.

Once again Animal Liberation Victoria are organising and running the 30 Day Vegan Easy Challenge which will take place from the 1-30 of November! This is one of my favourite vegan outreach events, it not only inspires but empowers people to become vegan and get involved with taking responsibility for their health, our environment and our animal friends - kind of like the new book release by the lovely Colleen Patrick-Goudreau that just so happens to have the same name:

The lovely Jasmin (who is one of my favourite friends!) and her equally lovely partner in life and activism, Mariann, invited me to be interviewed for their podcast: Episode 92: “There is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Nicole (who I met in Portland, OR - blog coming soon!) asked me to write a lil' blurb about a vegan product I like for Vegan MOFO (Month of Food) where Nicole was profiling vegan people she likes with the products they like on her blog Vegan Things I Like. I chose Pure Gaisha's mineral liquid eyeliner.

I have only recently discovered a really wonderful artist, Sarah Kiser, who lives in Florida, USA. Sarah is a FaceBook friend of mine and is going to be illustrating an upcoming recipe book for me! On her website and FaceBook page, Sarah has many beautiful pieces of artwork including, Ella Mermaid below:

It's a great time of year! Summer is almost here and it's under two months until my birthday!

The other amazing thing about this time of year is Vegan Festival time. Next weekend is the start of my East coast Vegan Festival tour and I hope to see many of you when I'm in your home town or when you've come to whatever town the vegan festival is in.

The biggest news on the festival calendar, is Canberra's first all-vegan festival,the new Living Green Festival taking place on Sunday 16 October.