Sharon Shannon’s ‘Garden of Vegan’

Fancy a salad with balls? Or maybe a burger with attitude?

Well then, get along to The Garden of Vegan, the latest venture from musician and animal lover Sharon Shannon.

Determined to “remove the preciousness” that can often surround vegan cooking, Sharon has teamed up with Galway’s Good Food Truck company to set up a specialist truck that will visit festivals the length and breadth of Ireland this summer.

The Garden of Vegan menu also includes a Root Vegetable, Chickpea and Lentil Hot-pot and a Spicy Coconut Malaysian Curry, all accompanied by Spuds, Spuds and more Spuds.

Sharon, who has been vegetarian for more than a decade, finally gave up all dairy and egg produce two years ago, because she feels it’s wrong to exploit animals for human food. Becoming vegan has turned her into a more experimental cook, she says, and that’s the message she wants to spread.

“I want people to be adventurous. When you are vegan, you have to try a lot of stuff you’ve never tried before and a lot of it would be new to meat-eaters too.”

Sharon has already proved her worth on the TV series, The Restaurant – as the mystery chef, her vegan menu got three stars from the judges.

Vegan cuisine often gets labelled as boring, but Sharon loves her food and, as her success on The Restaurant shows, she has no interest in eating dishes that aren’t tasty.

Her initial quest with this new venture is a simple one – getting people who might never have eaten vegan food before to try it.

“Everyone can eat this food, whether you are a meat-eater, vegetarian or a vegan.”

And because it’s all gluten-free, it’s also suitable for coeliacs.

The idea for this show came about when Sharon was being interviewed by Anton Savage on Today FM about her success on The Restaurant.

Vinny and Yasmin McNelis, who operate The Good Food Truck service, which travels to festivals all around Ireland, were listening and heard her talk about her ambition to promote vegan food.

They contacted Sharon and her manager John Dunford to explore the possibility of establishing a food truck for festivals which would specialise in vegan meals.

Sharon would create the menus and their chef would cook them. And that’s what happened.

As John Dunford explains, “she is a musician, not a chef, so she won’t be flipping burgers at festivals anytime soon”.

But the menu is based on the food she cooks at home, including dressings and sauces that she uses to flavour meals.

Naming the dishes for the menu was great fun – initially she wanted to call the burger ‘the great big dirty burger’ purely to point out that vegans “can be just as macho as meat-eaters”.

However, given that the idea was to promote healthy food, she revised that, so now it’s ‘A burger with attitude’. With chick peas, soya beans, green lentils, sprouted seeds, toasted pumpkin seeds, beetroot, pomegranate kernels, grated carrots, beetroot and potato, topped with special salad dressings, it’s both health and tasty.

Credit for the ‘salad with balls’ title goes to American blog, Thug Kitchen, which is vegan but as far away from obsessive ‘clean eating’ as it’s possible to get.

Although she’s not precious, going vegan has brought benefits to Sharon who feels much healthier since cutting out eggs and dairy from her diet, and – bonus for everybody who wants to trim up – has lost weight from her belly.

Most of that was due to bloating, she feels, and that’s gone since she went vegan.

While she’d like everybody to have more regard for animals and their welfare, her immediate goal is to get people to sample the fare.

She has already cooked in pop-up restaurants, including Nick Munier’s Avenue in Dublin and may do more of that in future. For now, she’s constantly experimenting with new dishes when she’s at home in Galway. Not everything works, but her most recent successes have included a wild garlic and nettle pesto.

Meanwhile, The Garden of Vegan food truck has already travelled to Africa Day in the Phoenix Park where there was great demand for the food. Next up is the Challenge Galway triathlon which runs from June 24-26.

Meanwhile, for anybody who wants to try making vegan food at home, Sharon recommends visiting govegan.ie a website run by fellow-vegan Sharon Higgins, which has a ‘vegan kit’ to help people replace meat and dairy produce in their diet.