Vegan Sloppy Joes

This might sound like fakery but aha!

You are wrong.

Or maybe you're not wrong, but we're working with my rules and re: the substance-not-flavored-to-taste-like-meat clause, TVP is not fakery.

Textured vegetable protein is in the same category as tofu, as far as I'm concerned. It's mostly its own thing and doesn' t have a lot of wacky Jersey factory ingredients. Just a particular texture. I still don't use it much, but for some reason I'm all over the veggie sloppy joes. Maybe because the real ones always seemed disgustingly fascinating. Something we didn't do in my fam. I have never had one, but I no longer feel I'm missing out.

So I have to admit, I didn't really measure this as I was making it. I always do it to taste, and unlike my hummus, it pretty much always comes out the same. I have guesstimated measurements for the second half of the ingredients - tomato on - so start under and work up to the amount, and then over if that seems necessary. Trust your taste. This one is pretty true to flavor.

Vegan Sloppy Joes

olive oil

1 med onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 serranos chilies, minced

1 carrot, grated

1 portabella, chopped

1 cup (dry) TVP, re-hydrated

1 cup canned tomato and juice, chopped

2 tbsp Bragg's

2 tbsp molasses

½ cup ketchup

salt to taste

1. Heat approx. 2 tbsp olive oil over med-high heat in a large heavy duty skillet. I use my cast iron.

2. When hot, add the onion and cook until translucent, stirring occasionally. Add garlic and chilies and stir for another minute. When fragrant, add tomato, Bragg's, molasses and ketchup.

3. Taste; adjust.

4. Add TVP, carrot, portabella and salt. Stir until thoroughly mixed and bring to a simmer. Turn down heat and simmer for 10-15 min.

5. Taste; adjust.

Good luck!

Vegan Mix Brownies!

When I was 21 I spent a year living in Boston. Rather than finishing up my last year at Tufts, I was working at a gourmet food shop and waiting to hear about my app to transfer into an agricultural program at Cornell. There were 7 of us in that house and we had a sort of veggie coop set up. Every week two people were on shopping duty, and we bought our food collectively and informally cooked for each other here and there. It worked pretty well. In fact, it was one of the best living situations I've ever stumbled into.

One of our small glitches was that two us were vegan while the rest were not. This meant that often things had to become vegan that ordinarily wouldn't have been. To be fair. Communal food.

For example: mix brownies.

I think I mentioned earlier that I freakin love brownies from a mix. Probably because my mother never made them when I was a kid. Everything we baked was from scratch, so mix brownies were pure magical sweetness.

And surprisingly, in and of themselves, often vegan.

Of course, they have a lot of other nonsense in them, but there are worse things. At least no corn syrup, right?

Here's what you do:

Instead of the

1 egg (for chewy ones, the way I like)
1/3 c. water and
1/3 c. veggie oil

that the kind I usually get – Duncan Hinse Chocolate Lover's – calls for, I use

3 tbsp. applesauce
1/3 c. water and
1/3 c. silken tofu (blended smooth).

Now you've cut the oil and the egg, but certainly not the sugar.

Simple Hummus

I have hummus recipe ish. (That's short for 'issue,' btw.) I can't find one I like. The hummus recipe in “How it All Vegan” is like a lot of the ones I have problems with: too complicated. Too many things in there. I think there's one in my “Vegetarian for Everyone” book that's pretty basic, but something about it bugs me, although I can't remember what. I haven't made in a while, though, ostensibly for that reason.

Or I'm just lazy. I hate opening a cook book for something I should just be able to throw together to taste. Something where all the ingredients end up in a food processor.

The problem then becomes my inability to repeat past combos. My hummus comes out different every time. This is fine, but it would be nice, once and a while, to have expectations and then to meet them.

So this time I measured. And I didn't accidentally put too much salt.

Plain Jane Hummus

½ c. tahini

½ cup olive oil (plus some for drizzle)

¼ c. fresh lemon juice

4+ cloves roasted garlic

1 15 oz. can chickpeas

approx. ¼ c. chickpea juice or water

salt to taste

paprika

1. In a food processor or blender, combine tahini, olive oil, lemon juice garlic and some salt (about ¼ tsp?) until smooth.

2. Add chickpeas and liquid some at a time until all chickpeas are incorporated and hummus is the consistency you desire.

3. Adjust salt.

4. Scoop into dish, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with paprika and serve.

This is a pretty mild hummus. Like a base hummus. Feel free to up the lemon juice or garlic, or to add a little cumin (½ – 1 tsp?) to taste. I prefer roasted garlic to regular because I cannot control fresh garlic. The flavor deepens as it sits, and every time I use the fresh stuff the hummus comes out two steps away from purely medicinal. I mean, I like garlic, but come on. Roasting the garlic mellows it out a little, but if you don't keep it around - I generally try to roast a couple bulbs every so often and just keep them in a tupperware in the fridge – fresh will do. Just start fewer and taste as you go.

Other Butter Option 3: Avacado

This is the simplest, least concocted option I've got.

An avocado.

For the right consistency, make sure your avocado is nice and ripe. You can tell by squeezing it gently (not too hard or it will bruise). If it gives, it's ripe. The more it gives, the riper it is. There is a limit to this - ripe can quickly become rotten, so keep an eye on your avocados. I keep mine on the counter until they're ripe, and then if I'm not ready to eat them, I stick them in the fridge to keep them from going bad in, like, a day. Also, if you're purchasing Hass avocados, the small, pear-shaped, pebbly skinned variety that most grocery stores carry, the skin darkens from green to near black as the avocado ripens.

Then all you have to do is open it up and scoup out some of the flesh and spread. Sprinkle with salt and there you are! Green butter! Amazing!

Avacados are also similar to marmite in their vegan-friendly healthinesses. They are relatively high in fat, but it's the monosaturated kind - the good kind - and have apparently been shown to reduce bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol (which we all know isn't just neutral but actually good for us) when eaten regularly. Among other things, they are high in B vitamins, potassiam and fiber. And they kind of look like dinosaur eggs.

Other Butter Option 2: Tofu Butter?

This is based off of a recipe in "How it All Vegan" for a really basic butter-like spread. All I've done is add roasted garlic. I'm not saying this is the best thing I've ever had, and it is 100% not butter, but it looks a little like butter (I think this is what the cookbook was mostly going for) and it's got the salt. I added the roasted garlic because it still tasted too much like tofu to me. I also upped the salt from "a pinch" to an actual amount.

The garlic makes a big difference, although it takes away from the butter-like simplicity that we're going for.

Biggest complaint? The texture. It has the gelatinous quality of silken tofu. This doesn't come across so much once you've spread it, but it makes me feel a little funny in my tummy when I stick my knife intp the container and the whole thing quivers like some half-dead sea creature.

But anyway. My toast is no longer dry.

Easy Veggie Butter

3/4 c. soft tofu

2 tbsp. flax oil or olive oil

1/2 tsp. salt

3-4 cloves roasted garlic

dash of tumeric

In a blender, blend all ingredients together until well mixed.

Annnd done.

I used half and half on the oil, for the olive oil flavor and the flax good-for-you-ness.

Snob Review: The Grape

Ok. I have to put my actual snob hat on for a moment. The thing is, the point of snobetarianism is not to be elitist. I don't generally mean “snob” as in I only like things that are fancy or up-scale or expensive or involve odd flavor combos like chocolate and bacon or rosemary-caramel-peach-cayenne. Greasy diners, veggie sloppy joes, ketchup. These are all things I love and am just as snobbily defensive of as I am of good pinots and hand-crafted pasta. Snobetarianism is, among other things, about appreciating things that are done well, whatever they are. Just do what you do well, and I'm be there behind you the whole yummy way.

But. Do what you do poorly and out comes the snob hat.

And in this case, unfortunately, I'm going to sound like the more traditional snob variety – the elitist. Here goes...

For those of you who don't know, I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. About three years ago a little walking mall, charmingly dubbed Perkins Rowe, opened up in mid-BR. This is not the kind of place I tend to frequent – to quote from an article my friend, Tracey Duncan, wrote comparing Perkins Rowe to downtown BR, it smacks of “pseudo-cosmopolitanism.” It is “a reproduction of downtown Everywhere, USA . . . a monument to broken and deserted downtowns everywhere . . . [it] has none of the flavor that makes Baton Rouge spicy, none of the pungency of the muddy Mississippi.” What it has is a J. Crew, an Urban Outfitters and a Sur La Table. It has a California Pizza Kitchen and a movie theater that sometimes plays not as mainstream movies. And it has The Grape.

The Grape is a chain wine bar, which I have never before encountered, but am not against in theory, if for no other reason than that they have wine and outdoor seating. Something not common here in the BR. To be fair, they have a pretty nice wine selection – the wine list organized by white and red and then light, medium and full-bodied wines. They carry things I know that I like as well as things I'd be happy to taste and you can get glasses and half-glasses of everything, which can make for a pretty tipsy afternoon. The prices aren't even that bad – there's a solid range – although I think they may have gone up since the place opened two years ago.

The problem with The Grape is the food. The food and the service. The food is horrendous. Embarrassing. Insulting. And the waitstaff – at least the few I've had, particularly our waitress last night – are clueless. Not to mention the condescending wine lesson we got from the wine manager.

I won't go into all of the food, and again to be fair, I haven't tried anything they have with meat. Perhaps the meat is fantastic. But if they can't even get a cheese plate right. Good God. Get out of the game.

A cheese plate may seem simple, but cheese is actually a relatively delicate beast. It has to be well cared for. Cheese – real cheese – is a living creature. It has to be able to breath. Cut and stored properly. This isn't a hard task, per se, it just takes a little attention. The cheese at The Grape is not well cared for. Their Parmesan-style cheese selection – Bellwether Farms San Andreas – is often dried out, and their semi-soft is rubbery. For starters. Beyond the cheeses themselves, there was also our waitress's complete lack of understanding. First, she hadn't ever tasted the blue because she “doesn't like blues,” and then she offered my friends the mozzarella and fontina that they have “in the back for other dishes” as alternatives to the artisinal cheeses on listed on the menu. Both of these cheeses can be quite good, but the type The Grape keeps in bulk stock for their “other dishes” does not a cheeseboard cheese make. Then, when she brought the board out, I immediately noticed the the blue looked . . . odd. More like a pile of mush than a nice slice of cheese. She informed us that they were out of the Point Reyes, but she had gotten the kitchen to spoon up some blue cheese crumbles in its place because “it's pretty much the same thing.”

Indeed.

On top of that, the "homemade vinaigrette" on the Greek salad I ordered was uninspired, and the salad showed up without either the garbanzo beans or the pepperoncini that the menu claimed it contained. This is not the first time I've ordered something there that has come sans some important ingredient; the last time it was the basil missing from my tomato basil mozzarella flatbread. The waitstaff tried to tell me the basil was in there. Seriously. If there was basil in there that I couldn't even see, what the hell was the point? At restaurant that has sleek black furniture, velveted chairs and a fancy broad-side menu, I expect real, fresh, whole-leaf basil when the menu promises basil. On top of that, the mozzarella appeared to be the shredded kind.

I could go on, but I think that sums it up nicely. In conclusion, the hummus was decent – garlicky with a balsamic tomato and onion 'salsa' on top. So if you like wine and cigarettes on the patio, by all means, but unless you like hummus, leave your appetite at home.

To read Tracey Duncan's article on Perkins Rowe in full, check it out in Sweet Tooth, a publication produced by Baton Rouge's Culture Candy Arts Org.

Other Butter Option 1: Marmite!

Here's another way in which I make my life hard:

I don't believe in margarine.

I'll eat it if I have to, that is, if I'm at my grandma's house and there's the tub of it on the table or if it's in cookies my friend made or if my father put it on the pb&j he made for me before remembering I don't usually go there on my pb&j. But I won't buy it. Perhaps it is healthier, in some cases, than butter, but I still think it's weird. Part of the snobetarian purity clause. If you want butter, suffer the consequences. Just don't eat it with a spoon.

Unless you want to, of course. Ya'll are big boys and girls.

As a vegan, however, I can't eat butter. This isn't much of a problem as far as things butter goes into - baked goods, etc - because there are other ways. Veggie oil for one. (I know, I know, it's basically margarine in another state, but here we are. I feel more comfortable with the liquid.) Where it really gets me down is in the toast department. I eat a lot of sourdough toast, and while the flavor of the bread stands up on its own, I'd still prefer a little butter to dry. So I'm on a mission to find a butter alternative. Not a substitute, that would be margarine, but something I can use instead of butter that has some of the same qualities. It's not butter, but it's still good.

The first option I'm going to present is: marmite. (Omg go to their website. It's adorable.) If you have no idea what this is, you're probably not alone. It's a UK product that doesn't get a lot of press here in the States. This may be because some people find it pretty offensive. As their ad campaign proclaims: you either love it or you hate it.

I happen to love it.

Basically, marmite is a spread consisting of yeast extract, vitamins and veggie and spice extracts. Brown in color, I've heard tell of people mistaking it for chocolate – by sight – and being rudely surprised upon mouth contact. It tastes nothing like chocolate. Nothing like chocolate. It's a savory spreads with a pretty strong flavor – definitely in the salty category. And when I say strong, I mean whoa, like butter wouldn't stand a chance getting through with marmite around. That's the main issue I have here using it instead of butter; it doesn't have the same anonymity. This is a spread with a no-miss personality, but it does satisfy the same umami-salt craving as butter. It just does it much more loudly.

Here's why I think it's particularly awesome for vegans: it's good for you. It has vitamin B12 as well as several other members of the vitamin B complex - thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, folic acid. Something non-meat eaters really need. And for those vegans out there who already make use of nutritional yeast as a cheese-type alternative, it's got the same type of savoriness. I'd the say flavor quality is somewhere between Bragg's and nutritional yeast – a combo that I use in a lot of Asian dishes to sub out the shrimp or fish paste.

It can be hard to find outside of big cities – in the BR you can get it at Whole Foods or World Market. If you have such things in your city, the small specialty import shop will often carry it. I imagine you can order it off line. It's an eensy bit pricey on this side of the Atlantic, but a little goes a long way. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. You might hate it, but you could love it, too.

I've been eating it on bread with tomato and local honey – questionably vegan, I know, but I think honey is magical and bee-keeping is magical and I always support magic.