The Lustful Vegan

I have a fridge full of veggies, and no time to cook^*. The weekend saw me skivving off to Stratford (the Canadian spin-off, not the UK original) with one of m’darlings for a couple days of pre-birthday fun. It was nicely uncrowded and even fairly un-touristy at this time of year, particularly considering that it was Mother’s Day weekend. We stayed at the lovely Glenwood B&B, saw  The Music Man at the Stratford Festival, and had a wonderful time browsing some of the interesting shops around town. If you ever make it there, check out Quark Soup and the amazing toy store, Family & Company! They’re well worth a romp or two, and it doesn’t matter how old you are.

The chocolate shops proved a tasty diversion too. The first (Rheo Thompson) was not terribly vegan-friendly, but the second (Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory) offered one of those happy vegan experiences that make time away special. We showed up, made our usual “do you have anything without eggs or dairy” request, and promptly got a personal, friendly tour of the half dozen options available to us. The Power Hounds (dark chocolate coconut clusters) were soooooo good. I’m not sure it’s a good thing that I just discovered they have a shop in nearby Kitchener, and another in downtown Toronto, and yet another in the very airport I’ll be passing through on Wednesday…

But really, the culinary highlight of Stratford? VegOut. It’s a little vegan cafe just off the main strip. Great location, even better food. If we’d been Good And Responsible Food Critics^TM, we’d have ordered a few different dishes to share, so that we could report back on the full range of offerings. We didn’t. In place of long excuses, I’ll give you three words:

Fish. And. Chips.

Okay, let’s make that four: Vegan. Fish. And. Chips.

Yes, you read that right. They offered battered fake fish, complete with vegan tartar sauce. It mimicked real fish and chips well enough to suit my rusty memory. In fact I liked these far better than I ever liked the real thing — most F&C always seemed to be made with either low-quality fish, or come over-battered or over-greasy. These were crispy, well-filled, fried but not greasy, and very tasty. The fries were equally good. We both ordered the same thing without even hesitating. Then we went back later for dessert. The apple-raspberry pie was wonderful — nice tart apples, a good crust, and I even got to enjoy that crust since it was heated in an oven rather than a microwave, and thus wasn’t soggy and gross. The soy hot chocolate was the most chocolatey I’ve had outside my own kitchen. M’darling found his chocolate-peanut butter ‘cheesecake’ less rich than the versions we’ve had at Vegetarian Haven in Toronto, but enjoyed the couple bites he managed to steal of my pie.

I took no camera and thus took no photos. Just take my word for it — the food was fabulous and you too should go there if you ever have the chance. We found the place through HappyCow. Travelling? Need to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant? You should check out HappyCow, and add reviews of any new places you find too!

So those were the highlights of the weekend. Tomorrow I’m off to Toronto, and Wednesday I’m off to Boston. At this point I’m not even sure when I’m back, but certainly by this time next week. Cookery, photos, and assorted blathering to resume then, or sometime near then. =)

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^* Which is killing me, because our eagerly-awaited grill just arrived. Literally. It’s still in a big box in front of me, and all I want to do now is grill and eat everything in the house. *g*

Yesterday I got my copy of the last Vegan Feast, Bryanna Grogan’s fantastic, recipe-packed newsletter….though at 69 pages it feels more like a small book than a newsletter! Due to personal issues she’s had to give it up and concentrate her efforts elsewhere. After five years of bringing us some of the best mock meats, faux cheeses, brunch foods, and more, that’s pretty sad news for the vegan world.

On the plus side, it looks like her blog will continue, and with luck she will also keep producing cookbooks.

Good luck, Bryanna — I hope things get better for you, and thanks for five years of such an inspirational and tasty newsletter!

I keep meaning to start a table listing easy substitutions for when you’re trying to ‘veganize’ a recipe. I’ve made notes in a half dozen places, but can I ever find them when I want them? Nooooo. Anyway, here’s a first take, and I’ll keep revisiting this as I think of new things to add.

Ingredient:	Substitute:
Milk	Easy — try an equal amount of soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, oat milk, potato milk, coconut milk, raw mylk, etc.Bear in mind that different milks have different qualities. For example, rice and almond milk tend to be quite sweet, so might not do the trick in a savoury dish. Soy milk is roughly the same ‘thickness’ as regular milk, but rice milk is very thin — more like a skim milk. Most soy milks are sweetened — you may want to hunt for an unsweetened version (particularly if you have something like mashed potatoes on the menu). All versions have their own benefits, and you can even make some of them yourself, from scratch.
Cream	There are commercial soy-based ‘creams,’ but I haven’t tried any yet. When I need to replace cream, I tend to use: Powdered soy milk — mix with water to reconstitute, but keep whisking in extra powder until you reach the right consistency for the type of cream you’re replacing. One caveat — I find that the powdered soy milks I’ve tried tend to have a strong bean flavour that really stands out when you make a soy cream, so this works best when used in small amounts or in highly-flavoured dishes. Thick coconut milk — it’s not as thick as a whipping cream, but just fine for replacing half-and-half. It’s wonderful in curries and soups. Cashew cream — this works very well for creamy sauces, soups, desserts…pretty much anything. Blend approximately 1 part raw cashews with 3 parts liquid until well blended, then add more liquid or cashews as necessary to get the right consistency.
Buttermilk	Add 1T lemon juice or white/cider vinegar to a cup of soy milk. I find this does wonders in many baked treats.
Eggs	Pureed or mashed fruit. Apples, prunes, and banana all work. To replace one egg, try half a banana, or a quarter cup of apple or prune sauce. Best for baked goods, or anywhere the added sweetness and fruit flavour will prove tasty. I use pureed prunes in baked chocolate goods, though generally to replace oil rather than eggs. The flavour compliments the chocolate taste very nicely. Tofu. (1/4 cup silken tofu = 1 egg.) This is fairly neutral, taste-wise. Puree it with other wet ingredients before adding to the rest of the dish. Egg replacer. This is a commercial product — a cornstarch-like powder. There are a few varieties; the one I use is Kingsway, and calls for 1 tsp mixed with 2 T liquid to replace one egg. Others may vary. I’ve had excellent luck with the stuff in baking — it’s very convenient. I do tend to add a bit extra. This is also a neutral taste addition. Cornstarch. Another neutral taste. To replace one egg, mix 2 T of cornstarch with an equal amount of water. Flax. “Flax eggs” seem to be one of the most common egg replacers out there. To replace one egg, grind some flax seed (coffee grinders are great for this, but clean them well before and after!). Beat 1 T into 1/4 cup of water, until the mixture thickens a bit. Flax eggs add a slight nutty flavour to dishes.
Butter	I find I can use oil in place of butter in many cases; my oil of choice is grapeseed, because it’s fairly neutral taste-wise and handles high heat very well.If you really want a buttery flavour, try Earth Balance — a very tasty vegan margarine. (And no, most margarines aren’t vegan — the majority contain whey powder or casein, which are milk products.) I’ve found that in baked recipes I can cut back a bit on the amount of fat required when using Earth Balance; substituting 1:1 makes things a bit oily.
Lard	Use vegetable shortening.
Yogurt	Try soy yogurt — there are at least two varieties available out there. If you don’t have soy yogurt, you still have a couple options: Silken tofu, pureed with lemon juice or white/cider vinegar. I’ve done this, but can’t remember the exact proportions I used — I think it was 1T of the lemon/vinegar to 1 cup of tofu. Thickened soy buttermilk. I haven’t tried this myself yet, but bookmarked celineyum’s formula for the next time I’m out: Combine 6 oz soy milk with 1.5 T cornstarch. Microwave for 30 seconds, stir, microwave for another 15-20 seconds. Add a squeeze of lemon juice or splash of vinegar, let sit 3 minutes.
Cream cheese	Definitely try Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese, which I’ve found in most health food stores and seen in some grocery stores. I always loved bagels and cream cheese, and no longer miss them. The stuff really is as good as they claim…and it makes heavenly cheesecake.
Sour cream	There are a couple commercial faux sour creams. I’ve tried the Tofutti one, but remain fairly unenthusiastic about it. Personally I prefer the raw sour cream I learned to make last month:Soak 1 ½ cups cashews for a few hours or overnight. In a blender, combine the cashews with ½ teaspoon salt, 2+ T lemon juice, and ¾ cup water. Blend until smooth, then taste. Adjust the seasonings as necessary (you will probably need more lemon juice), and then add water a bit at a time until you reach the right consistency.

Our balcony contains exactly one piece of furniture — a well-worn bamboo table. This table is wasp nirvana. Every spring the stripy little buggers come from who-knows-where to gnaw on it. You can hear them chewing. Seriously! They land, feast, fly off, and repeat ad nauseum. Obviously they’re using it for nest-building material.

Have I mentioned I’m virtually phobic about bees, wasps, and stinging things in general? This is not a good combination. Normally this means I run inside a lot, but this year I decided to try something new. Lee Valley and Home Hardware sell this thing called a Waspinator. No, it’s not a Transformer, though a wasp-fighting robot would be kinda cool, if needlessly violent. This thing is basically a blow-up nest. The idea is that wasps are territorial*, so if you make it look like your area is already occupied, they’ll stay clear. Excellent, a solution that harms none of us.

Today I was outside planting some seeds. Sure enough, *gnawgnawgnaw*, there was one of my stripy friends on the table beside me, whittling it down as I watched. Aha, I thought, and reached inside for my as-yet-undeployed Waspinator. A few seconds later I returned and deployed The Solution.

The wasp gnawed away. I shuffled closer. The wasp continued gnawing. I shuffled a bit further. The wasp went for a buzzing flight, came at me…and veered off. Then it went back to its original spot and resumed its business, while I stood over it with my fake nest going “ahem…ahem.”

I can’t claim this is a good test of The Solution, but I did find it pretty darned amusing. Next step: find a way to secure el Waspinator someplace semi-permanent outside, and see if that starts having a more general effect.

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* This is only supposed to work on ’social’ wasps, since those are the kind that build nests. ‘Solitary’ wasps need not apply.

Today our nice local veggie people dropped off our nice local veggies. I’d ordered basil (mmmm, pesto!), but to my surprise I didn’t find a bunch of cut herbs — I found an entire plant! A nice, bushy little basil plant, complete with roots. It doesn’t get fresher than that. Given that just yesterday I bought seeds to grow my own, I have to admit I’m tempted to plant it and see what happens. It’s so fresh and healthy looking. I can go without pesto for a bit…

On another random note, today I realized just how much my eating patterns have shifted in the past four months. I was cleaning the fridge (*shudder*), and found no less than three unopened packages of tofu, plus another of veggie ground. Three of those were significantly past their best-before date. Apparently I’ve really moved away from eating fake meat and tofu. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them — I’ve just been eating more beans and nuts, and meals more centered around vegetables than meat substitutes. I miss my tofu though — tonight I’m making tofu quiche dammit. There’s still pie dough left over from a massive pie-making foray (veggie and curry pot pies, mmmmmm), so it shouldn’t be too difficult. The pies were supposed to stock the freezer, but there are only two left! I used this recipe for “no fail pie crust”, and it delivered as promised even with my substitution of 1/3 whole wheat flour. The best part was not having to roll the dough (except for the pie tops). Once upon a time I was pretty darned good at making and rolling pie crusts…but then I didn’t do it for years and now I’ve lost the knack.

…there can still be food, and photos of food.

I just finished constructing my first ghetto light tent. It cost me a whole dollar to make, because the only thing I needed to buy was a sheet of white posterboard. It’s a cardboard box with most of the sides cut out, and papered over with rice paper (I’ve had a huge roll of the stuff kicking around for years). Parchment paper probably would have worked too. Objects go inside the box/tent, placed on a backdrop that curves from the top-back to bottom-front — curved so that you get no lines in the shot, and the background looks continuous. (Apparently this is called a ’sweep’.) That fancy backdrop is the aforementioned sheet of posterboard, cut to fit the interior width of the box, and held in place by two big magnets stolen from the fridge. For light I’m using a clamp-on full-spectrum light stolen from my painting easel. I can aim it through any of the three papered-over sides of the box to create different lighting. See how the shadows and highlights shift?…

I could even add more lights to cover different sides if I wanted to, but naaaaah. This is good enough for late-night shots of tomatoes, and just the thing for even yummier foods. Ta da!

Apple-sprout-pecan salad
with a maple vinaigrette

I want to be this woman when I grow up. The food…the photos…swoon!

Yesterday and today I took part in a study run by the local university, evaluating Eatracker.ca. It was pretty interesting. Yesterday I had to create a special account on the site, and use it to track everything I consumed throughout the day (including food, vitamins and supplements, drinks, etc.). This morning I met with a dietitian, and she collected much the same information via conversation. Naturally the two approaches had a lot of overlap, but they differed in the details they collected. For example I missed some things in the interview, because it was morning and my memory doesn’t kick in before the afternoon. On the other hand I’m sure that the dietitian managed a better overall assessment, because Eatracker’s database didn’t include a lot of the foods I eat (things like bulgur, kiwi, dried cranberries, etc.), which meant my online food list wasn’t 100% complete.

She also took general feedback on the system — which I can summarize as “easy enough to use and nice assessments, but the food database is sadly lacking.” My site of choice remains NutritionData.com, though admittedly the focus is different — more concerned with nutrition information, less with daily tracking. I use it mostly for analyzing recipes and individual foods; it has the best food database I’ve found, and offers tremendous detail. Eatracker may be better for tracking nutritional info over time though. I used it intermittently even before this study, and so learned that I’m consistently coming up a bit short on potassium, but have absolutely no worries re: the usual vegan ‘deficits’ — protein, iron, B12, or calcium.

Anyway, that was the study and the site. While I was participating I jotted down some notes for my own amusement. The highlight?…

“4:17pm…*bite head off of chocolate Easter bunny*…Uh oh…*eyes laptop*…How many grams of chocolate in a Botticelli bunny head? Nope, forget it, I’m not logging this. Never happened. Move along now.”

My sprouts are sprouting, hurray!

The mung beans have actually been very sprouty for a while — I’ve been nibbling them already, and threw a good half cup into last night’s vegan Kung Pao Chik’n. The broccoli sprouts were proving more reticent, but today they seemed to hit critical mass and I can really see them bursting out of their seeds. Very cool.

On the sprouters themselves, I can see why stacked multi-tiered sprouters are popular. They let you sprout different kinds of seeds simultaneously, and/or stagger your sprouting to get a more regular ‘crop.’ With my two sprouters I can’t start any new seeds until the current ones are ready. Or until I get more mason jars.

The one specially-made sprouter I’m using is a “Tony Hornick’s sprouter.” It’s basically a metal sieve that sits on top of a plastic dish, with a plastic dome to go overtop. You put your seeds into the sieve, and put water in the dish below. Rinse the seeds/sprouts twice daily, and in a few days you get sprouts. This works well for big seeds like my mungs, but the sieve would never work for the broccoli — the seeds are too small and would fall through. Also, a couple spots on the sieve are already starting to rust from the constant moisture! So while I was originally impressed by its ease of use, I don’t think it’ll be an ideal solution in the long run.

Tomorrow is Earth Hour! If you haven’t heard about it already, it’s an event organized by the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) to encourage awareness of climate change. It’s easy to participate too — just turn off your lights between 8pm and 9pm. Really, that’s it! You can turn off more if you like, of course.  :)  I don’t know about other countries, but I know that here in Canada a lot of cities are officially getting in on the act too, and turning off or reducing the lighting in many public buildings and landmarks — places like Niagara Falls and the CN Tower.

What can turning the lights off for a mere hour do? Well here’s a quote from the event’s Facebook page:

“Last year, on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney (Australia) businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.”

Just a bit more proof that small things can make a difference. So why not turn your lights off for an hour tomorrow evening and have a late dinner by candlelight, or go for a walk and see if the stars are any clearer?