10.05.08
On The Good Ship Vegan
For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months. Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.
The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.
This is, of course, all very silly. But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking. My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?” ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay. But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)
You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible. Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much. Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence. (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)
Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me. Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs. But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting. Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.
I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan. If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products. The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them. (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)
So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made? Noodle soup with tofu and chiles. Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam. Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers. Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles. Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish. Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries. Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower. Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives. Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.
Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning. While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long. We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne. Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.
Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either. It’s just so hard to choose.