Speaking of vegan pizzas…we ate out with some friends the other night at the Jolly Pumpkin Cafe & Brewery. Word had it that a person could get a pizza with soy cheese. While the word was correct, the word failed to mention that this was the bogus variety of soy cheese that’s made with…well…cheese. Can someone tell me why this product even exists?

Conventional wisdom would suggest that non-vegan soy cheese must be for either (a) people who want a marginally healthier cheese, or (b) folks who are lactose intolerant (non-vegan soy cheese typically has casein and sometimes even rennet, but not lactose). Unconventional wisdom, however, would suggest that non-vegan soy cheese exists to trick vegans. How many fledgling vegans have picked this up thinking–as any rational person would–that soy cheese  = vegan cheese? Or more likely, how many kindly friends and family members have picked this up for their vegans (this, I would argue, is probably the lion’s share of the non-vegan soy cheese market)? How many of us have been enticed and/or fooled by pizza with this crap? Now compare those numbers to the number of people how knowingly bought it.

At the very least, it seems reasonable to ask these companies to rename their soy cheese to something like 2% cheese or mostly not cheese (but just a little) or The Ultimate ‘Fuck You’ to Vegans ™. Why not just make it vegan and greatly increase the number of people who can consume it? Vegan cheese keeps getting better–Daiya melts just as well as the non-vegan varieties of faux cheese, tastes just as good–if not better, certainly won’t aggravate anyone’s lactose intolerance, and is probably healthier (at minimum it contains less cholesterol). The answer is probably that it would be either (a) more difficult, (b) more work, or (c) both.

I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect a company that presumably is enjoying some small profit to quit what they’re doing. The cost of changing their recipe may not be commensurate with what they’d get back. But I’d at least like to entreat restaurants who use this stuff to switch to a vegan variety. The minimal addition in cost greatly increases the number of people who can eat it. Additionally, it’s more honest. If we hadn’t made a point of asking, I’m sure the Jolly Pumpkin would have served us their not-quite-vegan pizza. What really burns me is that they’re clearly thinking of folks’ dietary needs; they even have gluten free crust! Why leave out the vegans?

This is what I e-mailed them:

Hello! My wife and I stopped in to the Ann Arbor restaurant last week–first off, let me say that the beer was excellent. The restaurant looks great too. We did have two small concerns, however. You offer a pizza with soy cheese–but this cheese isn’t vegan. This (a) excludes us vegans (and there are quite a few of us around here) and (b) is potentially misleading. If we hadn’t asked specifically (and a major thanks goes to our server for knowing the answer to this question), we may have eaten the pizza, assuming it was vegan. The great thing about vegan cheese is that it caters to the lactose intolerant, health conscious, and vegan alike. The other (very small) issue was that the soy cheese wasn’t on the menu; we learned about it from friends. Why not highlight this? I’d imagine beer and vegan pizza would be very popular with local vegans.

Daiya (http://www.daiyafoods.com/) currently seems to be the most popular brand of faux cheese (it’s soy-free too). Folks would probably be relatively happy with Follow Your Heart (http://www.followyourheart.com/products.php?id=25) as well, which has the advantage of being available in smaller retail quantities.

Thanks so much for your attention to this issue! Keep up the fine beers!

Thus ends my rant.

Take heart fellow vegans, small victories are still possible! This year, for the first time ever, we did away with the traditional mixed Spanksgiving (omni/vegan) “Separate but Equal” dinner in favor of something more communal. You know the meal–an entire vegan feast alongside an entire non-vegan feast, a multitude of dishes that are identical, save soymilk, Earth Balance, and veggie stock in lieu of milk, butter, and turkey stock.

The weekend got off to a great start when we were greeted at the door with vegan oatmeal cookies, which Amy’s omni brother deemed “perfect”. How awesome is Amy’s mom? How awesome is it that Amy’s brother, in a single phrase, eliminated any further necessity to make non-vegan oatmeal cookies?

The vegan bonanza continued through to Spanksgiving too; Amy’s mom typically makes two dressings (you know, stuffing, but not in the turkey)–one with veggie stock and one with turkey/chicken stock. This year, she decided it was too much trouble and that no one would miss the meat stock, which they didn’t. She also traditionally makes both vegan and non-vegan mashed sweet potatoes with candied pecan topping. Though she did decide to make a non-vegan version as well at the last minute, Amy’s brother–our omni-acceptability-barometer–decreed the vegan version just as good, freeing Amy’s mom from any future obligation to make two versions.

Add to this homemade bread and steamed broccoli and cauliflower (there was a cheese sauce for the omnivores), and you have quite a shared meal! The omnivores had turkey and turkey gravy, while Amy and I had Spanksgiving Seitan Faux-Turkey and seitan gravy–though Amy’s dad had some of ours as well.

While it may not always be possible to convince your friends and family of your values, it is possible to achieve acceptance, to build respect, and to erode some of the barriers that keep us from meeting halfway and enjoying a meal together–which, history notwithstanding, is what Spanksgiving is all about.

Spanksgiving Menu:

• Spanksgiving Seitan Faux-Turkey
• Dressing
• Mashed Potatoes
• Steamed Broccoli & Cauliflower
• Mashed Sweet Potatoes w/ Candied Pecan Topping
• Homemade Rolls
• Seitan Gravy
• (Cranberry Sauce – Amy’s fambly ate this)
• (Turkey – Amy’s fambly ate this)

I first made a version of this with my excellent pals Nick and Uncle Nathan for Friend Thanksgiving years and years ago. I don’t know where Uncle Nathan found the recipe, but over the years it’s become Amy’s and my staple Spanksgiving centerpiece. What’s great about this (aside from being delicious) is that it doesn’t attempt to mock a turkey; this means that (a) if you’re giving spanks with omnivores, they might enjoy this too (Amy’s dad ate some at Spanksgiving and had some instead of turkey the next day for leftovers), and (b) you can start a new tradition that doesn’t ape one you don’t support.

Spanksgiving Faux-Turkey

• 2/3 batch (2 packages if store-bought) of seitan
• 1/2 box of Fillo dough
• buttery spread (I like Earth Balance Whipped Buttery Spread)
• ~6 – 8 pieces of bread
• 1 large (but not huge) white onion, diced
• 1 handful fresh sage, diced (or ~3 tbsp dried sage / 1 tbsp if dried and ground)
• salt
• pepper
• 1 cup veggie stock (I like to use the seitan broth)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

This is all about the stuffing, really.  Either by hand or in a food processor, shred the bread into small pieces and crumblins and dump into a large mixing bowl.  Dice the onion and sage and add to the bread.  Mix the dry ingredients together briefly by hand.  Add the veggie stock incrementally in small pours until the mixture is just moist (you may not use all of the veggie stock–this depends largely on how dense your bread is).  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil.  Tear the seitan into smaller pieces (it will probably come in pieces) and form a mound of seitan 8 – 10 inches around in the center of the cookie sheet.

Pack the stuffing over the mound of seitan, preserving the roundness and shape of the mound.

One by one (or two by two like a damned ark if your fillo dough sheets won’t cover the whole mound) place the fillo dough sheets on the mound and brush with melted buttery spread.

That’s right.  EACH layer gets brushed with butter.  This ensures that your crust will be flakier than Lindsay Lohan.

Keep applying dough until you can’t see through it anymore and it’s a solid brown-white in color (you may later find that you like thinner or thicker crust).

Bake until crust is golden brown.

Though it’s really good by itself, I recommend a little gravy to go with it.

So having moved into a house in the not-too-distant past, we found ourselves, as grownups (nominally), on the other side of one of life’s most important doors: the Halloween door.

Sjaak's Vegan Peanut Butter Bites

I was kind of excited to hand out candy to the little chilluns, to be the house with good candy. You know those houses. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers, not that bullshit orange and black taffy stuff. Or the guy with pocket change. Or bags of popcorn that you can’t eat anyway because they’re not hermetically sealed and probably contain razorblades in the kernels. I’m talking about good candy.

But.

As a vegan, I don’t tend to eat much candy. At first, this was because it was too hard to find. Eventually, I think my whole palate changed and now I only occasionally gorge myself when Ryan makes 3 different kinds of cupcakes.

But what to give out to the chilluns? I know PETA has a list, but most of that stuff sucks. I’m talking about good candy.

In a perfect world, I’d make the Peanut Butter Cups from How It All Vegan, but they’d just get thrown away and/or would all be full of razorblades somehow.

I know most of the neighborhood kids aren’t vegan, so (a) they don’t care and (b) if they’re expecting “regular” candy, they might be unpleasantly surprised by a sub-par replacement.

Amy did find vegan peanut butter bites at the coop, but at $10/bag, Halloween could get pretty expensive.

What to do? Any ideas?! Anyone with vegan kids have a list of kid-approved treats?

In the IV kitchen, we find that we like cooking lots lots more if everything we need is clean, easy to find, and even…dare I say…pretty.  My friend Lauren cooks in such an attractive way.  She puts her veggies in containers as she chops them, cooking-show style.  I told her I observed her doing this and she denies it, but I saw it!  Mark and I have taken to doing the same thing.  A bowl for the compost stuff and a bowl for each veggie.

As you saw in Mark’s post on containers and bulk food, we have a lot of schtuff to keep organized.  We pick up most of our containers for bulk stuff at thrift stores and I found some lovely packaging labels at an office supply store.  We take the empty containers into the local coop and weigh them before filling them with their requisite contents and write the weight on the back of the tag for future reference.  This keeps us from using as many bags and disposable containers.  If the labels get a little mussed, you can tell that particular ingredient is well-loved (can you tell how much we like salt around these parts?).

We have a pantry with a little broom closet adjacent to it.  We didn’t find ourselves using the closet for much, and were running low on pantry space, so Mark put shelves in the broom closet and voila: more room!  We also mounted some handy shelves onto the wall for more storage.

For awhile there, we had a pretty messy spice situation.  They were in bags, different containers, and were generally mis-matchy and unattractive.  We decided to invest in what I dubbed a spice-lution.  We ordered these containers from a store called Raindogs.  Ordering 30 of them was a bit pricey, which is why we think of it as an investment.  After all, spices are one of the most important aspects of cooking, so they need to be kept in quality containers, away from humidity, excess light and other contaminants.

We were lucky to find room for ours on the side of our fridge since they’re magnetic.  We also liked these jars from Etsy, which are customizable and very attractive, but in the end, went with the ones with optional shake and pour openings.

In terms of fresh food, of course we keep most of it in the fridge like anyone else, but we also like to keep a lot of fruits and veggies that prefer room temperatures close at hand.  We have a little set-up for potatoes, onions, garlic, etc. that we quite like.

The herbs that needed to be brought in for the winter in pots are ready to be clipped for soups, stews and other wint’ry goodness in the greenhouse window over our sink.  Among all of their cactus and succulent friends, we have a healthy rosemary bush, lavendar and thyme.  We dried the rest of the herbs, as mentioned in a previous post.  There are also some dinosaurs, fish, and owls in there for good measure.

Okay now!  What have we learned today?  That’s right: get busy and keep it pretty, people!  Break!

I’ve been a naughty vegan, and it’s time to mend my ways. Farewell Bogle!

So, this being the Vegan Month of Food and all, what better time than now to talk about drinking vegan? It kind of makes sense–I’m normally obsessed with food, so Vegan MoFo’s focus on food isn’t really a change of pace for me. What is a change of pace is getting in touch with this gigantic community. I feel like I’ve had my head in the sand for years.

And I’ve been resting on my laurels. My vegan sire (you know, that person or those people who helped you become vegan) was pretty hardcore, so I learned a pretty hardline brand of veganism–one that encompassed not just food, but drink. It turns out a few beers and most wines aren’t vegan. Who would’ve thunk it? When this was brought to my attention, I pretty much ditched wine en masse. Over the years, though, I’ve gotten soft like Rocky in Rocky III. And it took Vegan MoFo, like a gentle Mr. T as Clubber Lane, to help me snap out of it.

It worked for Amy and me how it works for a lot of folks, I’d imagine:

We used to bring our own wine to events that demanded–demanded I say!–wine. To folks who don’t understand your choices, this can often seem a bit snooty. So then we would just try to stick to beer. I think it was ultimately the art scene that undid us. Not every gallery is as cool as, say, Three Walls, and serves PBR from a garbage can filled with ice. Most serve wine. Now, the obvious answer here is to not drink. Well, the second most obvious answer, the first clearly being a flask filled with Wild Turkey. I can’t even remember the first time I just said “screw it” and drank wine that I wasn’t certain about. But that’s how it starts–”we don’t know that this wine isn’t vegan”. So much for ethics.

After a while, this becomes “we don’t care if this wine isn’t vegan”. And pretty soon, you find yourself buying wines that you’ve recently enjoyed, without even checking your list. Well, I checked the list a few nights ago for our current favorite, Bogle, which is decidedly NOT vegan. So this isn’t even freegan. Oh, the shame.

That being said, I certainly acknowledge that veganism has a few lines that are a little blurry–questions of second-hand leather, honey, good products from bad companies, etc. But wine often has egg whites, gelatin, or both. Not so blurry.

As part of surfing vegan blogs during the MoFo action, I stumbled upon Barnivore. And I felt shame, dear readers, true shame. In the words of Johnny Cash using the words of Sting, I hung my head, I hung my head.

But.

Now is the time to recommit to drinking vegan. Are you with me? Well…maybe you were already there.

Strangely, I’ve become increasingly committed over the last several years to buying local. So part of this new commitment involves contacting local wineries about their wines and using this info to help keep Barnivore up-to-date. I’ll be compiling a list of vegan Michigan wines (and encourage other folks to do the same for their areas). Additionally, I intend to keep a “wine diary” of sorts, with some thoughts on which vegan wines are good and which should be avoided.

Which is all an awful lot of work for someone who prefers whiskey. Consider this my Vegan MoFo confession. What’s yours?

P.S. Anyone have any recommendations? We’re especially keen on red zinfandel right now.

P.P.S.  I made a printable list of vegan wines from Barnivore–you can print it two-sided and fold it, to have with you at all wine-buying/drinking occasions.

My folks got me a pressure cooker for my birthday this year:

This is awesome, because we’ve been rockin’ dried bulk beans. Which in turn means we’re:

• not using new containers
• saving money
• cutting down on transport costs
• more nearly ready for the Zombie Apocalypse

After 1.5 weeks (so I’m an official master now), I’ve gathered that it’s totally unnecessary to presoak the beans, which for me was probably the major barrier to using dried beans. How am I supposed to know a day in advance what I’m going to want to cook? I’ve also gathered that 1 cup of dried beans becomes 2 – 3 cups of cooked beans. The longer the cooking time, the more the beans expand, i.e. the greater the yield. 1 – 1.5 cups of beans works pretty well with 7 cups of water (you use a little more water when you don’t presoak).

Here are a few guesses at cooking times (I’ll poke back in periodically with updates):

• Chick peas: 25 minutes
• Black-eyed peas: 10 -15 minutes (I tried 25, and they were pretty mushy)

This li’l guy worked great for VeganDad’s Chickpea Cakes, Jumpin John, and Hummus.