Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I bailed on a vegan cooking class I was going to help someone with (L was sick) and apparently one woman wore her fur boots "for Tofulish" and another said "Oh I came up with all these questions to annoy Tofulish and now she isn't here." One of them was "Breast milk isn't vegan because its milk, right?"

I had given them a recipe for blackbeans and sweet potato tacos with guac, and it generally takes me under 15 minutes to make and it took them 3 hours. Their lesson - vegan food is really hard to make. Seriously, the recipe is dice and fry sweet potato and onion, fry until soft and then add a can of black beans. Warm corn tortillas, make guac and serve.

That sounds really good! I do black beans and sweet potatoes a lot, but just add salsa. Guac and some onion would be way better.

Also, people suck. I'm glad that you didn't have to put up with that shiitake, Tofulish.

That's what I want for dinner now.

Sounds good you weren't there. Who wears fur boots just to annoy somebody else? Are they 12?

For me, that's the price of educating omnis sometimes. You have to be willing to take a ribbing and show them that vegan food is easy. If L hadn't been a noserunny mess, I would have been thrilled to go, suck up the "jokes" and show them how good and easy vegan food can be, to encourage more meatless meals.

But that is part of the reason I need a vegan community. I love outreach and changing minds, but I need some good vegantimes too. I had a playdate with two veganish moms and it was awesome. We talked about rescuing animals and why the world needs more vegans etc. It was amazing. Sadly our kids didn't enjoy eachother much, so it was more a mom playdate while we prevented the two bigger kids from shoving Leela. Seriously, no one wanted to share their toys with her, and it was sad. I loved the moms and would like to hang out every day, but Leela needs playmates too :)

Here is the recipe, such that it is: http://naturallyella.com/2012/02/17/chi ... uac-tacos/

Yes, I take a lot of ribbing and whatnot too around friends, co-workers etc. You to have to take it and make light of it...then come home (or here) and bisque about it.

Glad you can take it Tofulish. And those tacos sound really good. Will be making them soon!

I'll take one for the team and eat the tacos. You're welcome.

My MIL had the best of intentions but used to send us care packages filled with milk chocolates for every plausibly-candy-involving holiday. I don't eat milk and my (ovo-lacto veg) husband hates chocolate.

Here's a peeve (hasn't happened to me in a little while, thankfully): when I order something online but the materials listed on the website are wrong/incomplete so it's not really vegan. Like the one time I ordered a 'polyester' puffy coat and the outside was polyester but they neglected to mention that the inside was filled with goose down. Unfortunately by the time I noticed I'd already been wearing it a good chunk of winter and only noticed because I smelled like a wet dog when it rained and started shedding feathers here and there. ARGH.

'Fulish, do they just...not...cook much? My dad has a repertoire of dishes he can make from memory, but when presented with a new recipe, he kind of shuts down. I asked him to help me out with dinner one night and make the mustard-maple string beans and potatoes from VWAV (you know, cut veggies, mix together mustard, maple syrup, oil, etc, combine, bake for a while--really easy) and he threw his hands up in defeat before he was done reading the recipe and told me he couldn't help after all.

Urgh. I didn't get a chance to call the hotel where we were having our meal tonight. I got to have melon and sorbet as a starter and some bread. I had a few oreos in my bag thankfully. I ended up not being able to drink much because I was so hungry. Ended up running out to get some fries but since I rarely eat deep fried food I felt sick for most of the night.

Whyyyyyyyy is eating animal products so damn acceptable?! Even with just taking my lactose intolerance into consideration nothing on the menu was acceptable for me. The melon and sorbet wasn't even on the menu! I had to ask. I was so hungry I nearly ate a mushroom from the risotto but I nearly gagged on just the smell of cream in the sauce.

One of them is a professional baker, but I guess she mostly makes chicken and meat with potatoes and veg. One of the others says she has only recently started to cook stuff that wasn't from a box and her husband still only eats fast food. So I guess they have different levels of familiarity.

The other veganish person in our group was trying to help, but apparently they couldn't get their heads around making a vegetable without a cheesy sauce. She said it was comical because they kept saying "but there has to be a sauce? where is the recipe for the sauce?" And she was saying "well, it is served with guacamole, so trust me, its going to be really good!"

And I guess its easy to forget that many people are raised to think that to make veggies taste good you have to put a dairy based sauce or stick bacon on them, and they have no idea how to bring out the flavors of the veggies themselves. And I notice that flavor of meat or cheese is so overwhelming to me now (like many of us, I can taste a tiny smidge of butter on veggies or that the rice was made with a chicken stock), that perhaps if that is in all your meals, you're not really used to or perhaps not even able to taste the more subtle flavors of veggies.

My veganish friend was saying it was funny. I will turn her.

Definitely agree with you on the overwhelming dairy taste. Out of desperation and hunger I tried a bit of the base of the cheesecake thinking it might be ok but I nearly got sick at the taste of butter. I used to adore butter! It was dangerous for me to be near the stuff because I loved it so much.

Speaking of butter, my vegan pet peeve is butter flavour being added to margarine. I used to live in a cottage and know the smell of cows. Butter smells of cows. Margarine is supposed to be flavourless, but because industry thinks it should be a butter imitation, it smells of cows, too.

If you were going to be doing a lot of work with chocolate/have storage space/can go in with friends who also want chocolate (you're near me, aren't you? I'd go in with you!) Plamil do bulk chocolate at pretty reasonable prices. That includes white chocolate.

Is this at sidecar? And what brand of white chocolate is this?

Yes, at sidecar. I don't remember the brand but I'd recognize it if I saw it. It had little flecks in it (of vanilla bean maybe?) and it melted nicely to drizzle over cookies. I'll have to check for you next time I'm over there.

Thanks! I am hoping to get up there for a day soon and I would love to get some.

It's probably the only bar they have. I don't remember getting to choose one over the other.

Sidecar has chips too. It's not just bars! It's not just bars!

Sorry.

I was watching one of those Christmas movies on hallmark last night and at one point the main dude's friend tries to set him up with a woman in the office and it's met with this gem: "But she's vegan. She eats seeds for lunch! Where am I supposed to take her for dinner?" It became a sort of (background) running joke throughout the rest of the movie as well. For no reason either since she wasn't even a named character. Kind of ruined the romance of the movie for me as I couldn't shake the negative feelings from the guy's comments.

in the extended director's cut of that movie, there's a scene in which the nameless woman wanders over to the man's desk in the middle of the workday with a bag of birdseed and eats fistful after fistful while staring unblinkingly at him. after three or four minutes, she turns and leaves without saying anything. the camera pans down to the mess of sunflower seed husks and hulled millet she's left at the entrance to the man's cubicle, and then up to his face, which conveys a mixture of surprise and dismay. eventually he shrugs and says, "vegans!" a sad trombone bleats its inevitable wah, wah, waaaahhh.

My sister was doing some kind of paleo thing (maker's was still ok?) for a while, and she really did walk around with a bag of birdseed-looking trail mix. Harrumph.

Ha! We had a low-carber over for dinner who drank most of a bottle of wine. Methinks they are confused.

isnt there a lot of sugar in wine?

Aren't paleo-dieters supposed to eat insects and tree bark?

I'm really glad I missed that otherwise I would have likely had a fit. I feel that vegans have enough trouble during the holidays and wanting a little escapism in a cheesy (noochy?) Christmas movie only to have something like that happen... bah humbug.

oh my gosh, i was kidding! i wish there were a scene like that in a made-for-tv hallmark movie.