I certainly agree. There is a neat concept restaurant here in Portland called Nutshell. They don't use any fake meat whatsoever and serve an all vegan menu. Unfortunately they are owned by the owners of another restaurant that serves foie grois. Little conflict of interest...

http://www.nutshellpdx.com/menu.html

Their menu changes all the time and has a focus on local, organic cuisine.

To veganize this you can substitute a variety of things for the honey. Agave works well, as well as brown rice syrup. This might also be good with maple syrup.

omg how have I never realized that vegans can't even eat honey. in terms of consciousness they're orders of magnitude less than the brainiest fish.. never thought of beehives along the same line as puppy mills and foie gras farms. anyways.

I've always hated meat substitutes but two of my best friends are veggies (similar environmental and energy-based reasons behind it) and I love to cook so I've always been forced to improvise at barbecues and cottage trips. Here's a pretty simple Thai curry that doesn't make you feel like you're "supposed" to be eating meat:

1 onion.
1-3 cloves of garlic, to taste.
Peanut/Olive oil
1 t soya sauce
1 t fish sauce (optional)
1/2 t oyster sauce (THIS IS OPTIONAL AND VERY DISTINCT FLAVOUR)
1/2 a bell pepper (red/orange/yellow)
1/2 cup diced eggplant (or 3-5 mini asian eggplants if you have 'em)
2 Portabello mushroom caps, diced
1/2 can chickpeas
1/2 can coconut milk
1 t Thai curry paste (I use Thai Kitchen brand)
1 t red Thai chili paste (I use Sriracha chilis)
1 lime's worth of juice (or lemon)
Salt and pepper
Cilantro for garnish

Saute the onions in a veggie oil, preferably peanut or something else with a high burning point. Once you start getting some browning, toss in the garlic and bell peppers and chickpeas and let them saute as well. After a moment, add the soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, curry paste, chilis and any other hot pepper pastes of your choice. Sometimes this can get a little thick, so I like to add a small splash of water just to thin it out a little bit.

After these flavours have simmered a little bit, add the eggplant and mushrooms. Cook for a few minutes until these two ingredients are soft, then stir in some coconut milk to bring the heat down a little bit and add some body/richness to the dish. If you want it spicier/lighter, add less milk, if milder, add more or some water. Let the curry simmer for a couple of minutes, but be sure not to overcook the coconut milk as it tends to thicken up fairly quickly. You want a nice broth, not a paste, right?

Since there's no meat, you're basically just cooking these veggies until they're tender, so take this time to taste it and add salt + pepper to your liking. About a minute before it's done, stir in the juice of a whole lime, and some chopped cilantro or lemongrass or any other aromatics that you prefer. Serve over rice, ramen, vermicelli or soba noodles.

nomnomnom. the portabellos will give this dish a creamy brownish colour, while the veggies and herbs give it a little flare. nomnomnom.

Edit: depending on the pastes you get, some may very well have bits of shrimp or fish oils in them.. read the labels.

this sounds great, I make a green curry that's very similar but without the fish/oyster sauce, and I use roland green curry paste. I am kind of hot and cold on the roland brand, I like their curry pastes but I haven't liked some other roland brand stuff I've gotten. coconut milk is a great thing to have around, I always keep a couple of cans. so so useful in south indian and thai cooking.

I've been wanting to do this since the first time i read it when you put it a while back and i finally got the chance the other week. Went for a Indian in my family's home town and the only vegetarian options were the standard curries w/ veg replacing the meat. It seems every place that does that doesn't really know what to do with vegetarians and so the so they just throw some veg in the normal curries and it's never great. Whereas the great Indian restaurants usually have a lot of dal, chana or paneer options.

So i had if they could ask the chef for any type of chana curry expecting just a chana masala, but wow this guy went to work. I have no clue what the exact curry would be called but it was the best indian meal i've had to date.

Cool thread, I am always looking for new recipes. My girlfriend and I bought 3 vegetarian cookbooks in the last year or so. We just find a random recipe in their whenever we can't think of what to eat. I haven't eaten meat in about 6+ years. I had no clue what my diet was going to be when I first started, but I eat pretty well now imo.

Also, to whoever said something about a yogurt mixture, most yogurt has gelatin in it. There are several organic/vegan yogurts though.

Not really in the vein of cooking, but I wanted to offer a quick recommendation. A few of you mention wanting to eat healthier or whatever, and then attempting vegetarian diets. A few others mention the environment, carry capacity, cruelty to animals, etc. The initial reason I get interested in a vegan diet was purely for health reasons. My whole life I was raised having chicken or steak every night for dinner, cold cut sandwiches for lunch, lots of milk, eggs, etc. To even mention that you are interested in a vegan diet is blasphemy in Texas, and I have had a few struggles over the whole food debate recently.

Anyways, a couple people mentioned some books like good calories bad calories, and that they are thinking they might need to incorporate more animal protein into their diet because they are taking in too many carbs. Before doing this, I HIGHLY recommend reading The China Study by T. Colin Campbell. This book is pretty much the most comprehensive study ever done on nutritional science. It goes into detail about what foods are healthy and why, as well as tons of common misconceptions in the public’s ‘knowledge’ about diet and health. If any of you care at all about long term health, this book is a must read. It isn’t boring either, it kept my interest up the whole way.

Anyways, just wanted to go off on minirant about that, I see all these people all the time talking about how they need to eat more lean chicken, lean beef, etc so that they can be ‘healthier’, but it is just flat out wrong. Who says it is healthier? Where is the medical research proving this? There isn’t any. Read this book; live a longer and healthier life. Love, -Raptor

lean chicken and lean beef is healthier for most people because the biggest health issue for most people is being overweight / eating too much food. it is not avoiding cancer. people don't want to eat small portions so for all intents and purposes a chicken breast is healthier than a chicken thigh because it contains less calories per gram of meat.

it is just that you define 'improving your health' differently to other people because you're like a million steps ahead of your average person healthwise. i know you know all this anyway, i don't really know why i bothered to type it out, 2+2 is aids.

Yeah, I learned a while back to try and find out "who benefits" from the information I receive. Some may call it cynical, but i'm going to go ahead and call it healthy skepticism. If you peer into all the messages we receive daily about the foods we "should" be eating - you can find a lot of people benefitting heavily from those messages. Dairy dairy dairy. It gives you strong bones! Calciummmm! Cows milk is for baby cows - just like a human woman's breastmilk is for baby humans. We are the only species that consumes the milk of another.

That being said - if I could just eat a piece of brie just one time...
Just kidding.

raptor,

just wanted to mention, ive never been there but the vegan scene in TX seems incredibly vibrant judging from blogs and vegan forums online.



on a non-healthy but still vegan note, i made a vegan chocolate cake with tons of olive oil last night. surprisingly, olive oil + chocolate works insanely well together.

slightly related, found a pretty cool alton brown quote (he was talking about supersize me at the time)


We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

well, perhaps fort worth is different. i recently found a fantastic vegan restaraunt downtown, but past that, i have been unable to find anything. The only whole foods is 30 minutes from my house, and in arlington, and when i ask for things like 'egg substitute/replacer' people think i mean egg beaters. also, vegan baking is awesome!

I would have to guess that any major vegan scene anywhere close to texas would be in houston.

didn't you misspell "austin"?

Thought I would post a couple of veg recipe blogs that would be of interest to thread readers:

101 Cookbooks - Recipe blog from an author here in San Francisco. Good stuff, tends on the more complicated/froufrou side of things.


Year of the Vegan - Used to be called 'But did they eat it?'. Focuses on making easy & tasty vegan food that even kids will eat. She makes some insanely cool stuff.

yeah yeah, whatever that liberal ass college town is...

I don't wanna hijack this thread too much, so ignore if you want, but this thought process is severely misguided. We don't need a 'community with a sense of its land base and a reverence for the world' to preserve the environment and wildlife. Simply enforcing property rights would be enough. If you owned a lake, wouldn't you be a little more likely to actually care how the fish population of that lake is doing?

Believe it or not, not everyone wants to live 150 years, have minimal muscle mass and look like ****.

Edit: Did you even read Good Calories, Bad Calories?

Edit #2:
http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/...l#china%20proj
http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

Yeah, not to turn this into a politics thread but I've heard this too in Libertarian Manifesto - Rothbard. Main reason that fish populations are in trouble at all is govt mismanagement. Allowing over harvesting, dumping, no proper fish segregation, etc. Companies have developed good technology to allow fish to flourish but govt doesn't let them too. Allow someone that profits from proper lake management and expect proper care.

The fish know how to take care of themselves. They did it for quite sometime pre industrial civilization.

A person who benefits from a piece of land economically (i.e. trees are not living things with which one enters into a mutual relationship with - a relationship in which each party's long term survival is reliant upon the other, yet they are resources to be converted into profit) will never do what is in the best interest of longevity of the land. The two are mutually exclusive, especially living in a hyper-extractive economy based civilization.

The China Study has some blatant errors from whats been related to me of the book. So keep that in mind.

care to go a bit deeper on the matter?

as much as i love eating fresh fruits and veggies and staying away from soy protein, etc. etc. - every now and again I love me some comfort food.

Tomorrow night for the potluck I will be making some beer battered "fish" (tofu) with homemade tartar sauce. I brewed the beer myself a few weeks ago. It's an amber fermented with an english ale yeast.

Maybe someday i'll post one of the many healthy items I make daily.

Anyone have a favorite hummus recipe? I do a fairly simple garlic, tahini, garbanzo, lemon, salt mix - but i'm wondering if anyone has tried - or likes to make something more crazy... olives? peppers? cucumber? something?

I'd also like to get some fruits thrown into the mix...
We've got tons of blackberries growing everywhere around the city (portland)...
Anyone ever do a balsamic reduction with fruit involved?

Not including this table from the actual study nor explaining its absence to begin with:

Figure 1
Associations of Selected Variables with Mortality for All Cancers in the China Study Total Protein +12%
Animal Protein +3%
Fish Protein +7%
Plant Protein +12%
Total Lipids -6%

Carbohydrates +23%
Total Calories +16%
Fat % Calories -17%
Fiber +21%
Fat (questionnaire) -29%*
* statistically significant ** highly significant *** very highly significant
==============================
(Data taken from the original monograph of the China Study.)

From: http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

Doesn't he claim that organic produce will take care of B12 needs? This is a pretty easy to spot one.

No, he says that B12 is something that should be supplemented.