In the beginning, there was steak.
Raised in a meat and potatoes family, I cooked, well, meat and potatoes for my family until my conversion to vegetarian at age 18.
In my first memory of cooking by myself, I am only a few inches taller than the oven, and I am putting tenderized steak inside it. I am probably about ten years old, and a responsible kid. My parents asked me to turn the oven on and put a pan inside it. In a few minutes, I'll make a salad of iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumbers, and tomato - which I'll put on the table in the same bowl we always use, with the ranch dressing conveniently situated between it and my plate.
My parents were good cooks - not "serious" cooks, not in a world where they both got home from work around 6 p.m. and wanted nothing more than to collapse for awhile. We ate balanced meals that tasted good. My favorite foods: buffalo wings, ranch dressing, BLTs, and pepperoni sandwiches (Um. Those are my favorites...not examples of our balanced meals).
When I went to college, I knew how to make kick-ass chocolate chip cookies (my mother said once she stopped making them after I started, because my brother and sister liked mine better. I can't touch her molasses cookies or her chocolate crinkles, though). I could make hamburger helper, steak, or chicken, and I had even tried my hand at meatloaf and baked a cake from scratch once.
But cooking the SAD (standard american diet) for five in a kitchen has nothing in common with cooking veg for one in a dorm room - and until a year ago, I would have told you I hated to cook.
A couple of years ago I saw a brilliant vegan cookbook with a recipe for pomegranate bbq tofu. I drooled over the damn book for almost a year, but I knew I was unlikely to cook anything in it.
Maman witnessed the pitiful drooling on one occasion, and bought the book for me. I drooled for another year, too intimidated by names of things I had never heard of: pomegranate molasses, liquid smoke, liquid aminos, shallots, Chinese five-spice powder, vital wheat gluten, chickpeas...yes. I had never heard of chickpeas. C'mon, I never ate an avocado - I even thought I hated guacamole - until I was over 20 years old!
Eventually, a brief love affair with the brother of a French chef (which, in an interesting twist, led to the procurement of pomegranate molasses) and, oh yeah, a love of all things delicious and unusual have inspired my Great Vegan Adventures.
I'm a broke student - food is my biggest splurge. I am not yet vegan. My alimentary ideology is unique, so far as I've yet seen (and as most are, really) - I'll have to go into that at another time. But it's been more than six months since I cooked a non-vegan meal.
I am also in the process of applying for the Peace Corps, which lends a special tinge to learning more about veg nutrition - I need to be prepared to have very limited resources.
So here it is: the chronicles of my attempt to understand nutrition, cooking, and planning well enough to eventually go veg!
Raised in a meat and potatoes family, I cooked, well, meat and potatoes for my family until my conversion to vegetarian at age 18.
In my first memory of cooking by myself, I am only a few inches taller than the oven, and I am putting tenderized steak inside it. I am probably about ten years old, and a responsible kid. My parents asked me to turn the oven on and put a pan inside it. In a few minutes, I'll make a salad of iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumbers, and tomato - which I'll put on the table in the same bowl we always use, with the ranch dressing conveniently situated between it and my plate.
My parents were good cooks - not "serious" cooks, not in a world where they both got home from work around 6 p.m. and wanted nothing more than to collapse for awhile. We ate balanced meals that tasted good. My favorite foods: buffalo wings, ranch dressing, BLTs, and pepperoni sandwiches (Um. Those are my favorites...not examples of our balanced meals).
When I went to college, I knew how to make kick-ass chocolate chip cookies (my mother said once she stopped making them after I started, because my brother and sister liked mine better. I can't touch her molasses cookies or her chocolate crinkles, though). I could make hamburger helper, steak, or chicken, and I had even tried my hand at meatloaf and baked a cake from scratch once.
But cooking the SAD (standard american diet) for five in a kitchen has nothing in common with cooking veg for one in a dorm room - and until a year ago, I would have told you I hated to cook.
A couple of years ago I saw a brilliant vegan cookbook with a recipe for pomegranate bbq tofu. I drooled over the damn book for almost a year, but I knew I was unlikely to cook anything in it.
Maman witnessed the pitiful drooling on one occasion, and bought the book for me. I drooled for another year, too intimidated by names of things I had never heard of: pomegranate molasses, liquid smoke, liquid aminos, shallots, Chinese five-spice powder, vital wheat gluten, chickpeas...yes. I had never heard of chickpeas. C'mon, I never ate an avocado - I even thought I hated guacamole - until I was over 20 years old!
Eventually, a brief love affair with the brother of a French chef (which, in an interesting twist, led to the procurement of pomegranate molasses) and, oh yeah, a love of all things delicious and unusual have inspired my Great Vegan Adventures.
I'm a broke student - food is my biggest splurge. I am not yet vegan. My alimentary ideology is unique, so far as I've yet seen (and as most are, really) - I'll have to go into that at another time. But it's been more than six months since I cooked a non-vegan meal.
I am also in the process of applying for the Peace Corps, which lends a special tinge to learning more about veg nutrition - I need to be prepared to have very limited resources.
So here it is: the chronicles of my attempt to understand nutrition, cooking, and planning well enough to eventually go veg!
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