Shannon annie - Betty goes vegan : 500 classic recipes for the modern family

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The name Betty Crocker and related signatures and designs sometimes used with the name are registered trademarks of General Mills, Inc., and the name Betty Crocker does not identify a particular living individual. Use of any such trademarks in and in connection with this book is not intended to suggest that this book is authorized, affiliated with, or endorsed or sponsored by General Mills, Inc., or its products and services.

Copyright 2013 by Annie Shannon and Dan Shannon

Cover Design by Melissa Chang, Woman illustration from Sally Edelstein Collage

Food photography by Dan Shannon

Cover 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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First e-book edition: February 2013

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ISBN 978-1-4555-1720-6

For the lobsters

At first, it was a charming movie that seemed tailor-made for me. A devoted, vintage clothingwearing amateur foodie with a loyal and patient husband cooking her way through Julia Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Just a normal person with a normal kitchen who hated her job and had hoped for more by this point in her life. She even wore pearls in the kitchenone of my own personal dreams. Of course, in my dreams those pearls are fake. On the surface, I felt like Id found someone a lot like me. But as you can imagine, Julie Powell lost me when she killed the lobster.

From the moment they showed her walking through the farmers market choosing the doomed crustaceans, right up to when she finally overcame her fear and threw them alive into a pot of boiling water, I kept waiting for her to have a change of heart. I thought she would succumb to her conscienceshe even admitted that she knew it was wrongbut she never did. It was at that moment I realized that Julie and I were not so alike after all. I just couldnt stop thinking about the celebrated Lobster Killer and how there needed to be a humane alternative.

Contrary to some stereotypes, vegans are just as passionate about cooking and eating as any meat-eating foodie. After years of working at the largest animal-advocacy organizations on the planet and meeting thousands of vegans from all over the world, I can say with complete confidence that no one loves food the way vegans do. We think about it constantly. We read labels with Christmas-morning eagerness, searching for those deal-breaker words: whey, egg whites, skim milk protein, and casein. We sit around talking about food like the gals on Sex and the City talk about orgasms. We send emails to our friends and family telling them about new products and restaurants with a passion that can only be compared to Beatlemania.

So when my husband, Dan, and I decided to start our own cookbook cook-through on our blog, we had an equally impassioned goal in mind: we wanted to show that you can make anything vegan and that no animal ever needs to be force-fed, confined to a crate or a cage, or boiled alive, or to endure any of the other nightmares animals face to satisfy our culinary desires.

But any good campaigner knows you cant just tell people that. The proof is in the vegan pudding. You need to show people that any recipe can be veganized, and you need to prove the result can be even more delicious than the original. This meant we needed to show people how to use vegan products like mock meats and cheeses to their full potential. I used to ignore products like soy cheese and fake meats because when I first went vegan, technology hadnt quite caught up with demand, and those early versions werent really right yet. Like many vegans, I also spent years avoiding ingredients like nutritional yeast and agave nectar because I didnt know how to use them correctly. But these days, there are outstanding vegan products and ingredients available in every grocery store, and all folks need is a little inspiration and guidance on how to reimagine compassionate and often healthier versions of their all-time favorite dishes.

Once we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it, Dan and I drove to every bookstore in southern Virginia. We begrudgingly agreed that Julias historic book wasnt the right fit. Julia really did revolutionize how Americans looked at cooking and mainstreamed French cuisinebut sadly Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with all its beef-flavored Jell-O molds and frightening organ-based dishes, wasnt going to inspire the kinds of recipes we needed to create to achieve our goal.

We flipped through more cookbooks than I can remember, but there was one that stood out: a bright red binder decorated like Bavarian gingerbread. It was the original 1950s edition of Betty Crockers Picture Cook Book. This book was for someone just like me, in (nonleather) saddle shoes and black-rimmed glasses, aspiring to one day wear (faux) pearls in the kitchen. But I had to put it back. The goal was to show that anything could be veganand this edition lacked any real international dishes and included recipes like Broiled Grapefruit and Herring-Appleteasers, which arent exactly in fashion with the modern family. We decided to compromise, going with the 2010 edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, which had more than just pork chops, meat loafs, and Jell-O molds. This would be the perfect outline for family-friendly vegan recipes and for showcasing the tips and tricks wed picked up over the years for veganizing recipes.

See, it had to be Betty. The Betty Crocker brand has a well-deserved reputation for teaching amateur American chefs how to get the most out of products and ingredients that they might not have otherwise used. Betty Crocker would be the perfect inspiration for showing people you really can turn anything vegan once you know the tricks.

Since the day we walked out of the bookstore with our own copy of Big Red, I have fallen in love with Betty Crocker. This project has not only encouraged me to make some outrageous casseroles and use all of the crazy kitchen gadgets I hoard, but also gives me an opportunity to share with others how easy a vegan lifestyle can be.