Gill - DIRTY VEGAN COOKBOOK: your favorite recipes made vegan

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Dirty Vegan

Text copyright 2017 Catherine Gill

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-578-267-125

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Cover and Interior Design by Carolyn Kasper

Printed in the United States

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Contents

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Recipes

Foreword

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I dream of a world of complete equalityone where there is peace for all beings, including animals. I am confident that in doing so we will create a world free of suffering. This has been my goal for quite some time now, and The Dirty Vegan Cookbook is my latest contribution to the cause. The more people choose to eat vegan instead of consuming animal products, the better human health will become, the cleaner the environment will be, and the safer the animals will be from harm.

Whether you are just beginning your journey as a plant-based eater and are planning to add one or two meatless meals to your weekly meal plan, or you are a seasoned vegan eater looking for a great cookbook with new and exciting dishes, this is the cookbook for you. It is my hope that this cookbook will help to make life easier for those who are struggling to find simplicity and balance in veganism. This book outlines the popular products to keep on hand to make vegan cooking free of hassle, and offers simple, easy-to-follow directions to create delicious and practical dishes. Youll soon see that the vegan diet can appeal to everyone!

As a cookbook collector myself, I love the recipes youll find in gourmet vegan books, but lets face it: they are anything but practical. While I enjoy making exotic or complicated recipes on occasion, making a trip to a specialty food store or two and spending a day or more in preparation, can be exhaustingespecially if youre new to the vegan lifestyle.

In writing this cookbook, I wanted to stay away from doing that to you all, completely. This cookbook is free of those scary, complicated-sounding ingredients, and calls only for products that have decent availability in most supermarkets. The recipes in this cookbook are my actual, everyday recipes.

To my readers, so many of whom e-mail me asking what it is I eat every day, and love seeing the photographs of food that I post on social media: this cookbook is for youand, of course, for the animals.

Peace always,

Catherine

What is a Dirty Vegan?

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N umerous people have asked me why I chose the name, The Dirty Vegan. Its been my official and unofficial title for so many years, it seems natural to me. In fact, its a nickname that I was using to refer to myself ever since the day I became vegan. Its origins lie in an offhand remark; someone once observed that, since Im a vegan, that must mean Im a clean eater. I responded by saying that, although vegan food is much healthier than animal products, my love of rich, indulgent foods means I will always be a Dirty Vegan at heart.

But, you may ask, if thats the case, why be vegan?

The truth is that Ive always been this way, even if I didnt know it. But even as a child, I was destined to be an animal rights activist. I can recall myself as young as 4 years old, questioning my parents about animal products, asking about the veins that I would find in chicken or steak, or the blood Id found in an egg yolk. My mom would tell me, Thats just the way it is; its part of the animal, but I couldnt accept that.

In fact, I would protest it!

I would argue with my parents and wonder why we had to eat meat, given that we were a family of animal lovers. My dad would just shrug his shoulders, and give me a sympathetic look of pity. He felt the same way as I did; my dad refused to eat anything with a bone in it and never ate steak. Were it not for my mother being an old-school Italian, raised by immigrants who had never heard of vegetarianism, ours would have been a vegetarian house for sure.

As I grew older and began making my own meals, I dipped my toe into the world of processed vegetarian products. Boy, were they pretty terrible back then! The taste was something else entirely. When the first vegetarian marketed products hit shelves, they were still a work in progress, but I ate them anyway. By the time I was a teenager, I wasnt eating any red meat at all, but I was still battling an Italian family. In my familys culture, everything is based around food; the only thing more important than the food on the table is the people seated around it. Animal products are used in every aspect of Italian cooking, and at the time there were hardly any products available that you could substitute into Italian recipes.

Yet even back then, vegetarians were making their own foodscreating cheeses out of nuts, things like that. In fact, a lot of the amazing vegan products we use today had already been invented; they just werent available in every store yet. Today, any grocery store or superstore with a cold case or a freezer will almost certainly have a ton of vegan products. But back then, vegans were just getting startedand so was I.

When I moved away to college, I quickly grew tired of eating junky dorm food, and would often drive off campus to a grocery store in the city that had a wonderful natural foods section. I had never seen anything like it; certainly a far cry from the small Connecticut town I grew up in! I felt a connection to these natural foods in a way Id never before experienced, and as time went on, I expanded my shopping list to include as many wholesome food products as possible. My roommate would see me come back to our room with my grocery bags and she could only laugh, asking just what it was Id bought that day. My only reply was to tell her not to eat any of it. Hey, back then specialty natural products were even more expensive than they are today!

Of course, everything up to this point had been centered around my diet, and a preference for not eating meat. It wasnt until years later, when I received an email from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that this preference was transformed into an ethos and a lifestyle. The e-mail contained a link to a video, cataloging a series of shocking images that an activist had taken inside of a slaughter facility that supplied a popular food chain.

Never had I felt so woke as I did after watching that video. What I was experiencing was the sensation of real, meaningful change. For change and awareness to occur, your comfortable bubble of existence must be burst; you must be shaken awake.

I became a vegetarian in that moment.

After my initial shock, I developed a plan of action. I would become the best vegetarian that I could be, one that will inspire others. In that moment, I felt motivated to become an expert in vegetarianism and animal rights, and was determined to change the minds of everyone on the planet. And I have never lost that passion; it has continued to burn in me like a wildfire ever since.