Whelan - The I Cant Believe Its Vegan! All American Comfort Food Cookbook: Our Top 40 All-Time Favorite Kitchen-Tested, Family-Feeding, Down Home Delicious Veganized American Comfort Food Recipes

The I Can't Believe It's Vegan! All American Comfort Food Cookbook: Our Top 40 All-Time Favorite Kitchen-Tested, Family-Feeding, Down Home Delicious "Veganized" American Comfort Food Recipes is copyright 2013 by Felix Whelan and Carol Ann Whelan.

Published on Smashwords by NuEvan Press.

All Rights Reserved.

License Notes:

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A Big Thank You from Felix and Carol Ann!

The phrase "comfort food" gets bandied about a lot on TV cooking shows these days, graces the cover of many a bestselling cookbook, and even appears on restaurant menus... But what does it mean?

Webster's dictionary first included the term in 1977. Here's their definition:

food prepared in a traditional style having a usually nostalgic or sentimental appeal

I like this on-line definition even better:

simple, home-style food that brings comforting thoughts of home or childhood.

I was born in 1962, and did the bulk of my "growing up" in the 1970s, in a Midwest, USA small town. It was a simpler time, and in many ways, a better time. There were only three channels on anybody's TV NBC, CBS and ABC, and consequently, everybody watched the same shows. We all listened to the same music, went to the same movies (VCRs had not been invented yet, let alone DVDs and Blue Ray players), and to a remarkable degree, we all ate the same home cooked meals. And in that inexplicable way the smell of roses can carry you back to the night you first fell in love, or a picture from a childhood Christmas can reduce one to unexpected tears, the home cooked meals we remember from childhood have an almost magical power to transport us backward in time, to the happier, less complicated days of our youth.

That's comfort food . If you're an American Baby Boomer, chances are you and I are talking about the same dishes when we apply that term pot roast, beef stew, chicken and dumplings, tuna casserole...

But wait! you might reasonably object at this point, this is a VEGAN cookbook! Those foods are all meat! Don't vegans and vegetarians have to swear off American cuisine forever? Is it even possible to live as a vegan in the USA, and still eat any of the foods we grew up with?

Yes it is! You did not exchange your credentials as an American for your "vegan ID." You can be both! This cookbook series will show you the way. "The way home" might be overstated... But the way, nonetheless. The foods you remember from childhood, especially if you grew up in the 1970s, are all here, recreated in a way that preserves their "comfort," but eliminates all animal products. This is guilt-free nostalgia at its best!

This omnibus collection brings together all of the recipes from the first four volumes of our "I Can't Believe It's Vegan!" series:

I Can't Believe It's Vegan! Volume 1 All American Crock Pot Classics

I Can't Believe It's Vegan! Volume 2 All American Comfort Food Entrees

I Can't Believe It's Vegan! Volume 3 All American Comfort Food Desserts

I Can't Believe It's Vegan! Volume 4 All American Comfort Food Truck Stop, Diner and Lunch Counter Classics

For this volume, I reversed the order of volumes 3 and 4, so as to provide the dessert recipes last, because that just made sense. No dessert till you've had your meal!

Probably the biggest obstacle preventing most Americans, even those who feel powerfully drawn to the ethics of a meat-free lifestyle, from going vegetarian or full vegan is fear of the unknown .

Will giving up meat mean I have to eat lettuce and bean sprouts all day? Isn't all vegan food super-expensive weird stuff you have to buy at a health food store? What about the meals I loved as a kid that I still love... Do I have to surrender everything...? I'll get bored! I can't do it!

With this cookbook (or any cookbook by Felix and Carol Ann Whelan) in your hands, yes you can!

Carol Ann and I grew up in the American Midwest during the 1970s, members of normal, Middle Class, meat-loving families, raised on a steady diet of good, old-fashioned all-American comfort food. "American cuisine" is in our genes, so when we first went vegetarian (each of us, individually, before we met) we had the same doubts any other red-blooded American would have at the thought of exchanging burgers and fried chicken, beef stew and pot roast, sloppy Joes and meatball sandwiches for "rabbit food"...

But, as it turns out, that wasn't the bargain at all. The truth is that you can, in fact, live life as a vegan, but still eat like an American! This book will prove it to you.

What Carol Ann and I have discovered over the years, and will be sharing with you in this series of cookbooks, is that we have yet to discover a single American Classic meal that can't be re-created vegan... and taste just as good, if not better, than the original.

Not one. We keep trying, and we keep... Well... succeeding . We hope that, once you try some of the amazing recipes in this cookbook, you'll agree.

If you're not already vegetarian, we hope these recipes inspire you to take the plunge. If you're already vegetarian or vegan, we hope you'll cook these dishes for your carnivorous friends, and let them experience first hand that going meatless requires no sacrifice of flavor or food favorites at all!

The Whelan family is vegetarian technically lacto-ovo vegetarian but we are not vegan. That means we do not eat any meat, fish or fowl, nor do we consume products with ingredients that require an animal's death to obtain, such as gelatin or beef or chicken stock. We do, however, eat eggs and dairy products like cheese.

Someone following a vegan diet eschews all animal products, including eggs, milk and cheese, but also things like honey. Veganism is really a subset of vegetarianism (all vegans are vegetarian, but not all vegetarians are vegan... Remember sets and subsets from grade school?).

As we developed the recipes in this book for our family, our concern was making sure they were vegetarian . But having accomplished that goal, it only takes a little bit of research and experimentation to take them all the way to vegan , finding suitable substitutes for any eggs and dairy .

And out of love for our vegan brethren (and "sisteren," I suppose...), we have done just that for this series. Every recipe to follow is either full vegan as presented, or vegetarian with well-researched suggestions for "veganizing" specific ingredients.

There is nothing in this book that cannot be enjoyed by every vegetarian everywhere, no matter how strict their observance! Everyone is welcome!

This is a cookbook series focused on American Cuisine. American Cuisine is, almost by definition, "meat heavy." You can't just leave the meat out of most classic American dishes and reach the same result. "Pot roast" without the "roast" is just vegetables. Tasty vegetables in gravy, but still just vegetables. If that had the power to win anybody over, the whole world would have gone vegetarian a long time ago...

So we turn to meat substitutes. All of the recipes in this cookbook (except the desserts, of course) call for one meat substitute or another, so as to keep them vegan, but still grant them their unique American appeal. Some recipes call for readily available commercial products, like Boca crumbles, Morningstar Chik'n Strips, or Soyrizo. Others tell you how to create your own meat substitutes using tofu, TVP, vital wheat gluten, etc.