Ann Hodgman - Vegan Food for the Rest of Us: Recipes Even You Will Love

The recipes in this book include chocolate; coconut oil and other coconut products; corn; all-purpose (white) flour; lecithin; monosodium glutamate; peanuts; tree nuts; soy milk and other soy products; granulated (white) sugar; wheat gluten; xanthan gum; and meat. Oh, wait, not meatthats the whole point!

No substitutes for the ingredients above have been tested, and none are recommended. If you are allergic or pretend-allergic to any of these items, avoid the recipes in which they appear.

Copyright 2017 by Ann Hodgman

Illustrations 2017 by Kate Bingaman-Burt

Author photograph 2017 by Rich Pomerantz

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

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

ISBN 978-0-544-32449-7 (paperback); 978-0-547-52210-4 (ebook)

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

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The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood.

Edmund Campion

Are you a hypocrite? Because I certainly am. Im an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who cant resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets. Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me. But even a fraud has feelings. And Im starting to think that our cultures frenzied and mindless assault on the last shreds of nature may not be the wisest course.

George Meyer

I wouldnt mind never tasting this again, said my husband at supper one night.

This was my first try at seitan, a meat substitute based on wheat gluten. If youre new here, seitan is pronounced say- tan. To make it, you wash flour over and over until it turns into a sort of rubber, knead in various flavorings meant to suggest meat, and cook it however you want. Or dont want, in the case of my first seitan, which ended up as a vaguely meat-tasting glob with a texture somewhere between Superball and hot dog.

Poor Dave. Theres a steep learning curve when you suddenly adopt a plant-based diet, and for a year our food had been getting more and more horrible. One night, after an asparagus paella topped with a savory Rice Krispy treat had wrestled me to the ground, I dragged myself into Davids office and announced, I dont see a way around eating this. While we eat, Ill describe what it was supposed to be.

Vegan props took over the kitchen, which began to look like a molecular gastronomy lab built by an orangutan. Mesh bags filled with cooked soybeans drained into bowls in the sink. Gleaming pallid shapes loomed up in the refrigerator. I got a seed sprouter and a dehydrator and some cheese molds, along with twenty pounds of cashew pieces that Ive never gotten around to using. Theyre still in the basement freezer.

Until the seitan night, David had been as nice as could be about all this. I could tell from his strangled politeness that he wasnt happy, but I kept thinking he just wasnt happy yet . Its hard to convert an omnivore to vegan food. Its even harder when that omnivore is originally from Kansas City, where people pick meat off the trees. And its harder still when hes only giving voice to what you secretly agree with. I might have been able to convince myself that my seitan was okay. But I had already spent a year trying to master fake meat, fake dairy, and fake eggs, and David and I were tired out.

The seitan night was when I decided to stop trying to expect that all omnivore cooking could be perfectly replicated in a vegan version. There would be no more research on gelling agents. No more So you ferment some seeds and add the ferment-juice to soy milk and stir in coconut oil and let it stand for six months and it ends up tasting exactly like spackling compound! No more food that made us homesick for our former lives. No more Learning to Like Vegan Cooking. Maybe you need to learn to cook vegan food, but whatever you make should be delicious.

I started over. My new rule was: No vegan recipe made the cut for this book unless David liked it enough to take a second helping or eat it as leftovers. Every recipe in the book would be Dave-tested and Dave-approved.

Whether you know Dave or not, youre going to thank him. But never as much as I do.

- - - -

I want to become a vegan, my sister once said, but I cant make myself watch the videos.

The horrifying videos, she meant. The ones that scald your eyes and sear your brain. The ones where you lurch away from your computer, sickened, and promise that this time youre really going to go vegan, or at least vegetarian. Because this time youve seen , youve really taken inyou recognize, deeply and permanentlythe fact that the cows didnt somehow turn into flank steak, Cryovac themselves, and jump into the meat section at the supermarket on their own.

But then the next time youre at the supermarket, the images dont seem quite as powerful. Those packages of meat and poultry look so fresh and clean! And youve got to go out tonight, so you need a meal you can make fast, and probably you should educate yourself more before taking such a big step, and maybe this particular flank steak comes from one of the nice meat-packing plants. There have to be some nice meat-packing plants look how much Temple Grandin has accomplished! And somehow the topic swims away.

I was like that for a long, long time. For most of my adult life, I was the one who ate whatever she wanted. Self-indulgence was my brand. Life is too short! Leave the chicken skin on! Fat is our friend! (I was right about that one, anyway.) Everyone needs treats! those are the things Ive told myself over and over. When people would ask me how to improve a recipe, I used to answer, Double the chocolate and add bacon.

Then one day, while reading a book by James E. McWilliams called Just Food , I accepted the fact that everything about meat eating is wrong, and I became a vegetarian. This surprised a lot of people, but not me. Like a cigarette smoker who knows shell have to quit someday, I had always known that at some point I would stop eating meat. I just hoped the change would come down the roadmaybe after I was dead.

Ive been pretty smug about this choice, but vegetarianism is a bowl of ice cream compared to veganism. As long as you still have dairy products and eggs, you can eat pretty much everything. But when you give up dairy and eggs? No cheese on your pizza. No butter on your English muffins. (No Thomass English muffins, which contain milk and whey, either.) No cream in your coffee. No milk, no sour cream, no crme frache, no cream cheese, no Parmesan.

Right Versus Wrong. Period.

Society doesnt encourage us to be vegans. So: Tell me again why I want to be one?