My vegan heart, part 3

There's this Middle Eastern restaurant near my office that has an amazing appetizer plate. Hummus, babaghanouj, tabbouleh salad and falafel, and I actually moan when I eat it. The first time I had it, I told my date (!) I was going to go in the kitchen and make out with the chef. And the best part? On the menu, it's clearly labelled "vegan." Be still my vegan heart! With food like that, that is so clearly and considerately marked safe for yours truly, you better believe I'll keep coming back. And maybe I'll even  threaten to make out with the chef.

The vegan's dilemna

I was at an event last week. It was in the middle of nowhere, two days long, and I was there for every meal. The first night was a potluck, so I brought a quinoa salad (chickpeas, veggies, avocado, dressing) to be sure there would be a least one thing I could eat. There was luckily more than one things I could eat: there were also raw veggies, green salad, couscous salad, and a soup that the organizer told me was vegan. Huzzah! I was a happy vegan.
I was less happy the following morning, when I discovered the only thing I could have for breakfast was peanut butter on toast. Okay, fine--I had that for breakfast almost every day for two weeks when I was on vacation in Italy. (An American expat we met while there said that for breakfast, Italians eat "a cookie." Not so vegani. Hence pb and toast for breakfast.)
By lunchtime I was really hungry. Lunch that day almost the same as dinner the night before, assorted salads, veggies, and soup, with only the addition of bread. That night for dinner, the vegetarians got veggie lasagna (with cheese), and the omnivores could choose between roasted chicken and stuffed cabbage rolls. I however got the same plate I'd had for the last three meals, with the addition of a few roasted potatoes (only after discussing whether the potatoes had butter on them). While I was checking out the spread, the organizer actually sad, "I guess I forgot to order something for you." So I ate my potatoes and my leftovers, again.
More pb and toast for breakfast the third day, and lunch was--guess what? Leftovers! I must have made a face when the organizer confirmed we were having leftovers--the same leftovers I'd had for what for me was the fourth time since we'd been there--since she turned away and made a frustrated pfffft sound.
So I apologized to her. I said, "I'm sorry if I made a face, but I'm hungry. The others get to choose 10 things for lunch, and I get two". I forgot to add that they were the same two things that I'd been eating for every meal since we arrived. She said she didn't know what to get for me; I replied that if she didn't know, she could have contacted me--since we speak on the phone a couple times a month anyway, and email at least as often, this would not have been a big deal--but even then, hummus would have been fine. "Oh, I forgot hummus."
This is the vegan's dilemna: how assertive do we be in demanding that we have food we can eat? No one wants to be the cranky vegan, whining about how our choices aren't being respected (when there are people starving, far away and close to home). But no one wants to be hungry either. And frankly, being hungry often leads to being the cranky whiner.
As far as this particular event is concerned, I think I've learned to contact the organizer in advance and just double-check. And in November, when I'll be at another event, in the middle of nowhere, this time for four days, I'm bringing some fucking hummus.

(Partially) Illustrated Things I can Always Eat.

I asked a colleague out for lunch last week. She said, "I was going to suggest sushi but you just had some on Friday." First of all--good memory on her, no? Secondly, I can have sushi anytime.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, midnight snack, post workout...I hope you get what I'm saying. There are a few things like that--if someone asked, "How about this for dinner, again?" I would say, hell yeah! So for my first post of VeganMoFo 2012, here is my very informative list, of (Partially) Illustrated Things I can Always Eat.

Sushi, obviously
The elegance of Japanese food is inherently appealing. The focus on the aesthetics is so different from the meat-potatoes-veg dinners so many of us grew up with. Hallelujah for that! And plus we get to use chopsticks, which is how I measured when I became a fully-formed city girl.

Pizza
Generally speaking, I have to make it myself. So I do. If I am especially disciplined, I will make a pizza and take it to work with me for a couple days' worth of lunch, health-ified with a salad on the side. Sex is like pizza, right? I can't remember how exactly, but it sounds right.

Dumplings
They're tiny and varied, they're stuffed with things, and they come with sauces. If dumplings aren't on your list of OMNoms, you must have been born without taste buds.

Grilled Cheese
Since going vegan, grilled cheese wasn't a popular item on my menu rotation. But then there was Daiya; and I discovered my panini press makes grilled cheese extra awesome. (It's all the extra space for crispy-ness that the panini press makes.) Now there is now going back. 

French toast
This has much the same appeal as grilled cheese--it's fried and it's carbs, so gimmeh! Only with French toast, it's not the gooey cheeze that make it extra nom-worthy, it's the stuff you eat it with--fruit, fruit sauce, maple syrup, icing sugar, or completing the full-on hot-breakfast trifecta of hash browns and meatless sausage/bacon. Weekends are made for this, people.

Falafel
Another food that builds on the basic fried carbs, falafel kicks it up a notch. Not only do you have the fried falafel balls and the pita, some food genius decided that contrasting this with cool, crisp parsley and adding some tahini for depth of flavour would take this food to a whole new level. And it did. 

Mexican

There is something about the flavour palate and the often vegan-ness of Mexican-style food that I can't get enough of. And seriously, anything I can add avocados to has my heart. Furthermore, chipotle peppers are the perfect addition of heat, and leave me teary with delicious joy--and a burning tongue.


Avocado
Do I really need to explain this one? If anything with avocados has my heart, then avocados themselves must be amazeballs. It's like this: if movies with Ryan Reynolds are inherently awesome, then Ryan Reynolds himself must be awesome squared. Hard to argue with my impeccable logic, right?
Avocados are smooth and creamy and go well with everything. If you're not convinced, look at the picture and try not to imagine how tasty that is.

Hummus

Humans have four basic needs: air, water, food, shelter. This being the 20th century, we can add Facebook and funny photos of cats if we wanted the list to be truly accurate. Vegans can add hummus to the list of necessities. How many sad, hungry vegan, lost and forlorn--on the road or at an event--has found that delicious saviour, hummus, and become instantly rejuvenated? Hummus is a vegan food that can be found so many places now that it frequently saves us from "just the salad". And thank hummus for that!

The catered vegan

So I was out of town for work. With catered meals. In a small town. The upside: I could see all the stars! The downside: I worried about what to eat.

It didn't turn out too badly, thank goodness! However, everytime I asked the caterer what was vegan she instead told me what was gluten free. ...Um, thanks, but could you tell me about the whole animal product thing? Fortunately, she did have lovely curried chickpeas, but without rice. So I ate it with bread--but she had pumpernickel and caraway rye--definitely a weird flavour clash. Do I sound like a spoiled vegan? Well, maybe a little bit. She made vegan things and gluten-free things but it was not a menu, it was a collection of things she could make to satisfy all diets, but without cohesion. Day 2's lunch spread was hamburger casserole for the omnis, eggplant moussake (vegan and gluten-free( and chickpea curry (vegan and gluten-free) with Cesar salad and garden salad. And the eggplant moussaka tasted rather like eggplant and tomato. I suspect she didn't open her spice drawer for that dish.

All this being said, it was definitely far better than the re-heated hungry-fest I had a five-star resort a couple years ago. And partly it was because she made us hummus from scratch, for lunch on Day 1. It was lovely!

Level 6 vegan: hummus

When I went to stay with a friend for a week last summer, I said that I needed to get some hummus. "Hummus is a necessity for vegans. It's like oxygen. Soon, I'll be able to breathe it." If being a level 5 vegan equals pocket mulching, level 6 is breathing hummus.

For a long time I had a love-hate relationship with hummus. I loved that it is cheap, nutritious, available almost everywhere and delicious with almost everything. But I hated that whenever I made it, it wasn't as yummy as the store-bought version and inevitably languished in my fridge. Everything else that you make tastes better than the store-bought stuff. But not hummus--it's such a bad-ass vegan food, it refuses to follow the rules!

One evening I went to a party (where the only vegan edibles were the cupcakes I brought and, fortunately, the hummus) and completely freaked out over the hummus. I couldn't get over the texture: smooth and creamy, just like the store bought stuff. I think I ate most of the bowl myself. (Sorry about that, Cara.) I was talking with someone there (okay, so I was gushing over the Perfect Hummus) and she said two things that stuck with me: Don't think of it as hummus, think of it as chickpea dip. And: don't be stingy with the oil and the tahini.

I decided I needed to delve further into the true meaning of hummus. Of course, I turned to Google. Fortunately, this time I managed to filter out the inevitable internet crap and actually find useful tips. And I finally became one with the chickpea and made Perfect Hummus. To help you in this noble endeavor, I have four rules for Perfect Hummus.

1. Cook the crap out of the chickpeas.
2. Refrigerate the chickpeas overnight.
3. Add lots of the yummy stuff.
4. Get a good food processor.

If these are self-explanatory, or if you already make perfect hummus, you can stop right here. Otherwise, here's the full Perfect Hummus rules.

1. Cook the crap out of the chickpeas.
I used to be impatient with my chickpeas. I would cook the little darlings until they were just done, and proceed to make hummus. Hummus is like foreplay: never rush it. Now, I cook the chickpeas until they're really, really soft. If I take out a beautiful little chickpea and can squish it with even a little pressure, they're done. If not, I keep cooking.

2. Refrigerate the chickpeas overnight.
I'll say it again, because it's really true (for both hummus and sex). Hummus is like foreplay: never rush it. My hummus googling told me that if you make hummus with still-warm chickpeas, they will never be creamy. I don't know the scientific basis behind this, but since doing this I have creamy hummus. If you are religious, take this on faith, like water-to-wine, the burning bush. If you're not religious, join me in the Church of Eternal Garbanzo and don't question it. Cook those little chickpeas until they're squishy and refrigerate them overnight before making your hummus.

3. Add lots of the yummy stuff.
I watch what I eat. I used to skimp on tahini and olive oil when making hummus because they were calorific. I had to stop worrying about this to get Perfect Hummus. Now I add a bunch in the food processor and if my hummus isn't creamy, I add more and blend until it is creamy. I don't eat giant portions of hummus at a time, so even if there is lots of high-calorie stuff in the hummus, that item alone won't be an issue.

4. Get a good food processor.
I have killed two hand blenders making hummus. Seriously. I am one hand-blender-corpse away from starting an Appliance Sematary (and when I bury the dead hand blenders, they will arise three days later and do diabolical things like purée heads of lettuce. OMG, not PUREED LETTUCE!!) .

At one point I decided hummus was worth the investment in a serious, grown-up kitchen item, and bought a decent food processor. Besides enabling me to make cashew "cheese", my food processor allows me to finally make good hummus. Yes, it's big and it's a pain to clean, but I can tackle even the most complex recipe with it and know it will not need to be buried (and re-buried, after arising from the dead). And it allows me to make make Perfect Hummus.

So with these rules in hand, I encourage you to proudly tackle making hummus at home. Once you get the hang of it--and learn not to rush--it's well worth washing the food processor. "Bon appe-chickpea!"