Making vegan food, as a meat eater, is actually loads of fun

From gloucestershirelive.co.uk 

By William Morgan

Learning to cook vegan is like starting all over again

I have long considered myself among the meat-lovers, dairy drinkers, and offal aficionados of this world. If a meal does not have a meat protein in it, you can at best call it lunch in my mind.

Now, I love food, I used to cook for a living and I love discovering new dishes as well as new ingredients to cook with but, recently, I have started cooking for one of my housemates. I find cooking for other people to be deeply rewarding and I usually don't mind so long as the person I'm feeding is not a picky eater - the only problem, my housemate has never and will never eat an animal product.

I am not one of those online vegan haters that think eating a steak is a substitute for personality, but I must say that I have recently really started to notice the drudgery of staring into your fridge after a long day to decide what assortment of meat, vegetable and carbohydrate will sustain you. There are only so many times a person can make a three-day bolognese, which is not a lovely slow-cooked caramelised ragu, but one where you cook it and then eat it for the next three days straight.

But such is the life of a young millennial, if I wasn't wasting my money on double soy caramel lattes, avocados, and paying for my elderly landlord's holidays through my rent, I would no doubt be a millionaire. So, when my house share kitchen does not have one of my six other housemates in it, I have to make the most of it.

I must say though, going from a diet where every meal requires the blood sacrifice of one of God's tastiest creatures to one where vegetables, tofu, and grains reign supreme, is actually quite hard. You have to learn to season with a heavy hand and think more about how you add texture and complex flavours to a dish.

With meat, most of the work has already been done for you by some pig or cow, leaving you with just some light seasoning to do and cooking it to the right temperature. In other words, if you want to make good vegan food, you have to become a better cook and understand your ingredients more.

I will use one meal I cooked this week for my vegan housemate as an example. We had tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, lettuce, mushrooms, and some leftover refried beans from burrito night, which my once carnivorous brain would have looked at as a collection of particularly dull salad options.

But with no choice of meat, I was forced to go beyond my boundaries and find something new. So after spicing and dicing the sweet potatoes I stuck them in the oven for 90 minutes to go crispy and sticky from the natural sugar in the sweet potato.

Then, I made a kind of marinade out of olive oil, white wine vinegar, garlic, onion and a tiny sprig of sage, for the mushrooms and also put them in the oven but for about 30 minutes at a lower heat. Still staring at the soon-to-turn tomatoes and slightly worse-for-wear peppers, I decided the final thing this concoction needed was a sauce to bring it all together, so I de-seeded the tomatoes and made a salsa.

Eventually, around an hour and 45 minutes after I had started, I had this ciabatta vegan tower burger, with refried beans on the bottom, seasoned lettuce, crunchy sticky sweet potato, marinated chunky mushrooms, all topped with a salsa. After years of eating greasy burgers covered with gallons of cheese and bacon, it was quite nice to eat something that was extremely tasty and also made me feel better after eating it.

Anyway, I suppose the reason I am telling you this is that we as human beings love to put ourselves into categories, like meat eater or vegan, and if anything tries to shake that little box we put ourselves in, our natural reaction is to get angry. For a long time, I restricted myself to only eating meat-based meals and all it did was make me more unhealthy and more depressed about my food options, cooking for someone else who sees food differently showed me that food, meals, and self-identities, are entirely what you make of them.

You still won't catch me paying £8 for a salad in a restaurant, but I think I will continue to swap chicken for tofu in a stew at home, adding chickpeas for a bit of crunch. and trying to broaden my culinary horizons. After all, I am neither a meat eater or a vegan, but a person wanting to eat a tasty meal after a long day - meat or no meat.

https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink/making-vegan-food-meat-eater-8501418