Cheap Vegan Eats, Whole Foods and Old Cookbooks

I was leafing through cookbooks this morning and looking over some of the less expensive to make recipes that used to be staples in my kitchen back when I was cooking more (and for more than myself). Their origins vary: vegan cookbooks, whole foods cookbooks, veganized versions of recipes in non-vegan cookbooks, recipes swapped years ago in online vegetarian or vegan discussion forums, veganized versions of childhood favourites -- you name it! I've posted a few of them over the past years, either writing them out in full or sharing links to where I've since found them online: Kasha and Veggies, Lentil Burgers, Lentil Soup, Farmhouse Stew, Marinated Lentil Salad, New Farm Macaroni and "Cheese" Casserole, Melty White Cheez (and another favourite Baked Macaroni and Cheez recipe), Baked Rice and Lentils, Spicy Sweet Potato and Bean Burritos, TVP Gyros, Oven Roasted Tom Tofu, Tang Tsel and Taboulleh.

I first started learning to cook without animal products years ago using well-worn secondhand copies of non-vegan books like Jean Hewitt's The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook and Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet. Both books taught me to cook using whole foods -- dried legumes, a wide variety of grains (whether in the form of whole or cracked berries or flour), nuts and seeds, herbs and spices and fresh produce. For a college student on a tight budget and first exploring vegetarianism at a time when the world wide web didn't exist to offer up thousands of plant-based recipes with a simple mouse-click, they were invaluable in teaching me how easy it is to steer clear of (generally more) expensive processed foods and to work with basic foods that pack more of a nutritional punch.

Unfortunately, most of these books were unapologetically non-vegan, with many of them merely omitting meat, and those omitting dairy and eggs often including honey (which was promoted quite heavily in the "natural foods movement" as an ideal alternative to refined sugar). The book pictured above (with its horribly hand-drawn cover displaying animal use) is an example of this -- a book focused on tofu, which uses dairy, eggs and honey in almost all of its recipes. These books obviously weren't so much about the ethics of animal use as they were about environmentalism and avoiding processed foods. Thankfully, we have books available today that stress vegananism and have the internet at our disposal to find vegan recipes without having to cherry-pick through the confusion of those old so-called natural foods cookbooks.

I had grown up in a home where the only varieties or rice explored had been Minute Rice or Uncle Ben's, and where the only legumes I'd ever eaten had been the split peas in my grandmother's traditional stinky and gloppy soup, or in the navy beans in the baked beans my mother picked up for our weekly Saturday dinner. I scoured the cookbook sections of the local used bookstores constantly in the city where I attended school to find a wide variety of books like the aforementioned, which enabled me to try out so many new ingredients and to get into the habit of stocking my pantry so that I always had something on hand to whip something up when rent or that extra textbook would have left me otherwise going without groceries any given week.

There are so many more recipes I've nabbed or adapted from books like those, as well as from more recent books and web postings, and I've been itching to share them for some time. I've been reluctant to do so since I'm currently without a functional digital camera and one of my own pet peeves about food posts is that I have a hard time not passing them by unless they include both the recipe and a photo. I'm going to cross my fingers that this is mostly my own quirk and that others might find the recipes useful anyway if I keep posting them here and there. Heck, if someone has a spare unused digital camera they'd like to offload and toss my way, I'd even be willing to spend an entire month posting pictures every single day of every single dish I made. ;-)

In the interim, here are a few more old favourites I've cherry-picked from various cookbooks over the years that I thought I'd share. They're both simple and inexpensive to make. The first is adapted from an old Company's Coming cookbook on "Meatless Cooking":

Tofu Sausages

What you need:

1 lb firm tofu, pressed
1-1/2 tsp cider vinegar
2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp (or less) salt
1/4 tsp pepper, freshly ground
3/4 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 walnuts, ground
1/4 tsp cumin, ground
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/2 cup bulgur / cracked wheat
1 cup rolled oats (not instant)

Whatcha do:

Mash your tofu in a large bowl and add everything but the bulgur and rolled oats. Mix well. Add the bulgur and oats and mix well, again (I knead it with my hands) and let sit for around 15 minutes. Shape into small sausages or patties (use maybe 3 tsp or so).

Heat some olive oil up in a pan and brown on all sides. Makes about 20 of 'em.

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This one was adapted from another older non-vegan cookbook, Low Fat Cooking for Good Health by Gloria Rose:

Baked Zucchini, Eggplant and Tomatoes

What you need:

1 medium eggplant, thinly sliced
1 medium zucchini, thinly sliced
2 ripe tomatoes, thinly sliced (I've used 3-4 plum tomatoes before)
6 fresh mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1/4 tsp dried thyme (feel free to experiment with different herbs for a different outcome)
1/4 cup broth (whichever flavour you prefer)
4-5 garlic cloves (or garlic to taste)
1 Tbs low-sodium soy sauce

Freshly ground pepper to taste

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 400 F / 205 C. Spray a casserole dish with vegetable / olive oil (I use olive oil in a non-aerosol pump). Spread the vegetable slices in layers, making sure that the mushrooms don't end up on top. Mix the rest of the ingredients well and drizzle over the vegetables in the casserole.

Place foil (or a cover) over the casserole and bake for a half hour.

Serve over brown rice or other absorbent grains like cracked wheat. Serves from 3-4 people.

Sprouting 101

(This is a post from March 28, 2008 that I thought I'd bump after a conversation about sprouting earlier today.)

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to fix myself up a batch of something I used to have on hand almost constantly up until just a few years back. I decided to try my hand at sprouting again. I popped over to the local health food store to load up on some extra organic Speerville Flour Mill kamut and spelt berries--grains I usually boil or steam to eat instead of rice, or throw into the bread machine with any old bread recipe ingredients to make a really chewy and nutty-tasting bread (with a really crunchy crust).

I don't use a store-bought sprouter, although if I were making sprouts for more than one person (or decided to up my own sprout intake significantly), I'd consider it for the sake of convenience. A simple clean Mason jar does the trick for me right now, though, providing me with enough sprouts to throw into a couple of salads or stir fries. A second Mason jar to sprout something different might be useful, too, though. So? Here's the scoop on everything you could possibly want to know about sprouting. I'm not going to go over every facet of it here, since there are bunches and bunches of other places online where you can go to find sprouting FAQs that aren't commercial sites like the one to which I just Iinked, which is actually really easy to navigate and has a lot of usable info for low-tech sprouting.

Make sure that your hands and sprouting tools are clean whenever contact is made with the sprouts, incidentally. And ensure that the grains (or other things) you sprout are clean and have been stored well before you use them. There are indeed safety concerns revolving around sprouts that haven't been stored or handled properly.

Here's the My Face Is on Fire crash course: Take around a half cup of a mixture of kamut and spelt berries (I've read that spelt doesn't sprout particularly well, although I've had no issues with it--you may want to stick to kamut or something else for your first try at sprouting). Take a bunch of grains and pick out the broken or discoloured ones. Rinse the grains off in a colander and place in a jar. Add 2-3 times the amount of water (so, a cup to a cup and a half) and let the jar sit overnight. In the morning, check to see if any grains are floating on top and if so, press down on them to see if they'll sink. If anything's still floating, pick it out, then rinse your sprouts well over the sink, saving the water for later for your garden or houseplants. Wrap a layer of cheesecloth over the jar's mouth and tip the jar to let the water out. I tend to keep the jar tilted mouth-downward with the cheesecloth on it and kept in place with a rubber band to ensure that there's no water left in the jar, which could cause spoiling. You can rinse and drain them once or twice a day at 8-12 hour intervals and they should be ready in around three days. You can sprout them for a longer period, as long as you keep rinsing and draining them--they're alive! Here's an "Instructable" on how to grow sprouts, just to show you how easy it really is.

There are a zillion other things you can sprout successfully--all kinds of grains, nuts, seeds and beans. Soaking and sprouting times vary accordingly and some sprouts store well in the fridge, while others don't. Remember that Google is your best friend! Once you figure out what to sprout,you'll be burdened with figuring out what to do with them, because the possibilities are plentiful. I like to sprinkle 'em on salads, throw them in wraps or sandwiches, add them to stir fries/casseroles/soups or use them when baking hearty bread or rolls. You can even make sprout cereal, hot or cold, or sprouted "oatmeal". It's all trial and error, baby!

(Listening to: A Vegan Freak podcast while taking photos in me kitchen.)

Whole Foods (the foods, not the store!)

I stumbled upon this online training manual for employees at a food co-op somewhere in the US. It's adapted from the National Cooperative Grocery Association's Food Training Manual.

I was hesitant to post this, because there's a section that deals with meat (and I figured that it could be offensive to some of this blog's readers). That being said, the information in the rest of the manual is invaluable. It contains everything from information on the organic certification process to detailed breakdowns of the differences between various types of grain. There's some really good stuff in there and I think it's a good starting point for someone who wants to move away from processed foods and start eating more wholesome foods or making more meals from scratch.