Entries tagged with 'vegan'
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During the summer of 1999, I subsisted almost solely on the cheapest menu item at the Chinese food truck: peanut noodle salad. A little spicy, a little sweet, a little salty, chewy Chinese noodles with cucumbers, peppers, and scallions coated in a chunky peanut sauce was a tasty, filling meal that I only occasionally got tired of. Had I known how easy it is to make at home, requiring not much more than a few pantry staples and some fresh vegetables, I would have even been able to add some cheap gin to fully flesh out my minibar.
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Canned tomato soup is all fine and good in my mind, but when I actually taste it these days, the nostalgia disappears in a puff of high fructose corn syrup-scented smoke. Cloyingly sweet and one dimensional, it's a tough dish to swallow.
The good news: Making excellent tomato soup from scratch at home is almost as easy as simply opening a can, and the return on your minor time investment is significant.
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My dad is what you'd call a meatatarian. He's always loved all things meaty, the fattier the better. Aged rib eye steaks and medium-rare prime rib covered in compound butter. Foie gras seared until crisp with a liquid custard center. Pork belly confit'ed in its own fat, served deep fried and crispy. Slabs of fat-laced tuna belly. Grilled hamachi collar bones. Potatoes cooked in goose fat. Peking duck with crispy skin, and anything served with bacon. You get the idea. Why am I telling you this? Because here is my goal:
I'm going to get my dad to eat an entirely vegan meal without even noticing it.
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The key to great vegan pizza? It's exactly the same as the key to great cheesy pizza: it comes down to the pieman's craft, the tools being used, and the quality of the individual components, the most important of which is the crust.
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Jalfrezi is not as popular with the U.S. audience as it is in Britain (yet), but it seems that as palates are shifting and folks are becoming more and more accustomed to spicier foods, jalfrezi is getting primed to win over this side of the pond as well. With its origins in China, jalfrezi is more similar in its cooking method to dry-fried Chinese dishes rather than the typical wet Indian curry.
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As a vegan of three and a half weeks, I've discovered that there's a whole new set of these ingredients,and I've gradually been honing my pantry, stocking up on my favorite ones so that eventually, I hope to have just as large a selection to choose from. Here are a few of my go-to's thus far: soy sauce, miso paste, good olive oil, vinaigrettes, and more.
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Woks are generally associated with super high heat, rapid cooking, and smoking hot oil, but there are other, gentler methods of cooking in one.
Braising (or simmering) in a wok is about the simplest thing you can do with it. It doesn't require the crazy high heat you need for stir-frying and it doesn't require mad flipping skills. In fact, it doesn't even require a lot of time, particularly when working with a tender vegetable like eggplant.
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As a quick exercise to chart out my cravings, I decided to plot various foods on an arbitrary "meatiness" to "crave factor" scale. Take a look at that chart and you'll see that outside of a few major outliers (I will always love April Bloomfield's
Spotted Pig Burger, and I've never been much of a cookie or ice cream eater), for the most part there is a solid diagonal line that runs from most-meaty-least-craved to least-meaty-most-craved. Seeing it all laid out like this is pretty interesting to me. What does it mean?
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Beets get their fair share of criticism from children and adults alike, and it's easy to see why if you, like me, were exposed to the canned variety as a kid. Those things are
not easy to like. A freshly roasted beet, on the other hand, is something quite different. Sweet as candy, rich and earthy, with a great sorta-soft-sorta-crisp texture, they're one of my favorite vegetables to work with. I make some variation of this salad a few times a year and it's one of my wife's favorites. Just like her, it's pretty, colorful, and best served at room temperature.
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I'm going to a Super Bowl party on Sunday, but as a man who associates himself strongly with both New York and Boston, I can't say I have much of a dog in the fight this year. To keep things interesting, I've decided to issue myself a personal vegan superbowl challenge. The goal?
To bring vegan Super Bowl snacks, serve them to a room full of avowed meat eaters, and make them so good that they get eaten before the regular snacks do.
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