I lived and worked in Chicago from 2002 to 2016 and, while there, had a close friend whose Christmas gift from me each year was a dozen or so packages of home-cooked food.
No worries the first few years; Shawn was an omnivore like me. Then he went to eating any food “that didn’t have a face” (which modulation did not preclude chicken, for some reason). Then he shifted to being a pescatarian.
You see where this is going.
For a couple years there, I was able to cook him vegetarian eats; in fact, I loved it, especially all the Indian foods I made.
But when he went vegan, I had to do some book larnin’.
Cooking vegan is very different cooking and impresses on the home cook just how much non-plant food we consume in our diet.
It is also delicious cooking, when you get the hang of it, and impresses on the home cook just how much non-plant food we can do without in our diet — all without sacrificing flavor, aroma, texture and other eating aesthetics.
Some vegan cooking made me feel much in touch with the Earth, a sense that I do not get when (even guiltlessly, I admit) I eat animal-based food.
But to cook vegan, you’ll need to reconfigure your pantry with: non-dairy milk(s), vegan oils such as coconut and olive, and other fats (vegan butter, for example, or vegan mayonnaise); vegan cheeses; and vegetable broth.
You’ll probably already have some different grains (rices, say), but you’ll need to expand the palette with additional types of beans, nuts, seeds, and pastas. The variety is important because it expands the available flavors, textures and possible preparations. Of these, dried are preferred, but many canned vegetables and beans work well, especially canned tomatoes in different forms.
Dried mushrooms of several sorts are key, not merely porcini for Italian-style cooking, nor shiitake for Asian, but an entire bookshelf of dried ‘shrooms. Again, the range is key to success in the kitchen and on the plate.
A trip to an Asian grocery will help stock the pantry with helpful vegan staples such as miso paste, liquid aminos or tamari, rice vinegar, and tahini.
And there is the issue of vegan proteins. Once during the vegan years, Shawn and I went to a vegan restaurant in New York City where the menu was as long as the Manhattan phone book (remember phone books?), “shrimp” and “lobster” this and “chicken” and “steak” that. All the faux-meats were constructed of soy- or other plant-based protein such as seitan or tempeh but also were made to resemble, for example, the curled commas of pink shrimp or glistening slabs of seared steer.
The omnivore at the table found all of this very amusing, as I still do when vegan menus sport omnivore-ish names, but I suppose the appeal is nostalgic.
When I cook with vegan proteins, I don’t need to make them look like anything. I’m less interested in vegan bratwursts heavy on the wheat gluten or Thanksgiving Tofurky heavy on the furky than on the wheat gluten or tofu alone.
The point about vegan food for me isn’t the visuals; it’s the taste and texture, both of which can be some of the more alluring in all of cooking.
With a laptop or smartphone handy, you can find vegan recipes of any stripe or style of cooking; there are thousands. Cuisines that are natively friendly for vegetarians – Indian, say, or Mexican – make for an easier transition to vegan. Much of Asian cooking is vegan to begin with or needs only a bit of tinkering to go vegan from vegetarian (or even meat-tinged).
The highlight of one of my friend’s Christmas gifts one year was this mushroom fricassée from a cookbook by the successful group of Native Foods restaurants in Chicago. It’s a really terrific turn on mushrooms.
Wild Mushroom Fricassée on Garlic Toasted Crostini
Makes 12 to 16 bites
From “Native Foods Celebration Cookbook”
Ingredients
1 small baguette
¼ cup garlic oil (recipe below)
1 pound shiitake mushrooms, cleaned and steams removed
1 pound portobello mushroom, cleaned, diced ¼ inch
1 pound maitake mushrooms (also known as “hen of the woods”)
½ pound king or oyster mushrooms
½ pound chanterelle or lobster mushrooms
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 shallots, minced
2 teaspoons sea salt
½ teaspoon black pepper, cracked
¼ cup vegan sour cream
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice baguette into ½-inch slices. Brush with garlic oil. Toast for 9-11 minutes or until golden brown. Clean all mushrooms and dice into ½-inch pieces. Heat sauté pan up on medium high heat. Add 2 tablespoons garlic oil. Add garlic and shallots and cook until transparent, stirring constantly. Add larger mushrooms first (lobster, portobello and king). Sauté for 3 minutes, then add all other mushrooms.
Season with salt and pepper. Add more oil if mushrooms start to “dry” out. Cook for another 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow the mushrooms to cool down until you can handle them. Rough chop the mixture and transfer it to a bowl. Add the sour cream, mix well and taste. Scoop or spread the fricassée onto the crostini.
Roasted Garlic and Garlic Oil
Makes 2 cups
Place 4 cups garlic cloves in a saucepan and sprinkle with 1 teaspoon each salt and ground black pepper. Pour 2 cups each olive oil and vegetable oil over cloves and simmer over medium-high heat for 35-40 minutes. (Cloves should end up golden brown not dark brown or black.) Strain oil and cloves into separate container to cool. Store both in refrigerator.
Reach Bill St John at bsjpost@gmail.com
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