Vegan Recipes: Introduction
[This page is in the earliest
stages of development:
28 April 2007
]
How to find vegan recipes
Typing ‘vegan recipes’ into a search engine produces any
number of online recipes for vegan food and meals. Anyone with access to
the www can acquire more vegan recipes than they will
cook in a lifetime.
About these vegan recipes
My interests in offering these vegan recipes are to share my enthusiasm for vegan cooking, to celebrate culinary creativity, and to inspire adventure. My concern is suggest how to prepare food and meals that are tasty and satisfying. As I am trained neither as a chef nor as a nutritionist, it is my intention neither to propose a balanced diet, nor to be over-concerned about the nutritional content of any one vegan meal. Whilst in my experience a varied vegan diet is likely to be both balanced and healthy, I make no health claims about any of my vegan recipes.
An advantage of buying food specifically identified as being ‘suitable for vegans’ is that the designation requires that the food is manufactured outside the context of non-vegan ‘contaminants’. For instance, Kinnerton manufacture their chocolate that is ‘suitable for vegans’ in a dairy-free (and nut-free) environment. However, vegan food is not especially hypoallergenic. Eating foods to which one has a food intolerance, or a food allergy, is a bad idea. Whilst it is unlikely that anyone sufficiently enthusiastic to use one of these recipes would prepare food that is inappropriate to themselves, the vegan diet does exploit ingredients, and involve dishes, with which the digestive systems of non-vegans may be less familiar: quantities of nuts, pulses, cereals, vegetables and fruits. Tofu is probably easy for most people to digest, but a non-vegan dinner guest may find a chilli sin carne blows about their innards with some vigour.
The vegan recipes presented here are my own, not copied from some other source. The recipes set out what and how I cook. I am, in truth, hopeless at following recipes. Instead, I prefer to think in terms of cooking processes, procedures and principles. I like to understand why sugar is used when baking bread, what the function of oil is in frying, what happens when I fry some mushrooms, why jacket potatoes cooked in a microwave oven taste different from those baked in a convection oven, how to make a selection of dishes that are guaranteed to work together in a meal.
I have learned to cook food and meals inspired by dishes from a variety of
culinary traditions. I cook food that I enjoy, and therefore what I describe as
a Thai curry may differ substantially from curries cooked in
I shall present vegan recipes for food inspired by dishes from:
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o Eastern Mediterranean: moussaka, hummus
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I occasionally experiment with fusion cooking: combining food, procedures and ideas from different traditions, but am finding it much harder than I imagined to do this well.
Most food I obtain I buy from supermarkets: most of the ingredients for my vegan recipes are readily available. I often buy low cost / economy lines because they are cheap, e.g. canned tomatoes, canned red kidney beans, plain / self-raising flour. I buy quite a lot of processed foods because I am lazy. I buy almost all my fresh fruit and vegetables from supermarkets. I buy some of the less-mainstream ingredients from independent health food stores or stalls. Whilst I love the idea of ‘growing my own’, I now grow very little: fresh herbs (because they are easy), rhubarb, plums and cooking apples (because they are there). However, I bake almost all my own bread – using a bread-maker, make some vegan yoghourt, and all-too-infrequently make my own tempeh. I do not believe that one has to have emigrated from some distant star-system, or have been spawned in / by a compost heap, in order to cook vegan food.
I should be more than happy to hear how you get on with any of my vegan recipes, and to learn about your vegan cooking ideas and experiences.
