Reading Cookbooks

Vegan Product Review

While I love trying recipes, I also crave convenience, and I regularly try new products to up the convenience factor — especially when I’m attempting to keep a vegan kitchen. Sometimes, when I’m wandering through Whole Foods I find a product that appears as though it may be an answer one of the my many questions about vegan living. Like, “Uh what about ranch salad dressing dude?”

Important, yes?

Yes.

Enter NASOYA. Last week I purchased a bottle of Creamy Dill Vegi-Dressing. I was skeptical.

Sure, it’s not full fat buttermilk ranch dressing, but this dressing has found a home in my refrigerator. It’s creamy and slightly sweet, totally satisfying if you’re someone like me who needs a little bit of persuasion to eat a salad. It’s not the lowest fat salad dressing, but two tablespoons are 2 WeightWatchers points. But again, in my opinion, if it convinces me to eat a salad, those points are well spent.

Try it.

Once More with Feeling

At what point do you consider a recipe officially part of your meal repertoire? I have decided – today – that I have to make the recipe three times, in a reasonable amount of time, like say a month or so, in order to consider it an old stand-by. The first time I made Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I raved about it on A View from the Park. I’m not sure anyone was listening, except perhaps, my sister, who now also makes this soup on a nearly weekly basis.

Seriously people, would I keep making the soup if it wasn’t fantastic?

Check out the original recipe.

This soup has so much going for it – beans, buckwheat soba noodles, veggies, the option to add some greens. It’s a no-brainer, health-wise, but for the sake of too many snacks pre-run tonight, I decided to WeightWatcher-ify the recipe tonight. Look at that, I made a new word.

Here’s what I did:

2 tablespoons olive oil –> I reduced this to 2 tsp, and to compensate, I used a few splashes of vegetable broth as needed to sauté the vegetables.

6 cups water or vegetable stock –> I actually up the amount of liquid in this recipe to approximately 8 cups, sometimes I use all vegetable broth (store bought), but last night I used half water, half broth. The effect was a somewhat lighter soup.

6 ounces soba noodles –> Soba noodles expand a lot once cooked. Six ounces isn’t necessarily too much, but I reduced this to four ounces and still felt like I had noodle-palooza going on in my soup.

Finally, I added a handful or two of spinach at the end of the cooking process (at the same time as the miso).

Based on six servings, the WW points value of this soup is 3. That’s approximately one and a half cups of soup per serving. Keep in mind, the original WW points value of this soup is only 5, still very low, so go on with your bad self and make yourself some soup. Either way works!

Adventures in Vegan

On and off since the New Year, I’ve been experimenting with a vegan diet. While I’ve given up meat (poultry, beef, and pork) entirely, I found myself shifting seamlessly from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian depending on the situation. For the most part, I have been keeping a vegan kitchen, though a pint of the B&J finds it way into my freezer from time to time (who am I kidding… like it ever goes into the freezer… it goes directly into my face). I eat vegetarian out because I don’t really want to dissect menus and question waiters. And, I have continued to eat fish — but only for sushi or on the rare occasion I find myself at a steakhouse where the restaurant’s vocabulary excludes the word “options.”

But, after a week-long business trip where I primarily spent my time shoving every piece of food I could find into my mouth — sans the meat, obvi — I have decided to challenge myself to eat vegan for the entire month of April. Combined with WeightWatchers, I’m hoping to drop approximately 8 lbs before the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati.

[Road trip!]

Does that sound like a lot? Eight pounds in one month? Maybe it is. But if I hadn’t gone nuts on the cookies, rolls, ranch dressing, croutons, cheese, and God knows what else during my trip, I would be talking about wanting to lose 5 pounds. Not eight.

So eight it is.

I’ve found that the hardest part about eating vegan is reading the labels of every packaged food you buy. So many products include some form of dairy or animal products — buttermilk, eggs, cream, whey, whatever — slyly tucked away in the middle of a long ingredient list, between high fructose corn syrup and xanthan gum. You can’t just pick a product off the shelf and assume it’s kosher — so to speak. You have to go all detective on that product’s ass and investigate. Fo’ real.

Luckily, as I was wasting time on the Internet yesterday, I found this — Trader Joe’s Web site offers a list of the vegan products available in its store. It also provides lists of products for other types of restrictive diets: low sodium, fat free, heart healthy, etc. If you’re not interested in the vegan products, go here and pick your poison.

So, Trader Joe’s saves the day, per usual. If you don’t heart Trader Joe’s, it’s probably only because you don’t have one in your state, because if you did, you would pilgrimage there even if it was 100 miles away. Life must be unimaginably hard for the Trader Joe’s-less among us.