What does a vegan butcher shop look like?!

Just so you're not in suspense, here's the short answer (a shot of the deli case):



Gutenfleischer's is a vegan butcher shop located inside a vegan bakery (Dough) in Atlanta, GA. The basic setup is similar to a traditional deli. OK, it's not really a vegan "butcher shop" because you don't get to choose a particular "cut" of wheat or soy (e.g. "I'll take a radicle, two cotytledons, and a lean cut of endosperm"), but you do get to choose from an array of homemade fake meats (made from wheat gluten, or seitan) which are then sliced super-thin on a real meat slicer:



The end result looks like this, not terribly different from what you'd buy at a normal deli. Super-thin slices wrapped in plain brown wax paper (please ignore the old toaster oven tray they're sitting on):


Being curious, I naturally had to try every one, and I knew that Sarah would want to as well. So I ordered a quarter-pound each of all nine flavors, which kept her slicing for quite a while. Those were ham, Cajun ham, Canadian bacon, roast beef, Genoa salami, pepperoni, pepper turkey, buffalo turkey, and herb turkey. I also got a hot sandwich (a roast beef "au jus" thing which was surprisingly tasty and satisfying), a vegan sausage biscuit with tofu scrambled egg, and some desserts.

Unfortunately I visited about two months ago, so I don't have a perfect recollection of each of the meats. However, overall we enjoyed them quite a bit. Relative to their meaty cousins, these certainly tended to be significantly less juicy, although to be fair it took us a few days to get to all of them, which likely dried them out a bit. As you'd probably expect, they didn't taste just like meat, but they did have lots of flavor. The ham and bacon were the closest to tasting like the real thing, and might even fool someone not paying close attention. Most of them were very different, but good in their own way. For example, the Genoa salami didn't taste like salami much, but it did have a lovely peppery flavor. The turkey buffalo was nice and spicy, the pepperoni was complex and delicious, and while the roast beef had a mild flavor I still definitely enjoyed it.

If you find yourself visiting Atlanta it's definitely worth stopping by. Aside from the surreal experience of watching logs of vegan meats be sliced, and the unique culinary experience, you also may get ideas for changing up your diet at home.

What has vegan lady eaten lately?

Vegan lady finds herself too busy to write here more often than not now that she's back in grad school, and I can't keep up with all of the great stuff we eat on my own. So here's a quick sampling of some of what we've been eating lately. Sorry there are no recipes, but leave a comment if you want one and we'll see what we can do.


Seitan braised in red wine mushroom sauce (incredible):

with some kale added for health:

tempeh tacos w/ Mexican slaw (the tempeh used the marinade recipe from "fajitas" on http://food.veganjon.com):

Simple Thai salad (nothing fancy, just a way to use up some leftover peanut-coconut dipping sauce from our spring rolls):

Roasted cardoon, jerusalem artichoke, and parsnip:

If you have never heard of cardoon before (we hadn't), it's a relative of the artichoke which looks like celery but tastes like a bitter artichoke:

Raw parsnip beet salad with pineapple-mint dressing:

Bonus points for making the salad with striped Chioggia beets:

But still good if you make it with normal beets (we liked it enough to make it twice):

and finally, pumpkin parsnip kale lasagna (with parsnips FINALLY at the farmer's market, I just can't help myself):

A simple three-course Thai meal: Tom Yum, Thai Spring Rolls, Coconut Rice w/ Mango

We recently saw some fresh galangal (looks like ginger, but has a different, sort of flowery odor) at the farmer's market  and were inspired to make a Thai meal. Ever since I had a bowl of mind-blowing tom yum in Hawaii I have been wanting to try and recreate it.

Once we'd decided to do that, why not Thai spring rolls and mango coconut rice?


In planning the soup, I thought back to that eye-opening bowl I'd had on our  honeymoon. The key difference from most tom yum I'd had was the strength and simplicity of the flavors; the flavors of the large inedible chunks of lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves in the soup blended together and made it clear that this soup meant business. Anyway, I didn't want our guests to have to pick out inedible chunks, but I still wanted to focus on the flavor of the broth because the typical ingredients to vegetarian tom yum (tomatoes, canned straw mushrooms, tofu) were uninspiring. As a result, I just filtered everything out and served it as a plain broth. Now that I've verified how good the broth is, I'm going to try again with a few solid ingredients and see what happens. Here's the recipe I came up with:
In a saucepan, add:
4 cups vegetable stock
~1/4 cup lime juice (I used 1.5 limes)
2 Tbsp sugar
2 stalks lemongrass (remove the outermost dirty layer, and score the entire length of it with a knife)
~1/3 cup chopped fresh galangal
8 kaffir lime leaves
2 tsp chili oil (I used sesame chili oil, but that was a mistake. plain chili oil or canola would be better)
1 fresh cayenne pepper, minced (or other hot pepper)
garlic (maybe 2 cloves? I used a big splash of homemade garlic vodka / garlic extract)
2 pickled umeboshi plums, pitted (these provide a nice salty pungent umami flavor in place of fish sauce)
maybe 1/2 cup cilantro probably would be good, we just didn't have any

Heat the saucepan on high, and once boiling reduce to simmer and cook for about 20-30 minutes until delicious. Add salt to taste if needed. Strain out the broth so you won't have to pick out the inedible bits (lime leaves and lemongrass) You could make this with enoki mushrooms, or straw mushrooms if you don't hate them, or tomatoes (I guess), or tofu.

For the spring rolls (what I call non-fried rice paper rolls, some other people call them "fresh rolls" or "summer rolls"), we started by freestyling a coconut-lime-peanut sauce (sorry, I didn't keep track of what went in but it was tasty). Next we sauteed up some homemade seitan with garlic / soy / mirin / galangal, and minced it in the food processor. We shredded some carrots, thinly sliced the fresh red peppers which we can STILL get at the farmer's market in late November (good enough to eat like an apple), and washed and chopped the arugula. We got a good factory assembly going where I softened up the rice wrappers (since I have heat-resistant hands) and passed them to Sarah to stuff and fill.

Sadly our rice was not all it could have been. We basically used the coconut rice recipe from Joy of Cooking (which is good), but instead of jasmine rice (as they recommend), or sticky rice (which is best), we used some leftover arborio rice we had from a friend who just moved, plus a bit of jasmine rice for flavor. Tragically the only mango at Whole Foods was overripe on one end, and under-ripe on the other, but we got enough mango out of it to at least give our dinner guests a good mix of mango and coconut rice. The leftover rice got dry in the fridge overnight, but was excellent with some So Delicious vegan nog on it and then microwaved until it was soft.

Easy Ethiopian at Home

I made this last week while Jon was out of town.  I read a lot about people not wanting to cook for "just themselves" or why make such a fuss when its "just me".  Just you?!?!  That always blows my mind.  Did you have some sort of early childhood toungue injury so that the vicarious pleasure you get from others enjoying your food actually better than eating the food itself?  I like eating!  And I'm worth all sorts of crazy effort in the kitchen!  And so are you!  However, while you're working through your self-confidence issues, here's an easy recipe you can make:

Easy Ethiopian:

1 package Uptons Seitan Traditional Flavor, Chopped
1 package fresh green beans (about 2 1/2 cups) chopped
3 medium red skinned potatos, scrubbed, quartered, & sliced 1/4 inch thick
1/4 cup berbere spice mix (already contained salt) (more berbere to taste as needed)
1/4 cup water
1 onion, chopped
2 tsp oil

I sauteed the onion in the oil in the electric pressure cooker on the brown setting for about 10 mins, adding the garlic and berbere at the end and sauteeing for about 2 mins  Then I added the water, green beans,  potatoes, and seitan and set the pressure cooker to 2 minutes.  It was incredibly easy, and quite tasty.

On Seitan

Since normally seitan doesn't have the best texture in my opinion, I tried the trick of adding 1/4 cup of chickpea flour to make it more tender. It did indeed make it more tender, but nowhere near as awesomely tender and fantastic as the seitan I had at Horizons in Philly. The seitan I had there was so tender, it was freaking me out. It was amazingly tasty, unbelieveably tasty. I want my seitan to be that awesome. Anyhow. This did improve the tenderness, but it was still kinda chewy. Much less spongy though. Perhaps next time I will add oil to the seitan as well, or peanut butter, to see how that affects the texture.

With the seitan, we had a sad Asianesque dish with soba noodles, leftover marinade as sauce, and sparse veggies. With the 2nd half of the seitan, J. made Asian style peanut dish with brocolli and quinoa. We had a jar of peanut sauce. It was actually pretty yummy. You can't go too wrong with peanut sauce though. Peanut butter is just awesome.

I haven't got a memory card installed in the camera. That's my current excuse for no pictures.