All bean types
•
Sloppy Joes:
Add a 15-ounce can of Sloppy Joe sauce to two cups cooked beans. Heat and serve over whole-wheat hamburger rolls.
•
Bean and potato soup:
Sauté one cup chopped onions and 2 cloves minced garlic in 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add 2 cups diced potatoes, 2 cups cooked beans, and 8 cups vegetable broth. Simmer for 20 minutes until potatoes are tender. Season with basil and oregano.
•
Bean and grain salad:
Toss 3 cups of any cooked grain with 1 cup cooked beans. Season with bottled or homemade salad dressing. Add ¼ cup each of minced onion, chopped celery, and/or shredded carrots for added flavor and crunch.
Take Advantage of Familiar Favorites for Breakfast
Many people eat the same breakfast every single day, perhaps with a slight variation on the weekends. Hot or cold cereal with nondairy milk, toast with nut butter, juice, and fruit make a very hearty and healthy vegan breakfast that will suit the needs of most family members. Pancakes, vegan French toast, or scrambled tofu are good choices for more leisurely weekend breakfasts. Don’t be afraid to think beyond traditional breakfast foods. A veggie burger or soup is just as good for breakfast as for dinner.
Identify Snacks, Treats, and Desserts that are Vegan
You might want to experiment with egg-free baking (see page 114) or look for baked goods and frozen desserts in the natural foods store. Old-fashioned, all-purpose cookbooks have recipes for fruit crumbles and crisps that are vegan—or that can be “veganized” by replacing butter with margarine. If you love all-American cuisine, take a look at the Betty Crocker Project (
www.meettheshannons.net/p/betty-crocker-project.html
), which aims to veganize every recipe in the
Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook
published in the 1950s.
Many snack chips are vegan and so are several brands of commercial cookies, including Oreos. Take a peek in the freezer section of your natural foods store, too, for frozen desserts such as Coconut Bliss, hempseed-based Tempt, and So Delicious products.
Learn to Bake without Eggs
The egg’s main claim to fame is its role as a functional participant in cooking. In baking, it helps with leavening, and in savory foods, like veggie burgers, it’s a binding agent. But other ingredients have those same properties, and there are plenty of effective ways to replace eggs in cooking.
To keep vegan loaves, burgers and croquettes from falling apart, add a little bit of flour, bread crumbs, or rolled oats.
For egg-free baking, you are likely to get better results by using refined flours since they are lighter and more easily leavened. (It’s fine to use whole grains, though, just as long as you know to expect a somewhat heavier product.)
Look for recipes that call for just one or two eggs since it is easy to replicate them with a vegan version. Most cake mixes lend themselves well to vegan baking. For foods that don’t require a great deal of leavening, like pancakes, you can simply eliminate the eggs and add an extra two tablespoons of water or soymilk.
Natural foods groceries carry commercial products like EnerG Egg Replacer and Bob’s Red Mill Egg Replacer or try one of the following to replace eggs in baked goods.
For each egg:
• Grind 1 heaping tablespoon of whole flaxseed in a blender until it becomes a fine meal. Add 3 tablespoons cold water and blend until thick and viscous. The consistency is just like raw egg.
• Beat together 2 tablespoons water, 1 tablespoon oil, and 2 teaspoons baking powder.
• Whip 1 tablespoon plain agar powder (a seaweed product found in most natural foods stores) with 1 tablespoon water. Chill and then whip again.
• Mix 1 tablespoon full-fat soy flour with 3 tablespoons water.
• Mix together 1 tablespoon white vinegar and 1 teaspoon baking soda to make an instant, light foam.
Go Egg-Free for Breakfast and Lunch
When it comes to replacing eggs on the menu, there is nothing like tofu. Mash tofu and sauté it in vegan margarine with mushrooms and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast for “scrambled tofu.” Or chop firm tofu and mix with onion, celery, and vegan mayonnaise for vegan egg salad. You may want to track down some black salt (called
kala namak
), which can be found in Indian groceries or ordered online. It smells and tastes exactly like egg yolks. Try it in scrambled tofu or in recipes for vegan omelets.
Pack Up Vegan Food to Go
There are thousands and thousands of vegan recipes for dinner and at-home meals. But you can brown-bag it vegan-style too. If your workplace has a microwave oven, you can enjoy instant soups packaged as individual servings (the kind in cardboard cups) or prepared burritos. If you don’t have access to a microwave, take leftover beans, soups, or stews to work in a good quality thermos. Use the weekend to prepare a big pot of soup or beans and then freeze individual portions for grab-and-go meals to heat at work.
Or make sandwiches from vegan luncheon meats or hummus. Hummus-to-Go made by Wild Garden is a good choice when you don’t have refrigeration since it comes in sealed individual-serving-size packages. Trail mix, instant oatmeal, and apples with almond butter are other tasty on-the-go snacks.
A great option for brown-bag lunches is a wrap sandwich that uses leftovers from dinner. Keep a stack of large whole-wheat flour tortillas in the refrigerator and try some of the combinations below for wrap fillings:
• Diced potatoes, chopped celery, capers, and sun-dried tomatoes. Add a dressing of hummus, lemon tahini, or vegan mayonnaise with Dijon mustard.
• Black or pinto beans with shredded Monterey Jack–style jalapeño soy cheese and chopped tomatoes.
• Shredded carrots, peanuts, and raisins mixed with vegan mayonnaise.
• Veggie burger crumbles tossed with sunflower seeds, shredded carrots, and tahini.
• Peanut butter and jelly. (Who says you can’t have a PB&J wrap?)
• Rice, lentils, and shredded cabbage with sesame shiitake vinaigrette.
• Chopped chickpeas, onions, and celery mixed with vegan mayo and a dash of lemon juice.
• Baked tofu with spicy peanut sauce.
• Chopped tomatoes, carrots, and cucumber mixed into hummus.
Keep Learning
The variety of vegan products is growing like wildfire, and you’d be surprised by how many old-time favorites in the grocery store are vegan. As you explore, experiment, and taste, your menus will evolve, and you’ll find solutions to menu-planning problems. Even longtime vegans find that their menus and diets develop over time based on new products and changing lives. Maybe you need to identify a list of restaurants where you can meet friends or take business clients or host a child’s birthday party. If you entertain, you may need to gather ideas for a vegan cocktail party or for family get-togethers. The Internet is a valuable resource for these more specific issues.
VEGAN ON A BUDGET
Making the change to a vegan diet won’t automatically save you money, but it’s easy enough to plan healthy and enjoyable meals with a budget in mind. There’s a balance, though: The best way to cut back on food expenses is to eat out less frequently and limit pricey convenience foods. But that usually translates to more time spent cooking, and not everyone has that time. Here are a few ideas that will help you save money without spending hours in the kitchen.
• Cook beans and grains from scratch but in large enough quantities to stretch for several meals. Leftovers don’t have to be the same old thing. Serve black beans over rice the first night and then mixed with corn and salsa and wrapped in a corn tortilla the next. If you still have beans leftover, you can stretch them with a can of tomatoes for a third dinner. Or cook up a pot of chickpeas and use half to make hummus for sandwiches and half in a pasta and bean soup. The versatility of beans means that they can appear in meals throughout the week without getting boring.
• Get the most from higher-cost ingredients. Nuts, in particular, tend to be expensive, but a small amount goes a long way. One tablespoon of ground nuts mixed into a serving of cooked grains can add substantial flavor for very little cost. The same is true of more deluxe foods like sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and curry paste.
• No amount of leftovers is too small to save. If you have just a quarter cup of rice left, toss in some shredded carrots and a little bit of tahini and roll it up in a whole-wheat tortilla for a wrap sandwich. Little odds and ends in the refrigerator can often be pulled together into a salad or soup.
• Keep frozen vegetables on hand. They are just as nutritious as and often cost less than fresh. And they make it so easy to create fast dinners without having to make an extra trip to the store.
• If there is a thrift store bakery nearby, stock up on day-old whole-grain bread. Freeze loaves so you won’t run out.
• Freeze bits of leftover canned ingredients like tomato paste and coconut milk.
• Try to find ethnic grocery stores in your area. Often, items that are expensive “specialty” foods in the regular grocery store are everyday food in Asian or Indian markets—and are much lower in price. This can be your ticket to saving on some of the more expensive vegan staples like soymilk, tahini, and tempeh.
• Visit
www.localharvest.org/csa
to find a community-supported agricultural group in your area, and talk to them to see if it would be a good fit for you. These programs allow you to buy shares in local farms—a good way to support small vegetable farmers and get quality organic produce—but depending on the specifics, they may or may not be a bargain.
• If you can’t make everything from scratch, choose a few items that will save you real money and that you enjoy (or at least don’t mind) doing. Homemade cakes and cookies made from scratch save lots of money. Making your own seitan from gluten flour is also a huge money saver; you can make a big batch every few months and freeze it. Other ways to save include homemade salad dressings (so easy to make—there is really never any excuse for buying them), peanut sauce, and hummus.
• If you have room—a sunny spot on a window sill—you can easily grow your own vegetables. Tomatoes, lettuce, and greens can all be grown in pots. Leafy greens like kale and Swiss chard will give you a harvest throughout the summer and well into the fall. If you like cooking with fresh herbs, a small herb garden—in the ground or in a pot—is a must since these foods are expensive at the grocery store.
All of the standard advice that works for budget-minded omnivores applies to vegan grocery shopping: Make a list and stick to it; buy in season; look for specials; avoid impulse purchases; and take advantage of bulk-food warehouse stores.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!
There are “hidden” animal ingredients in many foods. Even seemingly benign foods like white sugar and maple syrup—seemingly vegan—can be processed with animal ingredients, a fact that you won’t see on their labels. Some food additives and food colors can be either animal- or plant-derived—and you have no way of knowing.
Should you care? Well, we don’t think so. In fact, we’re convinced that worrying about such things does more harm than good.
There is truly nothing to be gained by careful attention to this kind of detail in your diet. Avoiding these minute animal ingredients won’t make your diet any healthier. Nor will it lessen animal suffering or help protect the environment, at least not in any meaningful way. The only thing it will do is make your vegan diet more restrictive, time-consuming, and difficult to follow. It’s possible to get so bogged down in these details that you will simply find a vegan diet too laborious to follow.
Or you may be perfectly happy to put time and attention into seeking out and eliminating every last animal ingredient from your diet. While that is certainly your choice, it’s important to think about how this impacts the general view of vegan diets. If others believe that this meticulous attention to detail is what a vegan diet means, they may be less inspired to eat this way themselves. If you want to have a wide impact, then it makes better sense to portray a vegan diet as something delicious, fun—and easy.
SOYFOODS PRIMER
You don’t have to include soyfoods in your vegan diet, but they are so versatile and nutritious that many vegans find them indispensable. This group of foods has a long history of use in Asian countries, and they’ve been the focus of much research over the past couple of decades. We’ll talk about nutrition, health, and safety issues related to soy in Chapter 15. Here is a quick rundown of the most commonly consumed soyfoods.
Soybeans
Soybeans are generally tan in color, but they can also be black or brown. They’re a good source of protein, fiber, calcium, iron, and folate. Cooked soybeans have a flavor often described as “beany.” It’s a flavor that marries well with tomato sauces and spicy foods.
Edamame
These are soybeans that are harvested at about 75 percent maturity, while they are still green and have the nutrition of the whole soybean but with a milder flavor. In Japan, they are boiled in the pod and then served as a popular bar food (with beer). In the United States, you can find edamame already shelled in either the produce or frozen food section. Boil them for 15 minutes and eat as a vegetable or add them to grain salads. They’re a good source of protein, fiber, and calcium.
Soynuts
Made from dry soybeans that have been soaked and then roasted, these are a good snack and a crunchy addition to salads. They are relatively high in fat and calories and are a good source of both protein and calcium.
Soymilk
This is the liquid expressed from soaked, pureed soybeans. It’s a good source of protein and usually fortified with calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B
12
, and sometimes riboflavin. (Soymilk sold in Asian markets is often not fortified, so be certain to check labels.) Plain soymilk can stand in for cow’s milk in just about any circumstance. Vanilla or chocolate soymilk can be used in smoothies or desserts.