Food

[liralen]

I guess I'm even more aware of food after agrimony's, ambar's, and flit's awareness of the food they're dealing with.

I've got a vegan niece who is coming in a few weeks, and it's going to be a real challenge to cook for her. I just can't imagine life without eggs, cheese, or milk. I have gone meatless for Lent before, just to see if I could do it, and it was relatively easy with a bunch of cheese, eggs, and cream (mm... ice cream); but I can't imagine being without any of those as well. Quite a few breads that I make all have milk or eggs in them for richness and keeping ability. Pasta has eggs in it...

And does honey count? It's food made by other living creatures for their own 'needs' that humans take and eat, much like milk, because people don't take so much of either that the species or even the immediate offspring suffers at all. So does a vegan not eat honey?

All of which is well off either agrimony's or flit's posts' subjects; but they're just the thoughts I thought in tangent.

Comments

[ambar.livejournal.com]

If you were closer, I'd loan you my copies of Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites and Laurel's Kitchen, both of which are vegan-friendly mostly-vegetarian books (I say 'mostly' because the Moosewood book includes some fish.)

As for whether honey is okay by your niece, why not ask her?

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Yay! Moosewood! I have that. I may just buy Laurel's Kitchen, then from Amazon or something. And maybe give both books to my niece after her visit is over. She's mildly stymied as well with some of the food things she's discovering she can't have, like ice cream and pizza with cheese. It would be fun to figure out stuff together while she's here.

As for the honey question, it was mostly a philisophical question rather than a specific question. I will definitely ask her about it, too, for practical food considerations, but I did wonder if, in general, folks who classify themselves as vegan eat honey or not.

Ooo... quick and *easy* Moosewood!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I found a quick and easy Moosewood restaurant cookbook written by the same people! That should be much easier to use on the whole, and it'll be more practical for what I want to do with it, which is more the everyday kind of eating when I don't have the time between the baby and what it takes to actually get fresh things. And I did get Laurel's Kitchen as well. Yay!

Re: Ooo... quick and *easy* Moosewood!

[ambar.livejournal.com]

I read the review on Amazon, and it does look very nice. It's funny, most of my cookbook collection is vegetarian-oriented, even though I haven't been a vegetarian since, oh, three days or so in Girl Scout camp when I was ten. :-) It comes from living in shared households, I guess, where the lowest common denominator of "what everyone can eat" was lacto-ovo-vegetarian. But now I only use them very rarely for inspiration (so much is grain-based). I've actually been finding more excitement in The Joy of Cooking. :-) And I don't even read Laurel's Kitchen's Bread Book; it'll just make me wistful to no good purpose.

As for honey, I gather that some vegans choose to avoid it, and some don't, for pretty much the philosophical reasons you state (bees aren't killed to produce honey). Don't know which position is "more accepted".

Bread without dairy

[elflet.livejournal.com]

While eggs and milk add lovely texture & keeping propertes to bread, you could also try sourdough. The big rounds of Pain au Levan sold in Paris will keep for nearly a week. You just slice off bread as needed.

I don't know your weather -- it's been a tad too warm here -- but if you have a spot that will stay around 80f for a few days, you can make a starter easily enough.

Re: Bread without dairy

[liralen.livejournal.com]

My favorite sourdough site is Sourdough International (http://www.sourdo.com/). They have a clean dozen plus cultures of really old, some even antique, sourdough strains. I used to have a Yukon and a Russian culture, both of which are gone or eaten by molds, so I should probably get another culture. I really like the ones with the real acidic cultures and the symbiosis between the wild yeast culture and the acidic bacteria.

I just hadn't really though, before, of the actual keeping quality of a good sourdough. I should remember that. Thanks!

Re: Bread without dairy

[elflet.livejournal.com]

Isn't it fun to play with new starters? There's only one problem -- a unique starter doesn't remin unique.

It happens that I studied sourdough with one of the top masters, and he did a little experiment. He began with three starters -- one purchased, one from a commercial baker, and one he made from scratch. After 30 days of feeding (and he knew enough not to cross-breed them), they were identical.

I replicated his result with starters begun at different locations. They were unique at first, and remained so for a couple of weeks.

Think of starter as an ecology. With every feeding, you're adding fresh yeasts and bacteria, and a particular set of nutrients. Some organisms will thrive while others will die. it doesn't take long for a handful of organisms to predominate, and once they've taken over it's all over.

The thing is, you're almost certainly not using the same water and flour as the original starter, so the ecology _will_ shift over time. I don't know if anybody ever tried with sterilized flour, but the changes in temperature, hydroation, etc. would still cause the balance to shift over time.