I don’t find most of those vegan meals nearly as delicious as most of the vegetarian dishes in the same cultures. The versions that contain eggs or dairy are usually more delicious.
Absolutely, but it depends on if you have access to a goat or a sheep much less a cow, hopefully chickens or ducks.
That sounds delicious. How do you change the recipe?
Coincidentally, I made this over the weekend. I think it tastes even better with limes Instead of lemons. otherwise I don’t change a thing,except using freshly ground cumin
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I don’t understand. Is there a vegan full fat sour cream? I should probably keep reading.
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Your version of the NYT Red Lentil Soup With Lemon sounds scrumptious. I can virtually taste the fresh cumin + lime you suggest. Yum.
I have some cumin-forward ras al hanout spice blend (from Sofra, for Boston peeps) that I used in place of the cumin. Instead of the recipe’s cayenne/chile powder, I swap in a hot red pepper puree called shatta (Ziyad brand) from a jar that I need to use up. I use as much of the pepper purée as suits my mood.
Pics of the swapped-in ingredients follow.
Ras al (el?) hanout. This particular blend is red and fragrant with cumin. I think the cumin flavor is important for this soup.
Hot pepper purée.
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Linking the recent vegetarian / meatless thread here (as OP seems to have lobbed one out and disappeared).
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We had a couple of meatless days a week when I was a kid (60s) driven by finances. I wasn’t impressed, but then my mother’s cooking wasn’t very impressive regardless.
Much as I enjoy a really good steak from time to time we’re really not red meat people. Chicken, fish, pork in small amounts. For me entirely veg seems like a stretch. The heavily processed meat substitutes are awful. What is red beans and rice without andouille sausage? Sure there are some great veg dishes: confit byaldi, bean enchiladas, minestrone, some Thai curries, stuffed portobello mushrooms, shakshuka, … in my opinion these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
We (big we) have evolved as omnivores. Giving up meat strikes me as running counter to both nature and science. As John @Harters pointed out many of the animals we eat would not exist at all where it not for our food chain. Where are the foundational ethics?
First person to bring up either quinoa or intestinal gases gets keel-hauled. I have two trips coming up so your choice of New Bern to Solomons or DC to Connecticut.
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That’s hyperbolic, for sure, but there are definitely some vegan foods I’m crazy about (although it’s hard to draw a bright line between “food” and “ingredient,” and a lot of ingredients are obviously vegan). I love boiled peanuts, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi (anything fermented, really), cold sesame noodles, hummus, falafel, babaganoush, refried beans, guacamole, borscht, fried yucca, fried potatoes, the “duck” noodle soup at Very Fresh Noodles, the lions head "meat"balls at Tang Tang on 3rd Ave (o.b.m.), the vegan ramen at Ippudo, and on and on and on.
I’m not a vegan (I’m too fond of eggs, cheese and fish), but I don’t like meat, so I’m obviously not in the “bacon/sausage/a little meat makes anything better” camp. And it seems to me that people who dismiss vegan diets are actually just dismissing people who follow vegan diets. I have vivid memories of a former CH poster who never missed the opportunity to chime in on any thread that mentioned vegan food - even in passing - to yuk it up about “level five vegans” who won’t eat anything that casts a shadow. High-larious.
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I’ll recognize I can be dismissive on the issue. More than just being dismissive, I push back. It isn’t the food, or even the people per se. It is the behaviors. For 0.4% of the population some vegans make a heck of a lot of judgmental noise about being vegan, look down their noses at people who aren’t, and use a disproportionate amount of (metaphorical) oxygen. THAT behavior is what I push back against.
The OP’s post here is a good example. Judgment and unsubstantiated opinion presented as fact. At the risk of irritating a whole new group of people that post and the behaviors it represents are every bit as anti-science and anti-intellectual as denying climate change. So I push back.
Let’s look:
A vegan lifestyle is compatible with the highest levels of health and fitness,
Incomplete, neglects the requirement for vitamin and mineral supplements and ignores any potential performance difference between one person eating traditionally and that same person on a vegan diet.
protects huge numbers of animals,
This goes directly to John’s (@Harters) insight that without markets most of those animals would not exist at all. One can make a good case that wild caught animals such as fish and whales are protected although fish are harvested for agriculture (fertilizer) and fish and whales for a wide range of products.
and is a potent way to combat climate change.
Going to need footnotes here. The intestinal gas argument is a poor one and does not consider the huge amount of fuel used and therefore emissions generated in plant agriculture and of course transportation of higher volume, lower density food product.
Plus, the food is insanely delicious and it becomes more widely available every year.
Opinion presented as fact and a specious argument given that produce is inherently vegan.
It appears to me, personally, that especially with regard to climate change that if one accepts human impact the straightforward answer is to reduce the number of people. Unfortunately population control, usually reproduction control, generates a visceral reaction from some people who become very loud. I commend the movie “Idiocracy” for consideration; it’s entertainment but has some foreboding subtexts.
Now what other subject can I draw in to irritate some other constituency? grin
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I had been generally with you up to this point and I diverge at “Unfortunately”. Enforced human reproduction control has a bad record, not least in its use by totalitarian regimes. By the by, eugenics is an entirely current issue of discussion in the UK, causing the effective sacking of a newly appointed advisor to the prime minister
Eugenics is a subset of population control. All eugenics is population control but not all population control is eugenics.
I said “unfortunately” because I believe a civil discourse should be possible even on sensitive issues. We can all make the world a better place by being decent to one another even when we disagree. In my opinion, such discourse should have the goal of understanding vice convincing someone of our own views.
Practice makes perfect my dear Aunt would say.
Relevant article on Slashdot (/.). This is a tech forum. Score numbers are a complex member moderation. https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/02/22/026258/how-artificial-shrimps-could-change-the-world
What I found most interesting is that clearing land has the biggest impact on the environment. That would suggest that clearing land for pasturing animals is not better than clearing land for plant agriculture.
The fact that cats are obligate carnivores means that even vegans would have to participate in the meat industry (or not have pets, which is more vegan in terms of lifestyle). So in that case, they wouldn’t just smother us but eat us as well.
Dogs can get by.
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Oof. That makes my eyes roll so hard it’s just made my headache even worse. Idiocy does that.
Your cat will eat your face.
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We came to adopt a dog later in our adult years—the first by necessity, then her successor by choice—so I was surprised to discover that both love(d) carbs as their treat of first preference. This second dog is also crazy for veg and fruit as treats. If I leave a cut melon or tomato on the counter unwatched, I do so at my own risk. 
Not nearly as enthusiastic about red meat. Was I ever surprised.
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