Here are a few recipes. I should explain a little bit about them. If you read the essays available on my vegetarianism page, you will know that my primary reason for being a vegan is ethical. It's not that I don't think that the health aspects of veganism are important, they just aren't the driving force. For this reason, the recipes you find here are not particularly healthful. There are plenty of books and websites devoted to those recipes. The recipes here are the results of my desire to enjoy some of the foods I enjoyed before I became vegetarian and then vegan. There were many foods that I did not have to change, but many recipes needed to be adapted to suit my new dietary restrictions. The recipes on this page are selections from that group. Note that not all of the recipes required substantial changes (sometimes just replacing eggs with (naturally enough) Egg Replacer). I am including some of these just to demonstrate the general idea of adapting recipes, as well as to display recipes that I feel worked out well with the modifications.
A lot of what we eat is Asian food (Chinese, Indian, Korean, Thai, etc.). Western foods (European, Mexican, etc.) seem inherently more difficult to "veganize," mostly because of their heavy dependence on cheese. Most Asian foods, it seems, have only meat that needs to be taken out or replaced. We do enjoy a lot of western foods, and many of the recipes below can be characterized as traditional American fare. The reason you won't find a lot of the Asian food recipes we enjoy here is that they're easier to find in cookbooks, so we didn't need to adapt them. I'm not going to post a whole lot of recipes straight from a cookbook, but I will recommend our two favorite cookbooks. Our favorite is Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking, followed by Nancie McDermott's Real Vegetarian Thai. Both of these have great recipes that are easy to make (once you've acquired some ingredients) and do not sacrifice flavor for the sake of eliminating every possible bit of fat, salt, and calories. Both also discuss vegan variations where appropriate. I'd recommend them both, but if I had to choose, the Jaffrey book has greater breadth and variation.
On to the recipes!
We had a bunch of people over a couple of summers ago to introduce people to the joy of tofu! It was a lot of fun. We tried to prepare tofu in a lot of different ways that seemed to please people we had served it to before, so our guests could get an idea of what good-tasting tofu dishes are like. Most people, it seems, have no real idea of what tofu is like, only its pop-culture reputation. The bash was a huge success, so I made a page with the recipies we used, so people could try them out themselves.
Tofu Bash RecipesVegan breakfast equals fruit or a dry bagel, right? Wrong!
PancakesHere are a few of our favorite main and side dishes
Red Beans and RiceHere are a few we like to make for holiday dinners. We add to these some mashed potatoes, baked butternut squash, canned jellied cranberry sauce (the "ribs" from the can are key), some relish tray items (olives, pickles, etc.), and the Pumpkin Pie recipe below. It's quite a feast!
StuffingAh, dessert. This might be the most difficult area for vegans. Eliminating eggs makes baking pretty difficult at times. We've come up with a few adaptations that work pretty well. Of course, Alice is the dessert queen, so I defer to her in these matters.
Chocolate CakeWe make our own soymilk, to save money and reduce the amount of garbage we generate. I've put together a fairly detailed set of instructions for making soymilk the way I do. Maybe you'll find it useful.
SoymilkQuestions or comments should be directed to