another foray into cooking vegan on purpose

My friends K&M are coming over tonight and I'm cooking vegan for them again! This time I'm making burritos. Mmmm.

I got clever. I had been thinking refried beans and rice as the main "meat" of the burrito. But then genius struck when I was picking up the tortillas. I looked up, saw "tofurkey" and then realized, "Hey, I could get some of the gimme lean "meat", grab a package of taco seasoning and voila! have fake taco meat!"

This makes me happy because it'll make my friends happy. Cooking is love.

I've been intimidated about cooking vegan for my friends. Vegetarian I've got no problems, been there, done that. But I realized I'd never cooked vegan (on purpose) until K&M went vegan. I have vegan friends out West, but I'd never cooked for them. Anyway, the first time I cooked for K&M and K asked if I wanted to borrow any ingredients from her that I'd never cooked with before (e.g. nutritional yeast, vegan margarine) or planned on keeping on hand, that made it easier and less intimidating. I hadn't thought of _asking_ if I could borrow something from her. Duh. So, my advice to those of you who are meat eaters and would like to cook for your vegan friends: give it a try, remember that you can borrow ingredients from them and most importantly: ask them questions about ingredients. There's no reason not to capitalize on their research and knowledge.

Note: In no way do I feel that my friends are pressuring me to go vegan (nor do I have any desire to go vegan). Honoring what our friends decide to eat or if they have food allergies are the same in my book (which is why I'm willing to cook vegan or vegetarian or pescotarian or meatarian or without nuts or shrimp or....). Some people say, "Well, vegan is a choice and an allergy isn't." And you're right. I'm not going to argue that. I just don't feel it's a big deal to honor my friends choices. We all have friends with religious and other beliefs that are different from ours, should we exclude them from our lives? No.

p.s. Hopefully this will be the last time I make a big deal out of cooking vegan (cause it really isn't). Just some random thoughts going through my mind.

Posted by jennj at February 6, 2007 12:35 PM