Vegan Cooking Guide
Vegan cooking is so easy once you know about "veganisation"! Grab a recipe and veganise it with vegan substitutes and voila! A vegan meal which is tasty and can satisfy the most sophisticated taste buds.
I can sum up vegan cooking in one or two sentences: Take any non vegan recipe which doesn't ask for too many eggs - use vegan substitutes in place of the animal derived ingredients - and you can veganise almost any recipe.
But let me explain it in more detail.
Vegan substitutes are easy to find nowadays. One of the secrets to vegan cooking is to find the vegan substitutes you like. Once you have decided which is your favourite vegan cream/milk/chocolate/egg replacer etc, you have it in the bag!
It is extremely easy to veganise dinners which use mince in the recipe, such as moussaka, shepherd pie and spaghetti bolognese. Vegan mince is easy to find at health food stores and some supermarkets. Here are some examples. You can see from the above examples of basic veganised recipes that it is simple to make a recipe vegan so long as it doesn't require too many eggs. Also you're not going to be able to make a veganised version of paella which requires mussells (yet), but you can use vegan prawns and vegan fish to make something very similar. You can even get vegan crabmeat and vegan tuna nowadays. This book details cooking with vegan seafood.
For scrambled "eggs", most vegans substitute eggs for tofu which is mashed up with a sprinkling of turmeric spice. In my opinion, this tastes nothing like scrambled eggs but is delicious all the same. Especially if you have it on toast with a slice of vegan ham, a few mushrooms and a slice of vegan cheese (the ones you can buy in individual plastic wraps made by Toffutti) and a dollop of vegan mayo!
Then we have
soya products.
When you discover how versatile tofu is, you will probably really like it. It is important that you know how to cook this wonder food though (very high in protein and great for weight loss in my opinion) as if you don't, you may never go near it again and I think you will be missing out. I have detailed below how I like my tofu, but you can grill it and have it plain in a salad if you like it that way. You can buy tofu in most supermarkets but you should also try buying it from chinese supermarkets too as you may prefer it that way.
There are many ways to cook tofu but to get you started I am going to tell you how I cook the most easily available supermarket tofu.
I take this out of the plastic packet it comes in and drain the water away. Then I squeeze as much of the water out of the tofu as I can by pressing it between a cloth kitchen towel. I then deep fry it for a few minutes until it's a golden brown colour:
Then I just place the fried tofu in one of my favourite sauces. I then leave this to soak for at least half an hour and most of the time for around 4 or 5 hours so all the sauce flavours seep into the tofu. The photo below is a tofu chilli:
Many supermarkets are labelling their foods as being vegan nowadays so it is easy to choose vegan products to help you along. For example, Ive noticed that some brands of cooking sauces are being labelled as vegan if you just havn't the time to make your own.
Of course, all the healthy food items such as
fruits,
vegetables,
nuts, seeds and grains are all vegan foods too and the recipe/snack choices with these are endless. You can also eat
foods
which you wouldn't normally think of as being vegan too - so whatever your needs are, you do not need to feel deprived.
Leave Vegan Cooking and go to Vegan Food Pyramid
Leave Vegan Cooking and go to Nutrition Guide
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But surely it isn't as simple as that? Well, actually, yes it is.
With all the vegan meat replacement products, it is easy to make lovely and healthy vegan stews. Have with mashed potatoes (soya spread is used in place of butter) or chips, potato wedges or roasties. You can use the vegan meat products to make curries and other dishes, so you do not have to miss out on the "meaty" side of being a vegan.
