About vegan

No, I am not becoming one, nor do I feel any emotion towards it. I simply love steaks too much.

However, I re-discovered vegan way of cooking recently and I am hugely impressed. Bygone are the days when vegan cooking meant cooking with commercial veganized products. You know what I meant, store-bought egg replacer, vegan spread, vegan cream, vegan cheese, plant based textured proteins, all these things which did not exist in nature. For me, using those commercial "veganized" products for cooking does not mean eating vegan and certainly does not sound healthy when you read the ingredient list. It's a horrible way of ingesting a whole lot of highly processed food and convincing yourself that it's healthy and morally acceptable.

With vegan cooking (or with food in general), I highly agree with what Sarah (from My New Roots) said: if you can't make it at home, don't eat it.

I started to get in touch with vegan cooking from My New Roots. I wasn't looking for vegan or vegetarian cooking specifically. I was simply drawn by Sarah's ability to make every plant based dish look so scrumptious. I feel like I am browsing someone's garden, post after post. Each dish was carefully arranged and expertly created. From Sarah, I learned that cashew cream is an excellent substitute for conventional dairy cream, both in savory dishes and desserts. Don't tell me that you are not drooling over her recent chocolate torte?

Angela from Oh She Glows is another genius in vegan cooking. You have to know the quality of each ingredient very well in order to create vegan food with least/none processed ingredients, such as almond tuna salad, lentil walnut loaf, 7-vegetable cheese soup, chocolate truffle, chocolate fudge, Elvis bars. Wow.

Another trick I learned from those very creative vegan blogs is to thicken almost anything with ground flax seeds (linseeds) or chia seeds. Both seeds upon adding water produce mucilage which becomes gel consistency. It has been used as egg replacer for vegan baking, Chocolate chia pudding, Berry chia pudding, salad dressing. I am in awe.

Finally, do you know what this scallop dish is made of? Don't cheat.

I rest my case.