Strawberry Limeade Créme Brûlée

Yes, it sounds absurd, but you see I had a lot of strawberries and a lot of limes and my idiot brain is prone to run with hair-brained schemes.

As a cap-off to yesterday's Mother's Day spread (Steak Ducasse, thyme potatoes, haricot vert, baguettes, and red pepper pesto) I knew I would be making Créme Brûlée for dessert. Now, I'm not much of a dessert guy, so when I decide I'm even gonna bother, it's a moment of terror.

I've made Créme Brûlée before, so I know it's something I can do, but I didn't want to re-hash the same flavor. To top that off, we did get some very good fresh strawberries from Grow Alabama, and I had a general idea to top them on top of the sugar crust.

But...Créme Brûlée & berries alone is so played. It's the generic presentation. While there's something to be said of simplicity, I wanted to try it different than I've had it a million times over. That's when I remembered the limes we bought to make sparkling limeades (lime juice, carbonated water, sugar, mmmm), and I realized we had a ton left. Since both my wife and my mom are huge fans of Sonic's strawberry limeade drinks, it seemed like a sure thing. Most of this crap is a copy-paste with tweaks from my previous Créme Brûlée, so whatevs

• 5 egg yolks
• 3/4 quart heavy cream
• 1/2 cup sugar + more for the top + more for macerating strawberries
  
• zest of two limes
• juice of two limes
  
• 1 vanilla bean
• About 6 strawberries, sliced
  

Begin by splitting and scraping your vanilla bean. You can do this with a good pointed knife by jamming it in the middle and pulling on it until it unzips, then turning it around to fully split it. Once split, scrape out the tarry inside of the bean.

Combine the bean and scrapings with heavy cream in your sauce pot. Bring this just to the threshold of a boi and remove from the heat. Cover and let cool completely. Remove the bean and discard. Whisk in the eggs and sugar, and add your lime zest to the cream.

Preheat the oven to 325. Get 4-6 ramekins and fill them with the cream. Put into a casserole dish and add hot water until it reaches halfway up the ramekin sides. Cover with foil. Bake for about 50 minutes or so, or until just barely set.

Cover and refrigerate a few hours, or up to a couple of days. About 30 minutes prior to eating, remove from the fridge. Dust enough sugar on the top to coat evenly. Using a blowtorch (you do have one, right? Get one!) start running the tip of the cone of blue flame around the surface of the ramekin. Turn as you apply heat. Avoid buring sugar. Keep your flame moving and your sugar moving. Work outside in.

When you're done, you should have a nice sheen of caramel-colored sugar armor on top of your custard.

From here, add sugar to the lime juice until it's fairly thick, then add your strawberry slices. This is called maceration. By putting your fruit into a very sugary mix, you will both soften the strawberries and also leach some of the strawberry juice into the sugar-lime syrup.

Last thing to do is to spoon some syrupy strawberry slices on top:


This was an awesome idea. The lime zest in the custard meets the lime juice on top and the strawberries and the acid punches through the fat in the custard. Feels very light.

It was a great end to the Mother's Day lunch. Mom loved it, and after that, we sat around enjoying some french pressed coffee and listened as my wife played some tunes on the piano. Happy Mother's Day, mom.

Steak, the Ducasse way

I've been eating a lot of steak lately.

Mind you, this isn't a backlash to my Lent days. You see, I'm on a mission to understand steak. I mean, I think most guys get the whole primal 'piece of meat, insert on grill here' thing. And yeah, that does produce a tasty steak when you're not using a crappy cut, cooked to medium or worse, and drowned in "steak sauce" (blech). But isn't there something else out there, man?

If you've been paying attention, you've seen the signs. I fiddled around with cast iron searing for those nice ribbon-thin italian steak salads (arugula mandatory, y'all). I've scourged my soul against the bottom of the barrel of French depravity with steak au poivre, and still I want more.

Enter Alain Ducasse, some French guy who cooks and apparently also likes steaks. Being French, he overcame his first instinct to surrender to the daunting challenge, and instead opted for the second instinct, which is to drown the hell out of a random thing with butter. Ahhh....buerre! Look, nobody said steak was a staple. If it's a staple for you, you're probably gonna die. Enjoy it as a treat, because it is a treat. And when you do, be EVIL. Seriously.

What Monsieur Ducasse does is two-fold. First off, hot fat (butter, also rendered beef fat) is a transport mechanism for flavor. You ever see those premium-priced flavor-infused olive oils? Well you're paying a premium for non extra-virgin oil that's basically heated with whatever it wants to taste like chucked into it. In that same respect, by adding aromatics and herbs into a pan with hot fat and cooking on a medium-low clip, you can pull the flavors out of those things into your delicious fat, which is...


...then basted over a steak in cast iron, cooking over a fairly low temperature. Why low? Doesn't this go against everything good and sacred in the Tome of Steak? Well...not really. For a thin steak (like, say, hanger steak), yes you want very very hot temperature on your grill, pan or whatever. That's because you want to spend as little time inducing the Maillard Reaction as possible.

Pause for a moment. Go up, click that link. The ideal crust for a steak is BROWN. Black is burnt. Black is carbon. Black is coal. You have gone too far. Unless you're a bad kid around Christmas, I don't imagine you have plans on eating coal, so STOP doing this to steak you spend your hard-earned money on, capice? There are grill-stripe fetishists out there and I guess y'all can toe the line if you must, but please don't overdo that stuff. Dry your steak off as completely as you can, season with salt and pepper, and you'll find that crust is easy to get, and you'll never look back.

Anyways, sorry for the segue. The gist is that brown is good, and makes us all happy campers. If you're keen on living on the wide open ranges of Flavor Country, you'll also want a little moo in your steak. I fully admit I used to be a medium to medium-well guy. I also fully admit I used to un-ironically listen to Chumbawamba. Bad choices only become mistakes if you don't learn from them, so I fully own up to being human. If you're an overdone steak afficionado and you're reading this, I've probably offended you. I'm not going to apologize for that, but I'm not going to prosthelytize either. You'll either try a little strange or you won't. I will tell you that if you're one of those weirdos, I've got to absolutely adore you as a friend or you've got to be a blood relative for me to overcook a steak for you. And even then, it kills me to do it these days.

So, let's assume here that we're all fans of that range between rare to medium-rare. To get that, and to get the Maillard crust, a thin steak has to be seared off fast, and is essentially over and done in maybe three or four minutes. I recommend even using it straight from the fridge so you've still got a bit of pent up chill for a cool center. For example, here's how my hanger steak turns out using that method:


Note both crust and center. That's about as money as it gets.

Now for a steak in the Ducasse style, we're basting the steak in that tasty flavored butter, right? Well to get the most flavor into that steak, we cook slow. We also do that so that we can cook a very thick steak and not have the outside a blackened mess and the inside still cold and raw (not to be confused with rare, y'all). I found most of my success to be with New York Strips. Here's the kicker, I would shoot for a cut that's two inches thick AT MINIMUM. This seems like madness, doesn't it? Well, at that thickness, I consider a cut of strip can be split to feed two people. Instead of imagining steak as some plate-covering thing, think of it instead as a fist of meat. Equal x, y, and z dimensions give or take. I highly recommend you get chatty with your local butcher if you can. Don't trust any place that just has meat out in shrink-wrapped packages and nobody to talk to. Talk to a butcher. Tell them you want some cow cut up the way you like it. That's why they're there.

With the steak being thick like that, you'll also want to bring it closer to room temp. How close is up to you. I've brought a steak all the way up to room temp and it was a bit too done through for my liking. I usually let it out of the fridge for an hour as a guess. The great thing about NY strips is that they also have this substantial strap of fat running along the back. After you rub both sides with salt and pepper, you can heat a dry cast iron pan and rest the steak on its side. This renders the fat off that strap and into your pan, so it contributes to your baste.

Once you slap a side down, DO NOT move it. Moving a steak, lifting it up to see "is it done yet?" is a great way to make sure you never get a crust at all. Busy your idle hands by putting herbs and aromatics into your skillet, then tabs of butter until you've got a liquid you can collect with a tilt of the pan, and can spoon over the top. Keep the steak where it is. If you must check on it, give the steak a prod on top. As a steak cooks, it will "tense up" a bit. Raw steak does not recover from a prod. As it cooks, it gradually gets more resilient. I'm loathe to throw out a real number of minutes to expect, but at a low gas setting on my burner, I usually keep a steak on each side for about ten minutes. Don't let this numerical estimate betray your instincts. Imagine I'm Ben Kenobi and you're Luke Skywalker, and there is a Steak Force. Use it.

Once you flip and repeat, all the while basting, you'll eventually be done with the task. I rest my steak on a cooling rack over a plate. Don't tuck into it immediately. I recommend resting it for about ten minutes after cooking to redistribute the juices inside. If you are a greedy pig and eat it piping hot, you'll leak all of the flavorful juice all over your plate and the rest will be a bit dry. The time it takes to rest will make for a better steak, trust me.

Something else to consider is that if you're like me and add shallots to your pan to flavor your butter (for mine, I ideally use rosemary, thyme, garlic, and shallots), you might be able to reserve a few of the now french-fried shallot rings as a tasty topper for your steak. I highly recommend it.


Here's a good idea of the finished product.


I made this one for my mom yesterday for Mother's Day, and it's a pretty solid medium rare. I'm happiest at the threshold between med-rare and rare, but it takes a bit of nuance to get consistency. If you've got a digital thermometer, you may want to consider catching a reading to see what is ideal, and then get used to the tell-tale signs of when you get there.

At any rate, I would highly recommend trying this method. It makes for one of the best steaks I've ever eaten.

Spring Potluck

Last week, we had the first of what I hope to be many season-oriented potlucks at my house. It was really awesome to have friends come over, bring either food or booze or both, and spend a night chatting about everything and nothing over some food and drink. The weather cooperated about as well as you can expect it to in Alabama; which is to say, it didn't rain but it was about 200% humidity all weekend and looked at any moment as if a hurricane would drop out of the sky. Nevermind, we mainly stayed indoors, but under the light of tiki torches my wife played grillardin and worked both of our grills to put out a never-ending flow of kebabs for hungry folks.

She also made me these delicious stinky sardines!


These ginormous Portugese sardines own incredibly hard. I gutted them and cleaned them, then marinated them in some sherry vinegar, olive oil, thyme, and salt & pepper, and the wife grilled 'em whole. Good in a focaccia sandwich with some aioli, or equally good to yank the head off on the spot and eat it with your hands, like a bear.

I spent a good chunk of the party being the fry slinger, which actually works because my station behind the kitchen island gives me clear view of the dining area and the living room so I can chit-chat, drink, and fry whatever I please. Mainly for this evening, it was Spanish Calamares.


Calamares are awesome, but I firmly believe you can't get a good batch at a restaurant because they use wheat flour batter and fry at too low a temp. By the time their batter's set, the squid inside is tough. Instead, my batter is based on rice flour, I ramp the fry temp to the max, and those things stay in oil for 45 seconds to a minute, TOPS. The result is a completely crisp batter coating that isn't too thick and obnoxious, and the meat inside is so tender you can cut it with the flat of your fork. That's perfect. I'm normally not a guy that plays in absolutes but I'd put my calamari against anyone's, and I expect to win. Especially with the pesto I made, which is from roasted red peppers.

I made other stuff too. You have to bear with me, it's all a blur at this point. It was mostly a tapas sort of thing. We had spanish almonds, chorizo & mushrooms in a red wine sauce, some chorizo empanadillas, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, hommous, pita bread, rosemary focaccia, etc. We also had tacos de lengua and chicken qandahari on deck, but it was plenty clear that by that time, we had no need to serve them. Our guests also came in full force, bringing tons of fantastic stuff. Lots of Leinenkeugel beer, Jefferson whisky, a fantastic fresh fruit parfait, and a Three Philosopher's beer cheese soup.

That being said, the food's only part of it. Here's the reason I love these events:



Spending hours upon hours with nothing on the agenda but hanging out, chatting about everything and nothing, and having a great time. Thanks once again to all our friends for coming out, and I hope that we can get our act together for another round of fun in the summer!

The end of Lent, lessons learned, and a few pictures along the way

This post's been a long time coming, and I'm sorry to keep y'all waiting. Just been gripped by a case of lazy, and been busy doing other stuff.

The long story short - I survived Lent. It was easy. VERY easy. I went through 40 days of vegan eating with variety, imagination, and ease of transition. I won't say I didn't have cravings for omnivore food, but they were fleeting and easily put off. To be honest, I was more interested in thinking of ways to use my local produce in the next night's meal than to worry about pining over chicken livers or a good steak. Not that I don't like those sorts of things, but it wasn't causing me any undue distraction.

It was interesting to see it from the other side. Though I've never really agreed personally with the reasons most undertake vegan living, I certainly empathize with them and respect them for being very personal moral doctrines. I've already talked before about the sort of weird tendency of society at large to feel the urge to evangelize vegans back into the fold, so to speak. I got plenty of that from friends and relations. A lot of it comes from simple misunderstandings, and a lot of it comes from folks who grew up as kids who hated their veggies served by parents who maybe didn't know how to make them appealing.

The best thing about my vegan experience, and one that I would suggest the whole experience is certainly worth, is learning how to color pictures using the crayons in the box you may not use as often. Let's face it, America's a pretty red meat reality. Most folks aren't just omnivorous, but they're also pretty plain about it. My origins are actually pretty laughably sad, because I used to be a very picky eater if that can be believed. It all changed once I reached college, but some folks just don't break out of the mold easily. It's one thing to learn that veggies can be tasty, but another thing to just fully take the plunge. Having almost all of my food delivered by my local CSA helped a lot. Before this, I had only the most passing and vague idea of what it was to eat by the seasons. Now, it's in my blood. Right now I can feel it inside me, this weird ticking clock that KNOWS when tomatoes are going to go from being milquetoast abominations into being orbs of the most amazing flavor (June in case you're wondering) Eating by the seasons made me appreciate the seasons more. Of course the irony here is that Lent is positioned squarely in the midst of the waning winter, so it was creative, shall we say, to celebrate that in food. Still, one day I remember busting whole turnips with the greens into a south Indian-inspired dish that only existed in my head. It felt good. It felt sexy. There's a bit of pride in knowing that you can be a part of that celebration.

So that's a lot of rambling for me to basically tell you obvious things. Eating a vegan diet for Lent makes you a much better connoisseur of vegetables, I think. Shocking stuff huh? When you start eyeballing a sack of collard greens the way some folks eye a steak, you start to commit your perverse imagination to bringing about the types of things that you otherwise would treat as an afterthought. An accompaniment. A side dish. It's that sort of thinking that makes me respect vegans who keep it real. There's honest food to be made for a vegan diet. I've made it. I've eaten it, and it's good. Is this my clarion call for you to abandon yon omnivorous habits and take up ascetic living? Naw. But I'm confident that not only does eating vegan give you a full perspective for all sorts of cooking, but it also has legitimacy in and of itself.

As for how the fast ended, let me go ahead and say that I caught an itch for sushi in my final 48 hours and made plans to debauch myself. Easter Sunday I had a fantastic multi-course sushi romp, which I enjoyed every minute of. I didn't feel liberated or rescued, it was just something different and appreciated, sort of like the change of seasons. Kind of fitting I think.

I'm sure that some of y'all are "blah blah too long didn't read where are pictures." I realize I had a few snaps I never posted, so here's a brief gallery of other vegan eats I had during Lent:


Sweet potato & roasted red pepper flautas with avocado, cilantro, onion, and salsa verde


A vaguely-Japanese udon noodle bowl with broccoli, marinaded tofu, carrots, green onions, shitake mushrooms, and cabbage.


This one was amazing. The soup is called Sopa de Grao com Espinafres, which is basically chicpea & spinach soup. Extremely rib-sticking and rustic food from Portugal. The bread, also Portugese, is a demi-cornbread called Broa.


I cheated and got an out-of-season tomato because I wanted to make taboulleh, which is an arabic salad made with bulgur wheat, tomatoes, parsley, herbs, and served in a romaine lettuce leaf. Funny, I could resist meat and animal byproducts, but I got my pride crushed by an out-of-season tomato from Mexico that honestly was only average. Still, the itch was scratched.

Redneck hommous

In a fit of mad science, I decided to make a "hommous" using traditional southern cuisine ingredients. It sounds bizarre, but if you think about it, it should work! I tweaked a little past this video (added citric acid to improve the acidity). It's not as pretty a color as traditional stuff, and black eyed peas don't quite spin as smoothly, but it's not a bad variation!



Here's the finished product, topped with some paprika and served, in true redneck fashion, with saltine crackers.

So how's your diet going?

This is the number one inquiry into my vegan experiment, and it's interesting to think about it. Most folks think of vegetarian and vegan food as super-prim rabbit food. From the examples given in most pop culture, I can't blame folks. What is it again? Tofu, bean sprouts, lettuce lettuce lettuce?

Heh.

So when folks asking how my diet's going, I point to my pretty substantial middle and arch an eyebrow.

"How do you think it's going?"

I eat gooood. Probably "too good" heh. Vegan sure as hell don't mean diet, I can help you go ahead and dispel that rumor. So I figure I might as well go ahead and offset some of that by getting my workout routine back on schedule. Did a good 2 1/2 mile run tonight, which was fun to do while playing with Juno and watching the news. Hope to make it a habit again now that the weather's turning nice.

In the meantime, maybe I should eat more taboulleh and less falafel. Yeeeaaaah....

At least this way I can afford the occasional bit of evil I dish up.

Welp, I'm farming for reals now

I've gone ahead and done it now.

To the tune of about 80 bucks, I've gone ahead and stuck myself into the farming racket, and purchased my first batch of seeds for the season. Mind you, I've got a nice half acre of land I can turn into veggies if I'm lucky, so hopefully this will be a fruitful (lol) endeavor.

The trick now is to stick to this. I've pretty much done the easy part. What I now need to do is to get a tractor or a tiller and tear up the earth good and proper the first time (should be easier after that!) go ahead and work in some composted manure and other nice stuff, then get a UV lamp to sprout some of the little babies as I grow 'em in bathroom cups. I'm trying to not overextend myself with growing too much stuff that I may not be able to control. Arugula, broccoli, some tomatoes, peppers, herbs, a few beans, corn, butternut squash, some kale. I'm getting okra from a friend, so that'll get put in as well. There's also the possibility something else might tickle my fancy and I might want to plant other stuff. I want to start small, but larger than last year.

Now to find a benevolent soul who can let me drive their John Deere on my property for a day.

I'd sneak into the Gaza Strip for a good Falafel...

...fortunately, I don't have to.

Falafel's one of those things you don't realize it's potential until you have a good one, and then you spend an eternity wallowing in inferior ones, cursing the world that you can't find a good one anymore. At least, that's how it is for me. I had the luxury a few years ago of having a really good restaurant near my office that made what I still consider to be the best falafel in Birmingham. They were a little unconventional, as they were patties instead of the round hush-puppy-esque balls most places serve. The flavor was fantastic, but what really made the falafel an experience was the texture. I believe the shop owner fried em up in a cast iron skillet, because the mouthfeel was almost exactly like a good piece of good southern sage sausage. That perfectly crispy, yet fork-tender outside that yielded into a substantial, very moist, yet meaty interior. It was light years beyond the usual Lebanese stuff to be found in town, which had a sort of shapeless soft texture that reminded me more of dry cornbread stuffing than anything.

I was content to rest on my laurels and eat there pretty much forever, and then the shop closed. It broke my heart. I haven't been that upset about a restaurant shuttering in effectively ever. It wasn't just the falafel, which alone was worth every meal. Their baba ghannouj was the richest, their maamoul made me never want for a fig newton ever again, and I probably shouldn't talk about the electric-purple pickled turnip straws in their salads and shawarma plates, lest I get kind of emotional. Suffice to say, best pickled anything. Ever. Nevermind that the place had a hookah (and the same three dudes were always out front puffing on it, just chilling out) and had a market in the back where you could buy everything from spices to turkish delight to tea sets, but to make it even better, the proprietor was a big Alabama fan. I could go in there and BS about cooking, BS about the Tide, and enjoy every moment of it.

I tried to replicate the magic for years and the results were hit and miss. My falafels would fall apart. I'd try to dredge in some rice flour to crisp them up, which resulted in a hard outside and a fairly under-done inside. It was still better than chain falafel, but man, it was nothing like the good stuff. I began looking for volunteer slots in UNICEF to see if I could go on sabbatical doing humanitarian work that would be paid in falafel. I was that desperate.

Fortunately, I struck gold, pretty much because I was randomly looking for a recipe to try. I yanked this recipe from Chow Vegan, which is actually a baked falafel. I tweaked it a little bit because I wanted it fried (basically removed the baking powder, lemon juice, and oil) let each batch rip in 320 degree oil for about nine minutes. The results weren't as good as the best falafel I've ever had, but they're so close that I can curb my nostalgia a little bit. The bits of onion carmelize into that deeply bittersweet flavor, and the little bits of un-smashed chicpea get very nutty and provide a great difference in texture to the rest of the falafel. I crammed those into some homemade pita breads with some spinach, plum tomatoes, and diced purple onion, then spooned some dill hommous over it. I realize it's a bit of a weird move, hommous on falafel. Chicpea dip meets chicpea croquette, but seeing as tzatziki isn't vegan, it's perfectly passable, and more to the point, tastes good.

So while I eat this complete badass of a pita, I'm pouring out a little cardamom chai on the ground for my departed homie, and while it still sucks that the restaurant is gone, I'm at least able to make a falafel that I know can throttle anything else in town I've tasted.

Poppadoms!

Boom, headshot!

Now that I have your attention. Looks good, huh? We all like crackery things we can dip into tasty stuff, eh?

Poppadoms, my friends, are the cure to your itch. Whether it's smearing some leftover curry on top, or dunking into a chutney, it's one of those awesome little snacks that I've eaten plenty of, but never made until now.

I even made a few videos to help you do the same:





Now, this is more of a snack thing than a meal accompaniment thing, but I was really hungry yesterday and I needed to make actual food, so how about a tofu mattar recipe as well? This is vegan-ized paneer mattar, but paneer and tofu are so similar to each other that it doesn't really matter to be honest.

Here's your meez for making tofu mattar:

• 1 pound tofu, cubed
• 1 cup sweet green peas
  
• 1 onion, finely diced
• about a cup of tomato puree
• about 7 ounces of coconut milk
• 1 tbsp canola oil
• 1 tbsp cumin seeds
• 1 tbsp dried chili flakes
  
• 1 tbsp coriander seeds, crushed
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp turmeric
  
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• handful of cilantro, chopped, for garnish
• basmati rice, for accompaniment

It's a song and dance you probably know by now if you've followed my recipes. Heat your oil to near-smoking in a pot, toss in cumin, let it pop, then coriander, then turmeric, garam masala, chili flakes, pepper, onions, and salt in rapid succession while taking the pot off the heat to stir. Drop heat to low, cover, sweat for 10-15 minutes.

Add your coconut milk and tomato puree. Now I left the measurements approximate here because you kind of want to add and combine until you get to an orange color. Add, stir, and taste. You want just enough coconut milk to not make the sauce overly tangy, but not enough to make it just completely coconutty. Err on the side of more tomato to coconut. Take the pot off the heat and onto a trivet, and either blend with a wand blender or transfer to a food processor and whiz up until it's a uniformly thick liquid. Return to the pot if you took it out, add your peas and tofu, then let the pot ride on low heat while covered for at least 15 minutes. I let mine go for a while and everything generally comes together nicely.

From here, serve with the basmati rice, chop up some cilantro and sprinkle some on top, and it's food. And since I was starving, go ahead and add on the poppadoms and chutney too. And if you're really wanting to seal the deal, crack open a bottle of IPA and be in pure bliss.

Three weeks in

Hey guys, sorry about the lapse between posting. I promise I've been cooking fun things and enjoying the hell out of them, just haven't quite gotten to the point of posting anything substantial. Maybe this weekend will be the time.

I just by happenstance managed to check today's date, and realized it's three weeks into Lent. That makes twenty-one days of me on the vegan kick. How's it been? Pretty damn easy for the most part. The closest I've been tempted was maybe two days in when somebody had some good southern fried chicken livers. I thought "hey, I want one!" then immediately "naaaahhhh".

I'm not going to become one of those new-age health promoters. Going vegan hasn't added years to my life, made me rich and powerful, or taught me how to fly. I feel pretty good, but that's also because I'm not eating as much convenience foods as anything else. Probably the best thing I've been doing is eating plenty of fruit, which keeps me full of energy, and I only need one cup of coffee a day, instead of tapping an IV to the bean like I'd been doing before.

To be honest, I eat about like I ate before, minus a few frivolities that I usually reserved for the weekend anyway. I'm still a curry fiend of the like that puts Dave Lister to shame. It's just convenient that it takes zero effort to make vegan curry. I'm also getting through the backlog of a few slow-mover items that come in my CSA, so anything that gets us to finish our portions is always a good thing.

It's been fun to put myself into a lifestyle I haven't experienced before. I've found a lot of things that I expected to see, namely a lot of people not understanding/fearing veganism, and the really bizarre tendency of folks to blatently prosthelytize their eating habits to me. I could probably go out tomorrow and say I'm a member of the Church of Satan and have less people come rushing up to me to steer me on the path of their choosing. Mind you, I've seen the cheerleaders for vegans like everybody else. When your best known white knights are PETA and Moby, I guess it sort of makes credibility something you have to cook yourself at home.

Restaurants have been pretty chill for the most part. As long as you're not a dick, it's easy to ask people "Hey, does this thing have any animal products in it?" Whenever I do eat out in the first place, it's at places they generally care enough about their food to be able to tell me. Going to Flip burger boutique and getting a fauxlafel burger, they made sure to avoid both the butter on the bun as well as the feta, which I subbed out with artisanal ketchup anyway (Their rutabaga fries, by the by, are ridiculous and you should eat them if you get the chance). The key is don't be a dick, but this is sort of the golden rule isn't it? I'm from the South, so manners are always a good thing. I find that people respond well to them.

It's still not a game changer y'all. If some people are trying to convert this wayward lamb, don't worry. I still like food of all sorts. But I still think there's wisdom in both walking miles in other peoples' shoes, and learning how to prosper even when doing without.

And, I hate to be all doom prognosticator here, but people who deride vegetarians and vegans need to at least figure this one out: America (and to some extent other first world nations) can not survive without changing the way we eat, and being so dependent on meat as the centerpiece of each meal. I didn't eat much meat before I went vegan. I'll eat it again, sure, but I still won't eat much at all, because the amount we eat on average these days ain't sustainable.