Vegan February

This is something like my 15th Vegan February.  I celebrate every year, as a way to shake off my ordinary food habits.  It makes a bit more sense in the NOrthern hemisphere when this is the dregs of wintertime and I would happily wrap myself in a cheese quesadilla to stay warm, but my body is better off fueled by some damn vegetables.

To answer some frequently asked questions:

A. No it isn't for Lent.

A. No, it isn't that hard.  Oreos are vegan, y'all.

A. Yes, or course I miss cheese (but always eggs the most).

A. Yes, there are some recipes and foods that enter into my regular cooking rota for the rest of the year.  Silken tofu chocolate mousse, vegan baking, seitan and tofu in many forms are regulars in my house.

A. Yes, being vegan for one month, even though it is the shortest one, does make me 1/12th better than you, morally.  

j/k, j/k, j/k, food and how we decide to eat is so personal and specific and culture-bound and weird that I try really hard not to judge others and how they choose to fuel themselves.  If we wanna talk about some systemic support by way of corn subsidies and Big Agri then I can beef for days, though.  Pun intended.  

    This color is what happens when you boil pasta in the beet water.  Probably the most colorfully appealing thing I've cooked all year.  Vegan month often has a few really good rainbow vegetable meals, but this was actually one of my last non vegan meals in January.  I needed to use up the large part of a can of shake cheese, really quality Italian stuff, not the stuff in a plastic container.  

Kiwis eat more ice cream per capita than any other country, about 30 L (60 pints) per person, per year.  Some of that ice cream is really dreadful and happily forbidden flavors like the Groovy Gumdrops above.  Wildberry Ambrosia is probably fine, but frozen gummies are never the right texture.  Lookin' at you, Coldstone Creamery gummy bear mix-ins.

I made some funny choices for vegan month, like move out from a place with all vegan communal meals to a place where I must cook for myself.  D'oh!  What timing.  My new place does have a kickass new mural, though, look at this amazing cephalopod.  

The other funny thing I've done is attend not just my first but also my second sausage sizzle.  A sausage sizzle is a Kiwi staple of summertime, and one of the least vegan of all Kiwi traditions*.

The sausage sizzle is humble, unpretentious, and sometimes hosted in the parking lot of the mega hardware store (picture Lowe's, or Home Depot, but the logo is green).  This hardware store offers slots to community organizations like my roller derby league, Dead End Derby for fundraising throughout the summer.  They provide the grill, the tent, even the app through which people can pay, pretty much everything except the meat and buns.  Oh, wait.  Buns are not part of the equation at all.  The classic sausage is served on a slice of white bread folded in half.  The way a hot dog should be eaten if you have not planned ahead and have run out of buns, or discovered that your buns have turned into stale, inedible bread shards. 

The rules of selling sausages given by the mega hardware store included some general health and safety things, like maintaining temperatures on your sausages and hyigenic food handling.  That all made sense to me.  They also had rules about what you could sell, and it was strictly sausages and canned drinks, nothing more, nothing less.  The only addition that was blessed by the company was the addition of grilled onion, but only if the onion was layered on the bread under the sausage "for safety reasons."  The only thing I can figure it that you could slip and fall on some grilled onions, and they might be hell to clean up out of the parking lot. Where's the classic pratfall involving onions?  

The whole tradition felt like encountering some foreign-to-me religious rules around food, I just had to accept that folded white bread and onions were the only options.  Oh, and some Wattie's tomato sauce, which is just ketchup nonsense and I have to be all Chicago about this and claim it doesn't belong on anything resembling a hot dog.

  

I took the place of honor over the grill and kept the onions going, and the sausages crispy.  And yes I did smell like onions for the next day, even after I showered, thank you.

There's also a typical type of short, stubby sausage here called a Cheerio.  Cue Amelia Bedelia moment of putting a bowl of those in milk for the kids breakfast.  Eugh.  I haven't tried them, but my guess is they are bland and salty.  Their exteriors are shockingly red, like Cinnamon Red Hot or Fireball shade of red.

When I went looking for a photo of these artificial looking little stubs I encountered this cooking method:

How to prepare Cheerios
Heat a pot on medium-high heat until a few bubbles appear
Add the Cheerios to the pot
Cover the pot with a lid and cook for about five minutes
Remove from heat and drain the Cheerios through a colander
Return the Cheerios to the pot and cover until ready to serve
Serve with condiments like tomato sauce or American mustard

Hard to say if it's worse picturing the American breakfast cereal or the New Zealand sausage.

  

A vegan hotdog I ate to try to capture that sausage sizzle rush.  Review: flaccid, salty, dull, mustard and pickle vehicle. 

Possibly vegan, I wasn't tempted enough to even check the ingredient list for possible allergens like wheat or clearly deceased clowns.  

Technically vegan.  

Telecums I have been informed are telegraph cucumbers.

**Perhaps the hangi is even more carnivorous, given that it predates the pakeha European sausages.  Hangi is a fire pit lined with hot stones and traditioanlly includes kaimoana (seafood) though modern ones include lamb, pork, and beef.  The hangi is more about the cooking method rather than what was cooked, but it is still used, especially as a way to feed a massive crowd of people because it scales rather beautifully.

From the Christchurch Library:

The hāngī is the most widely used method of traditional cooking for Māori. “Laying” or “putting” down a hangi involves digging a pit in the ground, heating stones in the pit with a large fire until they are white-hot, placing baskets of food on top of the stones, and covering everything with earth for several hours before uncovering (or lifting) the hāngi.