Vegan Recipes and Foods

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*4/21/23 You know what? Veganism is a cult. It's often conflated with also being really rich, being into organic or expensive food, whole foods, New Age philosophies, or other crunchy granola hippie stuff. I say with lots of experience. Even these days with antivaxx and conspiracy theory stuff. But eating more vegan foods and being flexitarian is good for you so what can you do? Yeet the cult. Within your mind at least. Incorporate vegan foods you enjoy into your life and see how your body adapts to it. If it turns out that you can go full vegan, great, and if not, okay. Honest, if your entire fanbase is known as "the vegan police" and their methods of indoctrination are too similar to evangelical religious types and hysteric homophobes, you got a fuckin problem* Despite claims that eating more vegan foods is "impossible," the typical Israeli / Middle Eastern (and probably Chinese) diet is actually about 50% vegan as it is and has been that way for more than 80 years in Israel and centuries in China and the Middle East. So it's not just possible, it's tried and true. Anyway, eating a diet of 70% vegan foods can reduce high blood pressure, help with weight loss, make it easier to get fiber and antioxidants, prevent heart disease, and things like that. In fact, a plant based (vegetarian or vegan) diet has been shown in this study BMJ Nutrition, Prevention, and Health to reduce the risk of severe COVID-19. Pescetarians also had a reduced risk, though it was not as substantial. Article explaining it If you have any dietary restrictions as a result of health concerns, religious need to eat a certain way, if you're Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or otherwise have a diet that involves avoiding certain kinds of animal products, then this is helpful! In particular if you ever need to bring a dish to a religious celebration or diverse potluck and don't know what is the most appropriate thing to bring, you generally can't go wrong with something vegan. When in doubt, a fruit plate and some sparkling cider is vegan and festive. Maybe some vegan cheeses too. But the vegan police and the "I'm better than you because I'm veeeeegan!!!" stuff has masked a bigger toxicity issue in the vegan community, namely that it's become a way to virtue signal and feel better about yourself, and that has many, many layers of toxicity. Namely because there is a large assortment of legitimate medical issues that prevent going fully vegan, such as diabetes, vitamin B deficiency, anemia, food allergies, and pretty much any kind of already-restrictive diet. Heme iron seems to be the number one issue, although by no means the only serious issue. Also socioeconomic issues, such as inability to cook, poverty, or living in a food desert. When they come out with truly bioidentical-to-animal-products things easily available to even the poorest and most remote people, THEN people can virtue signal. Not a moment before. So don't vegan police yourself. It's probably good to try to eat more vegan foods, but if you just can't go the whole hog, that is okay. It might be better for the environment if those of us who can't go full vegan focus really hard on (gulp) invasive species such as freshwater Asian carp and certain crayfish, and bugs. Yes, bugs. Also on sustainable seafood instead of meat, such as things like clams, mussels, shrimp, crayfish, salmon, herring, oysters, and other non-endangered small things that are low on the food chain so they don't bioaccumulate as much mercury. These are sometimes farmed in ocean waters, such as mussels on lines. Since the ocean is so contaminated with mercury, and it's the best source of sustainable nonvegan non-egg protein as far as I can tell, environmental remediation efforts should probably begin there. Oh, and by the way, you will get far more mercury eating ocean fish than you will from any vaccination (get your vaxxes!). Fluorescent lightbulb replacement bulbs are also sources of mercury exposure, replace these with LED lightbulbs as they are obsolete anyway. Incandescent lightbulbs are, of course, very very obsolete by now. 5/24/22 Just remembered this one guy I used to know had a very polarizing idea. He'd take vegan recipes, and then add animal products to them, and he insisted this was the tastiest way to prepare meals. You know what? That's a perfectly viable solution for a lot of people and certainly better than not eating more vegan foods at all.

5/8/22 Another little-known fact about veganism is that it is easiest for men to go vegan. Why? Simple. Blood and bone. Iron and blood-building stuff like B vitamins and protein and assorted bioavailable amino acids, for iron-deficiency anemia or something approximating it, due to being female. Bone-building stuff - calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D - in a bioavailable form - due to being female and needing to stave off both osteoporosis and potential electrolyte imbalance. The former is explained in the previous paragraph. The latter? Unfortunately, lots of plant-based calcium is not actually that bioavailable. Worse, in anyone who can form kidney stones, plant-based sources of calcium might be forbidden by a doctor due to calcium oxalate content, such as from almonds, chard, spinach, and so on. Therefore some ladies might require dairy in order to prevent osteoporosis unless plant-based substitutes are found. In Asian countries this is less of a problem due to calcium content in assorted foods, particularly the higher levels of dark leafy greens, tofu made with calcium sulfate, certain kinds of seafood and fish, and sesame seeds. So you'd think that wouldn't be a problem here in the US, huh? Okay. Show me a fresh source of dark leafy greens, decent tofu, and good Asian vegetables and fresh tahini in my local supermarket. I'll wait. (ire not intended for my normal readers btw, just the vegan police, you know who you are)

9/20/22 Just discovered that farm-raised mussels, clams, and oysters actually exist in some places. I assume frozen products made of same also exist. So if you for whatever reason can't go vegan, do take a look at these options.

5/8/22 The Six Texas Food Groups are: Beef, Butter, Beans, Bread, and Bacon. Another unofficial Texas Food Group is Dairy. I'd shout it from the rooftop if I could: companies need to make great convenient accessible vegan versions of these, and then we'll see a lot more people eating more vegan foods. "But aren't beans vegan already?" Not in Texas. (quietly sobs)

Eating mostly or entirely vegan foods can help save the planet 20 meat and dairy firms emit more greenhouse gas than entire countries

Update 3/10/23 VegNews has upped their game recently and now you do not have to a. be rich and b. live in the main drag of a metropolitan area to benefit from their articles. You do still need to take it with a grain of salt as to their preachiness, but it is what it is. Veg News Bravo! Bravo!

Added 12/12/23 Veggi Cheat Sheets This is a husband-and-wife blog that reviews exactly how and what to order at various common fast food restaurants and other fast food places when out and about and/or in need of convenience food. They took the time to review hundreds of places. This is important because a. time and effort to make vegan foods would otherwise make it inaccessible for many people and b. most people do not live in vegan-friendly locations. These folks made the average fast food place accessible to everyone who wants to eat more vegan foods and they deserve praise! Added 3/21/23 I Am Going Vegan a blog that has seriously gone extra in providing accessible options to eating more vegan foods. Added 11/29/20: A magazine with some vegan info Veg News Here's its vegan food guide section. Vegan Food Guides And here is its taste tests section. Taste Tests Added 3/16/21: Vegan product reviews from Vegan Kitchen Magick Link out Added 10/23/22 Here is an Indian vegan blog called Vegan First which has great information. Added 10/27/22 Here's a website with interesting info for vegan stocks and multivitamins, among other things VegFaqs

If you want to get more vegan foods in your diet, it's better to start with simple things. Remembering that vegan food has a tendency of being too carb-heavy, light on protein, iron, and calcium, here's a list of ideas to help you avoid shriveling up and dyin'. If you can get away with eating something vegan for one meal a day for a long time, then try adding more vegan things into your diet. Slow steps. Don't go 100% vegan unless you're sure you can handle that.* It's usually a lot easier to start by switching one item or meal at a time to be vegetarian, instead of full vegan. If you can do that consistently, then the next steps are easier. Most vegan websites online claim that everything they make is "delicious" because their food is vegan. Beware the siren lure of these things' recipes. They can cost a ton, take days to make, and still taste bad. Your best bet is searching for accidentally vegan recipes on cooking websites you trust, such as The Pioneer Woman, Instructables, or The Woks of Life. You can also often find vegan recipes in Indian cuisine. One good way of getting into it is trying a few vegan replacement-for-animal-product products per week as a substitute to something or other. Eventually you'll find the products that work in your usual recipes or diet. There is just one animal product that might actually help with the environment, however: honey. And before the vegan police come to knock down my door, you should know that bees are actually considered sacred to Goddess worshippers like myself. Beekeepers at your average farmer's market (in my experience) slave away for the health of their bees and help protect the bee population from dwindling. This article link out claims that humans always steal honey and replace it with sugar syrup, and unless the beekeeper is really greedy, that isn't true; they provide honey plants galore to feed the bees, save bee swarms from being killed by terrified homeowners and adopt them, give 'em a Langstroth hive, smoke out bees & centrifuge some of the combs only when the hive is getting overfull, replace the combs, and this prevents the hive from overflowing with honey and attracting honey-hungry predators, plus prevents other problems source second source Of course, just like all other animal husbandry, if you screw it up, it's bad, but you can totally backyard beekeep in a way that is ethical. So keep that in mind. In fact you might also be able to keep rabbits and egg-laying chickens as pets. Rabbits, for the manure, chickens, for the eggs. 1/15/23 Adding this FYI because not everyone knows it: vegetarianism that includes dairy and eggs is not a meat-free option if you look at the systems of animal husbandry that produce these. The dairy and egg system is the meat system. That's how it works. Poor layers of eggs become poultry. Male calves get raised into beef or sold as veal. It's not cruelty free to be vegetarian. Unless the farmer used the male calves as oxen to plow or as extremely huge expensive pets, and the chickens that didn't lay well as pets, and financially speaking for the farmer, unless it's for personal use of the farm products it's probably not financially viable. Even one cow's feed costs will eat you out of house and home if you're not careful. Animal feed and labor to take care of livestock is ludicrously expensive and time consuming, hence the focus on efficiency. Even in India, there's a pretty good chance that the calves from the dairy industry are going to be sold to Muslims over there for Halal food.

*I tried once and turned out to have a genetic B12 and other B vitamins deficiency problem (YES, I WAS TAKING LOTS OF B12 SUPPLEMENTS, YES, IT STILL WASN'T ENOUGH). Also apparently an iron-deficiency anemia problem. Wasn't pretty. As in, I wound up in the emergency room. more than once I'm really tired of all the patronizing vegans going "oooh being vegan is easy, just have more plant-based iron and B vitamins" like - motherfuckers - it does not work, I tried it, I tried everything, you can't use my body as collateral to hedge your bets. But anyway if I can manage to eat vegan 2/3 meals a day and 2-4 days 100% a week, you can probably do it. One of my tricks is to try to eat vegan foods or at least vegetarian ones during all major Hindu festivals, every Monday I can, Esbats (full moons) and Sabbats (equinoxes, solstices, cross-quarters). It's not perfect but it helps because all of these have traditional veg foods associated with them and that food's easier to find at those times.

Cheat sheet of all the vegan foods bought at grocery stores and online that are definitely worth buying (or sustainably foraging) - why rely on these reviews? My family and I are the ones eating them and we are not vegan but very very picky. Those approved by my avidly carnivorous husband are marked as "Texan Approved"

• 5/30/23 A good friend of mine suggested getting an Instant Pot. I'm planning to save up for one and use the method described in Provecho by Edgar Castrejon to ensure those beans are tender. Then cook up a pot of beans maybe twice a week and consoom like a lot of beans, often.
• 5/30/23 Just in case I didn't mention this earlier, here are a couple really good ideas for things to buy in bulk and freeze or store in a pantry: vegan veggie burgers, vegan oatmeal bar things of whatever variety you prefer (I recommend without soy), vegan protein bar things (I also recommend without soy), roasted salted nuts and seeds of any variety you prefer. Also, powdered electrolyte drink mix. These are total game changers when you're trying to eat more vegan stuff and less non-vegan stuff. If you haven't tried something and are leery of it, try searching for coupons and savings, here's a page for that: Discounts Deals and Coupons
• 4/4/23 Some Texas and Southern foods that are by definition vegan - adding today. First up, Texas caviar. In its simplest form it's canned or cooked beans, usually black-eyed peas, plus some canned corn, chopped purple onions, lime juice and salt, but recipes abound.
• 4/4/23 Fritos, plain kind. Pickles. Pickled okra. Also Atkinson brand chick-o-sticks, peanut butter bars, and Mary Janes.
• 4/4/23 Paletas, popsicles made of pureed fruit basically
• 4/4/23 Nopales. Takes some know how to make them safely but they're darned good. Same goes for prickly pears, which come from the same plant. In fact grilled, kebab'd, or sauteed vegetables on a griddle or skillet are all pretty great, especially as additions to any Tex-Mex. Salt and pepper it and subject it to FIRE and there.
• 4/4/23 Pecans, except added to everything and then some. If you cook, you can probably throw pecans in it. Peanuts also.
• 4/4/23 All the different kinds of salsa - avocado salsa, corn salsa, peach salsa, citrus salsa. Salsa for days.
• 4/4/23 Every kind of booze is wildly popular here, I can't imagine why, but mocktails hit the spot also
• 4/4/23 Mesquite pod flour. Grind this up and mix it with flour, then you can make anything taste like mesquite. This isn't exactly a subtle flavor though.
• 4/4/23 Wild (mustang) grapes, mayhaws, and dewberries - all can be made into jellies and wines, the grapes can be eaten out of hand in moderation, and the dewberries can be made into everything.
• 4/4/23 Peaches. Honestly, I've never had better. They are in season in August and they don't need to be organic for the flavor to be superior. Organic limes here are also amazing.
• 4/4/23 Some Texas and/or Southern foods that can be made vegan relatively easily
• 4/4/23 Well some people aren't going to be too happy about this suggestion LOL. Make a chili, any chili, use the favorite recipe you have. Don't add the meat. Use cooked kidney beans and/or cooked Impossible or Beyond meat instead. Oh the horror. Oh the inhumanity. If your chili game is on point though, maybe no one will notice.
• 4/4/23 Jalapeno jelly served on some kind of vegan cream cheese, or Forager yogurt mixed with salt to taste then drained in a coffee filter-lined sieve over a bowl overnight in the fridge. With crackers.
• 4/4/23 Sopaipillas with cane sugar sauce (or jelly or powdered sugar) instead of honey
• 4/4/23 Texas Trash bean dip, with Forager products, a vegan taco mix, and Daiya cheese instead of the usual suspects. Perhaps it could go good with salsa.
• 4/4/23 White Texas Trash Yes that is the name. It's basically a Christmastime thing that people make. And yes I think everyone in Texas is crazy at least to some extent. To find a dairy-free white chocolate find white chocolate or candy coating labeled "U Parve". This is kind of like that Muddy Buddies stuff you sometimes find in terms of it being totally terrible for you and available in December. FYI Miyoko's should be fine as a butter substitute for that
• 1/23/23 Was reminded today by a cheap gas station food that anything with the symbol U surrounded by a circle means "kosher parve." Guess what? Anything and everything that is kosher parve is also vegan unless it contains eggs, honey, or fish. Since most kosher parve stuff is pretty cheap it is unlikely to contain these three but check the ingredients. Then be amazed. There's lots of this stuff out there. Here's an example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about Israeli Supermarket Online, any section in a large well-stocked grocery store that features Jewish foods like matza balls and Manischewitz wine might help here. I would also like to remind (perpetually) everyone that a Middle-Eastern store of any sort in any town is a great place to go for vegan foods, indeed any foods. Also, lots of halal food is vegan.
• 11/12/22 In shock: it looks like Amazon might be the best place to buy vegan food, period (not just on the internet), in a lot of places otherwise classified as "food deserts" or sans vegan options, if you have Amazon Prime. Here's a doorway to that wild and weird side of Amazon plant based stuff on amazon
• Alpro products These are really good. But they're not easily available in the States! Mostly UK, and apparently also Canada It appears that you might just be able to get some in the US from Amazon here, consume at your own risk...
• Beyond Meat Jerky Does it taste like jerky? No, more like carpet, and yes I have a really vivid memory of chewing on carpet as a kid (explains a lot I'm sure). It does have a lot of iron, protein, and it's filling. It's honestly not that bad. You can buy some from Amazon here.
• NotMilk (milk substitute), store brand organic soymilk, store brand organic almond or coconut milk. Almond-based stuff seems like it would be great for the environment and animals. It's great for animals, but almonds are a super water intensive crop and they're growing them in California.
• Vegan First Indian Breakfast Foods article Great if you can find it. Bluntly, unless you're somewhere like LA, or actually in India as opposed to the States or some other Western nation, your chances of actually eating any of this is almost nil. I've tried to make this stuff. It requires esoteric hard-to-find ingredients, great equipment, a lot of money, a lot of time and effort, and a good deal of luck.
• Dr. Pepper is Texan Approved and yes, it's vegan. LOL. Actually, when it comes to eating vegan foods the drinks are one of the easier things to go for. Sweet tea is vegan, as is vegetable tomato juice, lemonade, orange juice, many beers, many wines, fruit juice, sparkling cider, and so on. Read the ingredients and you're good.
• 9/30/22 Daiya gluten-free frozen pizza All totally vegan. It's really not bad. Not as good as Amy's gluten free vegan pizza but it's hard to find that. Could benefit from a flavorful dip in vegan pesto, sun-dried tomato pesto, garlic oil, marinara, vegan ranch, or some other good dip.
• Experimenting now with prune juice to determine if it helps as an iron boosting food. Let's see if Worf (Star Trek) was on to something. 4/20/22 It appears to be a great post-workout drink. Super refreshing. 7/1/22 Okay so it boosts iron but only a little bit. What really helps is, daily, a cup of prune juice, a half cup or so of roasted salted sunflower seeds, and a cup of nondairy hot chocolate and/or quite a few pieces of dark chocolate. Still trying to find more iron-rich options. 9/18/22 Have discovered frozen peas are rich in iron. Warmed up in a skillet, with some olive oil, some sea salt, and thinly sliced garlic, they are pretty decent, especially with some lemon juice added after cooking and some diced tomato on the side.
• Oatly ice cream. Surprisingly, it's pretty darned good. The Texan says "this is not half bad." This guy scarfs down Blue Bell like it's ambrosia too.
• Your favorite cereals, as these are pretty much all vegan already. If you actually enjoy oatmeal, that's great too. Granola counts too. People usually don't use butter or egg whites in granola in grocery store granola anyway since that spoils faster. Fruity Pebbles are Texan approved. I think they're godawful but go figure? Everyone's got their own favorites with cereal. But we both like corn flakes.
• Cybele's Cookies - I tried the oatmeal raisin. Great. Also gluten free, and the chocolate chip ones have no oats either. Though having studied some mythology the name made me gawk a bit. Cybeles Free To Eat Apparently it is the name of the owner of the company. Also, I am now out of these oatmeal raisin cookies and it's a fucking disaster. LOL
• Forager (yogurt and sour cream substitutes)
• Soy-free Vegenaise (best mayonnaise hands down, vegan or not)
• Follow Your Heart smoked gouda slices - just five years ago Follow Your Heart vegan cheese made processed American singles look like gourmet food of the gods, it was so godawful. Like an unholy mixture of Play-Doh and tofu. That really changed. These are the slices to gorge on and stick on sandwiches and eat with crackers. It turns out that Follow Your Heart has started making assorted cheeses, cream cheese, dressings such as ranch, and more, so I'll be trying these soon. Follow Your Heart
• Thai Kitchen plain unsweetened coconut milk, if you like to cook
• Amy's vegan gluten free frozen pizza, and Amy's vegan frozen pizzas. Get your favorite vegan toppings too and you can throw em on there before baking.
• Amy's veggie burgers, which are the best on the market besides Beyond and Impossible, which apparently are also worth getting. Their California burgers are good. They do have gluten. Their Sonoma burgers do not have gluten. I highly suggest sauteeing them with a large amount of oil in order to add that greasy goodness factor. Add the toppings that are your favorite, things like pickles, tomatoes, onions, whatever. Follow Your Heart cheeses are okay toppings but don't melt. Daiya melts and is okay. Miyoko's does not melt.
• Amy's frozen vegan meals in general. In far-flung places you can still usually find these. Personally I think the lentil loaf is the best one closely followed by the veggie pot pie. They're TV dinners, so they taste a little plasticky and may have some dubious health qualities from the waterproofed paper they bake in, but they will keep you going. Advance warning: you will need two or three to fill you up.
• Canned kidney beans, garbanzo beans, and whatever other beans and legumes you like, unless you can cook these from scratch which is preferable
• Organic white or brown rice if you have a rice cooker or are really good at cooking, enough so to make rice on a stovetop. Short-grain rice usually is less stale, but freshness is less of a factor if you're using a rice cooker. It's generally a good idea to add a couple hefty spoonfuls of pre-washed quinoa to any rice in a rice cooker to up the nutritional value.
• Bready stuff and bread products can be a major staple of your diet as a vegan. Flour tortillas, corn tortillas, bread, bagels, toast, soft pretzels, crackers, etc. These are Texan approved. A certain brand, and possibly more than one, of crescent rolls that come in a can is actually vegan as it uses shortening instead of butter. Pair these up with peanut butter or some other nut butter and voila, something a little more substantial than just bread. My happy ass enjoys bread with peanut butter and jelly like the Gods intended. My husband likes peanut butter and cinnamon sugar sandwiches, obviously an abomination unto the Lord. Lord being Coffee, our family's real religion.
• Avocadoes for that avocado toast. Study shows eating avocadoes twice a week lowers risk of heart disease Not so funny now, huh? Avocado toast. Feh.
• The trick to making potato anything without wanting to tear your hair out is to cube or otherwise slice it first, then boil it til it's al dente, and then do what you planned on doing. Instead of waiting like two hours for the damn potatoes to finally be tender, the cook time is vastly reduced and it tastes a lot better too.
• Basically any kind of potatoes is a good bet. Baked, sauteed, home fries, fries, hash browns - the first four options are Texan approved. Ketchup aplenty for that guy too. I prefer metric tons of hot sauce. If you're the one making the home fries, you can load these up with a lot of sliced and prepped vegetables in the last ten minutes of cooking, things like kale or spinach, mushrooms, bell peppers, broccoli, onions, and so on.
• Clif bars and the other portable foods that empire creates
• Live lactofermented things such as Wildbrine sauerkraut and kimchi. Expensive, but has actually lasted more than a year in my fridge after being opened and only got better. Not that I'm recommending consuming something like that. If you're really motivated, you can attempt to make your own, but all of my previous attempts have ended in disaster so consider yourself warned.
• Enjoy Life lentil chips
• Cashew butter in general. It's more buttery than other nut butters, put it on toast.
• Any kind of spaghetti sauce without animal products in there, or canned tomatoes. Canned organic whole tomatoes are actually my secret weapon when making fantastic tomato sauce. Run them through a blender, split them with kitchen shears, or squish them in your hands, their flavor is usually unbeatable.
• Cedar's Organic hummus; you can improve the flavor by adding about a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, half a teaspoon of garlic powder and a tablespoon of good extra-virgin olive oil, and stirring well
• Texas Olive Ranch extra virgin olive oil is a good brand if you live in Texas, and heck, even if you don't
• Nuts and seeds: roasted salted sunflower seeds, macadamia nuts, roasted unhulled sesame seeds or tahini made of them, squash or pumpkin seeds, roasted peanuts, and/or whatever your favorites are. Halva is an unhealthy Middle Eastern sweet treat made of tahini and sugar syrup, add that in there if you like it. The Texan will gladly eat the sunflower seeds, proof that he is a bird man, which explains why he's such a weirdo.
• Dried organic fruits: dates, figs, organic unsulfured apricots, prunes, apples, etc.
• Basically anything in the bulk foods section that is vegan, such as roasted nuts and dried fruits. No bulk section/your local one sucks? Try nuts.com.
• It is a good idea to have a snack plate on hand with a whole bunch of different dried fruits and nuts, also perhaps chocolate, so you can head to that if you're so hungry you want to gnaw your own arm off. Replenish with whatever you're enjoying and/or craving at the time, and there, more vegan foods in your diet.
• Your favorite brand of jarred spaghetti sauce is probably vegan already. Tinkyada brown rice pasta is good as a gluten free pasta, and just about all pastas are vegan. Most gnocchi is also vegan, and is great as a change of pace. Check the ingredients. If you can find any at your grocery store it's well worth it.
• Salsa or hot sauce to make rice and bean bowls, burritos, and other tex-mex taste better. San-J soy sauce or tamari to make all Asian foods, in fact a whole galaxy of foods, taste better. Anything made by Frontera, such as their chips and salsa. Do you like your salsas spicy? Also, consider branching out to different kinds of salsa.
• Feel Good Foods gluten free vegetable dumplings
• Dave's Killer Bread or Schar gluten free crackers
• Nut butters to go with said bread or crackers. Also organic good avocado if you can find it. Shut up about avocado toast being millenial, it's common in every farming village in Israel and I grew up eating it almost every day for breakfast. Important, cuz if you get your saturated fat from a plant you'll need less of it from elsewhere, and it is healthier.
• Organic wheat tortillas, if you can find those
• Impossible and/or Beyond meat products
• Lightlife bacon and/or bacon tempeh (gluten free)
• Equal Exchange coffee, tea, and chocolate
• Popcorn and potato chips, most brands are vegan as it is, just read the ingredients. Jalapeno kettle chips are Texan approved, although not for superstrict vegans as the sugar may have been filtered through bone char. We both like Kettle chips in general, and they have a lot of vegan flavors.
• Precut crudites and fruits, if you can't DIY it or if you keep buying fruits/veg and never get around to cutting them up and then they rot in your fridge into a sad heap (guilty!). Celery sticks with peanut butter are Texan approved. You probably have strong opinions on the best raw fruits and vegetables; eat what you like.
• If you are able to DIY crudites and fruit plates with vegetables and fruits in season, chop up the fruit and veg, lay each of these out on plates and cover them with glass saucepan lids in the fridge. Also, crudite plates are made more appealing when you add pickled things such as olives, okra, cucumber pickles, beets, and so on. Sometimes you can find more interesting pickled things at your local supermarket. Sometimes you can boil up stuff like de-choked quartered artichoke or beets and lay that on the crudite plate. Fruit plates are more appealing when you drizzle a lot of fresh squeezed lemon juice on the fruits. These are good to have around in the fridge at all times, both a fruit one and a veg one.
• My family and I gotta have an Israeli salad in our fridge at all times. These are simple; recipe provided below under the "nutritious stuff that can be a diet staple" subheading. They have a flaw, though: they are best eaten the day they're made and a day later is pushing it.
• Ingredients for green smoothies. Even if you have one of these like twice a week that's better than nothing.
• Some good frozen vegetables and fruits to have on hand include frozen mixed vegetables (Texan approved, dunno why), frozen peaches, frozen berries, peas, and lima beans if you like those. Besides being decent food, these last for quite a while. In fact this kind of stuff was the only produce type thing we had in the kitchen for a while during early quarantine before the vaccine was widely available.
• Earthbound Farms basically anything, for your intake of dark leafy greens and other premade prewashed stuff. I can only hope they treat their farmers right, but given it comes from California, who knows? United Farm Workers (https://ufw.org/) doesn't say anything for or against them.
• Salsa, corn chips, guacamole, other vegetarian premade dips such as baba ghanoush and ajvar; out of pride and stubbornness as to what make a good hummus I insist that if you buy it premade, get it from a good Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern restaurant and not your grocery store. If however your local restaurants' hummus is somehow worse than storebought, and I am sorry if you are in that situation, get a storebought kind without soybean or canola oil. The best kinds use only extra virgin olive oil if you can find any like that. And on a tangent, I love hummus as much as the next Sabra but some people need to calm down. Other delicious dips worth seeking out include vegetarian mock chopped liver, muhammara, cheese-free pesto, caponata, flavored hummus, and tapenade. You can usually only find this kind of stuff in big farmer's markets or well-stocked Middle-Eastern stores, though.
• The trick to cooking beans is to soak them in plenty of water overnight, discard the floaters, rinse and drain them, and then let them sit in a strainer over a bowl or the sink for at least a couple hours. Then, cook them in plenty of fresh new water by bringing to a full rolling boil, lowering the heat just a little so it's still at a rapid boil and a high heat, and cooking those partially covered with a lid, topping up the water if needed, for anywhere from (usually) 2 hours to 4 and a half hours, checking every so often to see if they're done by tasting several from different areas of the pot. Different beans vary with cooking time. For average-sized beans you'll probably need about 2 hours of cook time. The best vessel to do this in is anything made of cast iron, such as a dutch oven. Keep this hot until the first bit is eaten and then lay the hot pot in a sink full of cold (ideally with ice) water to cool it rapidly, uncovered, then have someone help you towel off the bottom, and refrigerate it, covered. Some people say to lay out the dry beans on a baking sheet first to pick out rocks, dirt, sticks, and so on; usually if you buy really cheap beans this is needed but not otherwise.
• A big pot of beans (kidney, chickpea, flavored pinto beans, lima, etc.) can be made or bought from a good cafeteria or restaurant on Friday or the weekend, refrigerated well and eaten throughout the week. Twice a week is fine too, less risk of the beans going bad. Pinto beans are very good with chile powder cooked into them. I mean, you could make cholent, but without meat or eggs cholent is a sad sack and it's just depressing! You could also make a big pot of vegan lentil soup if that's something you're good at and lentils make you feel great as opposed to "why am I eating this." I'll be sticking with beans; you do you.
• The trick to making decent rice is... uh... a rice cooker. My family and I just haven't had any luck with other methods. If you can find brown rice that is definitely free of arsenic and fresh, by all means make it in the rice cooker as that's the only way to make the stuff I have ever found to work. Adding a little wild rice to the brown rice ups the nutrition factor even more, as does adding a couple tablespoons black (forbidden) or red rice.
• Some friends of mine in Israel also like to cook up a reasonably sized pot of quinoa once or twice a week to add to various things; they claim the trick is to cook it just until it's done and not overdone.
• Uncle Eddie's and Alternative Baking Company cookies (note: gluten free Alternative Baking Company cookies ain't good, I recommend the Schar ones instead)
• Vegan junk food, of which there are plenty of guides online to the on-purpose vegan and accidentally vegan kinds: it basically lasts forever anyway, and if you're hungry, you're hungry, LOL. You can usually find plenty of these at any given health food store too, pretending to be healthy. It's not exactly but who cares. Jolly Ranchers, oreos, fruit roll-ups, and unfrosted Pop-Tarts in certain flavors (brown sugar is one) are incidentally vegan. These last few are Texan approved.
• Head to an Asian food store online or in person. Find the rice crackers, find the seaweed snacks, find the mochi. Good stuff.
• All of the herbs and spices and flavorings you can get, preferably in bulk. Use these as lavishly as you can, as eating food with good flavor often also results in better health. Things like for instance parsley, dried or fresh, are very high in nutrients. Other herbs, such as black pepper and ginger, help with digestion, and can have other benefits. So don't be afraid to go ham with the seasonings!
• 5/19/23 How to eat more salads: add more of the foods you actually like to them, as seasoning. For instance, me I like the best dressing I can afford, anything without soybean oil in it is usually fair game, and some olives. Some folks? Actually can eat more salads if they add things like toasted pecans or whatever. The trick is to add just a little of the tasty stuff to a lot of the roughage and mix well. And it works.
• 5/19/23 How to eat better even if you can't go full vegan? Stretch out the animal product usage into more meals. Instead of using your cheese all at once in one very greasy casserole or on one breakfast taco, ration it out so you get a week's worth of cheese diluted into 1/7th the amount per day on your tacos. And so on and so forth. Bulk up the animal products with non-animal products, such as potatoes or cabbage to stretch meats, beans to also stretch meats, Southern-style veggies to stretch meats (again), make a lot of soups and stews with a lot of vegan stuff in them and very little animal products, and so on. Thing is, a lot of people can't go cold turkey on the animal stuff without hurting themselves. But precious few people would be hurt by having less of it, stretched out into more meals. And keep experimenting every chance you get with new vegan products on the market. Some absolutely are worth using as replacements for staples.

First online vegan store I have found with flat-rate shipping: Vejii With that pretentious name, you'd never know it has reasonable shipping. It does. Woo hoo!

Chain stores you can usually find vegan foods at

• Trader Joe's
• Sprouts
• Natural Grocers
• Target is surprisingly vegan-friendly. Infinitely more selection for vegan goods than Walmart.
• Sam's Club has a surprisingly passable vegan foods section

Vegan meal subscription services - for if you happen to be rich or at least well-off. I am really sorry. I can't find anything cheaper. When I do I'm going to go hog wild, buy it, and tell you if it's worth it. Also note: may not deliver everywhere via the USPS; might have delivery areas that do not deliver to your zip code.

• Daily Harvest
• Purple Carrot May not deliver to everywhere.

Easy Vegan Breakfast Ideas

• Clif bars are vegan. They are also my favorite backup meal that I carry around with me in whatever purse or pack. You can probably survive on them alone for weeks, although I wouldn't recommend it. For variety you could try the Luna kind or the Builder Bar. Heart Thrive cakes and Bobo's Oat Bars also work but all of these options are really sweet. Better to eat falafel for breakfast probably. Or a bean burrito.
• Storebought flour tortillas filled with roast potatoes, cooked or canned black beans, and salsa; some green chiles or sauteed bell peppers in here would be good too
• Oatmeal with toppings, such as sliced apples and walnuts, chocolate chips and raisins, bananas and walnuts, or peanut butter and brown sugar; you can experiment with other hot cereals too like semolina, quinoa, and rice (rice pudding for breakfast)
• Grits with garlic, lots of salt, lots of pepper, and vegan cheese melted in (such as Miyoko's mozzarella); serve it up with sauteed bell peppers and mushrooms over it to add some tastiness. Maybe some kale or spinach sauteed in there too.
• Muesli made with almond milk and topped with nuts and fruits - if eaten each morning this stuff might lower cholesterol and high blood pressure.
• Toast with plain mashed avocado, almond butter, peanut butter, cashew butter, storebought vegan cream cheese and tomatoes, or tempeh bacon. Or heck, any of the large array of jams, jellies, spreads, and nut butters works well.
• Storebought granola, vegan yogurt, toasted nuts, and fruit in a parfait
• Warm up a can of kidney beans on the stove. Add soy sauce and/or ketchup. Serve over toast with some chopped green onion. Time-honored. Supposedly vegans have been eating beans on toast as a staple food since the 70s. Change it up with different kinds of canned beans and different seasonings, such as molasses and brown sugar and mustard powder for Boston baked beans.
• Breakfast cereals are basically all vegan. Throw a handful of some toasted nuts in there for protein and maybe some chopped banana or berries for other good nutrition. Soymilk is the best bet for adding complete protein but quinoa milk is also complete, however it tastes absolutely terrible, so I hope for a decent dairy substitute to exist soon.
• If you're one of those people with no appetite in the morning, try a fruit plate. Slice up fruit, mix it with lemon juice or pineapple juice, and lay it out on a plate to munch.
• If you happen to have extra time in the morning or you really want to get as much nutrition and health goin as possible, make a green smoothie on top of whatever else you're eating. The trick to making these is absurdly simple: blend up sweet fruits like an apple and some blueberries or a banana and some kiwi, add some kind of sweet juice like pineapple or orange, add like 3/4 cup of tightly packed well-washed greens. The greens can be kale, spinach, lettuce, or collards. It's even better if the fruits are previously chopped and frozen. You can add an acai pouch to this too. Blend the heck out of it and the greens wind up tasting unobtrusive, there you go

Easy Vegan Lunch or Dinner Ideas

• Storebought veggie burgers with storebought frozen fries and all the fixings
• Seek out an Asian food store; find the vegetable dumplings in the frozen food section. These are usually both vegan and great. Sometimes they're gluten free too. In some larger grocery stores in cosmopolitan areas you might also be able to find these.
• Peanut butter jelly sandwich with chips. Also time-honored.
• Storebought flour tortillas filled with refried beans, salsa, guacamole, pico de gallo and hot sauce
• Storebought falafel in a pita with hummus and a chopped salad, warm up some frozen fries on the side
• Curry. Basically any kind of veggie curry. Chana masala and aloo saag are two things you can start with. Try to focus on curries and dals that contain protein-rich things like beans and lentils. Problems getting started? Saute an onion, maybe some whole cumin seeds, chuck in a spoon of curry powder and stir, add in other ingredients and some water or coconut milk or many diced/canned tomatoes to bring it together, simmer. For the genuine flavor experience find some Indian cookbooks and blogs, and more importantly a Middle-Eastern or Indian food store where you can gradually build up a spice stash. Because the spices are crucial to getting it right.
• Stir-fries with beans, chickpeas, fake meat, or tofu are doable for people who are just starting to cook and for people with lots of experience. Add enough soy sauce or coconut aminos, use the trinity of fresh ginger-garlic-green onion, and you can cover up a multitude of culinary sins. Toss in some dark leafy greens like well-washed kale or something, some other vegetables, and serve the fucking thing over rice or quinoa and that's a full meal.
• Some ramens are vegan. Read the label and be sure to serve them with a protein food of some sort.
• House Foods brand makes a kind of noodle called tofu shirataki. You can boil up some veggie bouillon (Edward & Sons makes a decent 'chicken' type bouillon as does Frontier Herbs), add some veggies of your choice such as shiitake mushrooms, green onions, and thinly sliced or julienned carrots, and cook up those noodles in the broth. You might want a few shirataki packets, however, because tofu is low-cal and when you're eating vegan foods, you're going to want calories.
• Ying Ying brand makes tofu in Canada; it's pre-seasoned. In the US, we got Lightlife foods which is the closest we can get. Seasoned tempeh strips tend to be our best bet for soy food with flavor.
• Meat Substitute burgers A taste test revealed that Beyond and Impossible burgers, according to Serious Eats, are the best on the market.
• If you have a rice cooker, try making some rice and then top it with cooked or canned beans, lentils, or what have you. Or cook quinoa in a saucepan. Add sauces and cooked vegetables to taste. There, a buddha bowl. These are not as easy as the other ideas but they'll fill you up and they're customizable. If you get boxed quinoa, there's usually a recipe on the box to ensure the quinoa turns out right. Some ideas for buddha bowl combos include 1. Quinoa, black beans, sauteed bell peppers, lemon or lime juice and salt 2. White rice with like a spoonful of rinsed quinoa added per cup, lentils, sauteed onions, and cooked elbow macaroni 3. White or (better) brown rice hopefully with quinoa added as mentioned, canned beans of any kind, chopped lettuce and tomato, absolutely drown it in salsa 4. Quinoa, roasted red onions and sweet potatoes, black beans, cilantro, and lime juice 5. White rice, chickpeas warmed up on the stove with some curry powder, garlic, ginger, and kale and a couple chopped tomatoes and fried in there with like a tablespoon of sunflower oil
• There is a vegan cheese substitute called Daiya. The shredded mozzarella kind makes a pretty good pizza. Get a premade crust or follow a recipe, put pizza sauce on it, top it, bake it. Any pizza recipe will do. If you can make the crust whole wheat so much the better. Decent vegan pepperonis can be had from Yves if you like those.
• An easier version of pizzas is bagel pizzas here or french bread pizzas here. Just swap out the cheese with mozzarella Daiya or Miyoko's (the latter if you're loaded...), load 'em up with veggie toppings, and you're good to go.
• Amy's makes a whole lot of frozen vegan meals. It takes about two or three of them to fill you up, unless you're talking about their pizza, which does the job in one go.
• If you can shallow-fry corn tortillas and get canned or homemade refried beans made, plus fixings, you can make tostadas. Forager sour cream and Daiya cheddar should do the trick as dairy substitutes; broil the cheese on there or cover the still-hot tostadas with a lid to melt the cheese on there and voila. Tons of salsa should help too.

Easy Vegan Sides Ideas

• Find a copy of The Joy of Cooking or Good Eats. Make the vegetable side dish of your choice. Like, I don't know, roasted butternut squash or carrots or something
• Smoothies. No, these aren't breakfast! Ffs! Try using pineapple juice or orange juice or soy milk as the base, and make a habit of freezing all the fresh fruit you won't eat so you have some on hand for this.
• How to make a salad that you can eat without hating your life: get your greens and vegetables and other stuff together in a bowl, all washed and chopped up etc. Now sprinkle sea salt on there, then drizzle an acid of some sort (fresh lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, or apple cider vinegar work well), then drizzle extra virgin olive oil. If you want, add things like onion powder, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs. Mix it well.
• Fruit plate, crudite tray. Arrange stuff in a pretty fashion and add vegan dips. Mix up the fruit with some pineapple juice first to prevent browning.
• Boil or steam green vegetables until they become a brighter green, drain, optionally dunk in ice water and drain again, done. Perfect side dish.
• Storebought hummus with crudites and either sliced up pitas or crackers - warm up the sliced up pitas with a little olive oil brushed on there in a 200F oven for 20 minutes first, and drizzle some olive oil on that hummus, and you'd be hard pressed to find a restaurant doing better
• Make a humongous salad and pour some storebought vegan dressing on it. It ain't pretty but it works. If you are daring, try some of the Joy of Cooking's dressing recipes.
• Blend up some pesto using walnuts and no parmesan. Choose any recipe that you like; it'll come out fine without the cheese. Also works using sun-dried tomatoes instead of basil. Good on toast.
• Saute some mushrooms, then clap a lid on there and let them sweat to fully cook, then take the lid off and let the moisture evaporate a little. Don't just go with button mushrooms here. There are other options like king porcini, oyster mushrooms, diced portobello mushrooms, shiitake, and so on and so forth. I like my mushrooms grown in organic mediums since they take on a lot of flavor from said medium.
• Lightlife is a good brand for fake bacon. The stuff comes in "bacon strip" type things and "tempeh bacon." I have not tried the other meats by the brand. Also the CEO has criticized the guy attempting to turn the US into his own dictatorship so that's good enough for me. Source
• Canned soup. If you have the skills you can make your own; vegetable soups work out okay as do lentil soups.
• A tomato soup with coconut milk and cilantro is pretty dope if you can pull it off. You saute an onion and some garlic with black pepper in olive oil, add a can of whole tomatoes and 2 tablespoons coconut milk, simmer for 15 minutes, puree it with a stick blender or in batches in a blender. Return to the pot, take it off the heat, add chopped cilantro, season to taste.

Vegan Storebought Snacks: because it's easier to buy snacks than it is to make them

• Several junk foods are vegan, and are so awesome you'll wonder why on earth people call veganism "healthy." Dandies marshmallows for instance, those are great. Also you should try covering popcorn in hot sauce, Spike, and nutritional yeast. Potato chips, most popcorn, kettle corn, candied almonds, terra chips, Equal Exchange chocolate bars, GoMaxGo candy bars, coconut fake ice cream, and chocolate sauce are all vegan. I suggest tossing a scoop of that fake ice cream in some soda.
• Chips and salsa. Guacamole is also vegan
• Roasted, salted mixed nuts are usually tastier than raw
• More than a few chip-type things in health food stores are vegan. Just do yourself a favor and avoid rice cakes. Not the Asian-style rice crackers aka sembei but the Western-style stuff made by Quaker and Lundberg. They'll eat your soul.
• Heart Thrive makes a good apricot food bar.
• Dried fruits, nuts, seeds, and dark chocolate are good; granola, trail mix, and bulk foods often have good options too. You can find a lot of this at Nuts.com
• Hummus, flavored hummus, baba ghanoush, and ajvar are all great and you can get these from health food stores and from Middle Eastern food stores
• Sesame crunchies
• Breads and spreads, such as nut butters, jams, and Miyoko's cream cheese; I grew up eating mashed plain avocado or nut butter on whatever bread was at hand as a snack, meal, or breakfast
• Equal Exchange chocolate
• Wasabi peas
• Mochi
• Sembei
• Larabars. There is no competitor to this General Mills-owned snack bar thing. Why, I have no idea, considering it's absurdly easy to make the equivalent of these in bulk at home with a cuisinart and like 3 parts dried fruit to 2 parts nuts/additives plus a pinch of salt. Although it is certainly not good to pay into multinational megacorporations, Larabars are vegan, and in areas where little else is available, welp. It's food. Nutritionally speaking it's about as healthy as a candy bar and about as filling.
• Crunchy rollers rice snacks
• Enjoy Life makes lentil chips which ain't half bad
• Vegan Cuts A vegan snack box subscription. There are others available too. Can be a real help when you're living in a vegan unfriendly place like... Texas.

Fast Food Joints & Restaurants With Vegan Options

Let's be real here, not everyone has time to cook.

• Happy Cow A search engine to see if there are any veggie or vegan restaurants near you; highly recommended. Use the name and state you're in and not the zip code because for some reason zip code doesn't work.
• Taco Bell - bean burritos, taco salad with no animal products
• Chipotle - probably the most vegan friendly fast food option here but not actually tasty. Their beans and salsa are good, and everything else can take a hike. To make it a complete protein, grab some corn chips and dig in to that.
• Starbucks - ask the barista if they can make your drink vegan, or check out the multiple guides on VegNews
• Del Taco
• Dunkin' Donuts - Beyond meat breakfast sandwich with no egg, almond milk coffee
• Bubble tea joints - most bubble tea is vegan. Ask the guys behind the counter. If they don't know, get the kind that's fruit flavored and not made with powdered stuff.
• Burger King - Beyond meat burgers
• Cracker Barrel - baked sweet potato, plain baked potato, fries, grits, salad without dressing, broccoli
• Most Chinese restaurants
• Most Japanese restaurants, but avoid the miso soup and stick with vegetarian sushi, no egg cake (tamagoyaki) or tofu (inari) but plain fried tofu with plain soy sauce instead of dipping sauce should be fine
• Most bagel joints, because it's expensive to doctor up bagel dough with animal products. Just call ahead and ask.
• Middle Eastern restaurants are really, really helpful here. Get to know the cuisine and you'll know what to order. Here are some ideas: try the falafel, the vegetarian stuffed grape leaves (dolmas), the hummus and pita, if they have salads you gotta try those. Dips like ajvar and baba ghanoush are great, the rice is usually good too. Cooked lentils can go with the stuffed grape leaves by the way and sometimes such places have vegetarian lentil soup. I like adding roasted peanuts to the dolmas actually but it's a little strange. Oh, and with regards to the Middle East conflict, no, it isn't a thing in these restaurants, and my Israeli-as-all-get-out family has never had a problem with these, in fact we seek out these restaurants and often wind up having good conversations with the folks owning them. In fact this is some of the only decent human interaction my family has had in certain infamous places in flyover land... Go, be kind, enjoy some great food and great company.
• Indian restaurants and Ethiopian restaurants might also be good bets. Most Indian places have a vegan chana masala with rice, baigan bharta, potato samosas, aloo saag, aloo gobi, and chana saag; ask to be sure there's no ghee or cream or anything. Also, papadums are vegan. If you luck out with a place that makes onion bhajis dipped in a chickpea flour batter, get those.
• Hare Krishna temples sometimes have restaurants that are reasonably priced. They're usually called Govinda's. Wait for the pandemic to end and then go check em out. I have a special place in my heart for those.

Vegan stuff that's nutritious which can be a diet staple

• A cup of some kind of legume or bean dish. Try to make a point of adding this to your daily diet even if you're mostly diehard carnivore. If you're a tall or bulky person with a faster metabolism, then maybe up this to a cup and a half or two cups of them protein options. Strategies to ensure you are not just munching a can of cold beans or whatever: cook them up with other tasty things, add this stuff to other meals, crumble or chop it up if you need to, add some kind of flavorful sauce like soy or BBQ or sriracha or really good salsa. And rotate these so you eat a different kind of food at least once every couple days, so you don't get fed up with one kind. Some relatively findable options here: veggie burgers, other kinds of veggie burgers, some protein thing based on legume such as Beyond Meat or whatever, cooked or canned beans or lentils, roasted chickpeas, hummus, falafel, curried chickpeas, vegetarian refried beans, vegetarian baked beans, vegan seven-layer bean dip, tofu, lentil soup, vegetarian chili, bean loaf, lentil loaf. The latter two options can be either fantastic or really bad depending on who cooks them. Generally speaking no matter how they are made they are improved by ketchup and BBQ sauce. Don't be afraid to "cheat" here by using convenience options like restaurant sides, grocery store or deli pre-made stuff, canned legumes or beans, or frozen dinner type stuff. The learning curve for making these things is steep, and the margin of error is slim.
• Amy's frozen vegan meals. They're not very filling, most of them; usually it takes three for a meal. Expensive. However in places where you don't have many options this is generally your best bet. The vegan burritos and pizzas are the best bet. Their canned soups have basically no calories, I'm not a huge fan. Do gluten free if you need to. The vegan gluten free pizza is surprisingly good, in fact better than all of the nonvegan pizzerias in my town, filling, and also affordable. And perfect for layering a ton of veggies onto before baking. There are no competing companies that have quality affordable products. It is what it is.
• Five to eight servings of vegetables and fruits per day. A serving, generally speaking, is around a handful. Incorporating this into your diet is actually a good idea regardless of if you are vegan or not, so it's a pretty good first step towards eating more vegan food. How to get more than five servings a day without munching all day? Green smoothies. Side salad at every meal, such as Israeli salad. Vegetables at every meal as well as the salad. Fruits instead of dessert, such as in a fruit salad. Or heck, chocolate dipped fruits counts. Fruits inside of dessert, such as fruit pie. Veggies lavishly used as flavoring and additives to other foods, particularly in sneaky ways such as those moms often use to hide the vegetables in the foods the kids will actually eat. Snacks of vegetables and fruits. High quality local produce is actually more important to find here than shipped-in organic food because most local produce actually IS organic but the farmers can't afford the organic certification; ask the people at the farmer's market and know your farmer. A blender and paying for a CSA might be a better investment than some kinds of multivitamin pills here, because of bioavailability, but I could be wrong on that. I should also point out: lots of people think they hate fruits and vegetables but have simply never had high quality FRESH organic produce. Mostly because they don't know how to identify what is actually fresh and at its best as opposed to just "not frozen." Frequent your farmer's market and roadside stands, speak to the people there, buy organic produce at the store and nibble on it, learn how to identify freshness in produce from the many online guides, see what you find. Then learn how to keep your bought goods fresh through proper storage. Oh, and when you find a good farmer, ask if you can schedule a regular pickup direct from their farm.
• Ideally, start growing things yourself too if you can. Windowsill veggies? Regrow green onions from the bulbs, fresh spearmint sprigs after keeping them in a cup of water on the window to stimulate root growth for a week, basil plants. These are doable in a South-facing window (everything else just seems to want to die).
• Seek and find as many fiber-rich whole foods as you can, and incorporate those into your diet. Things (besides fruit and veggies) like wheat germ, whole ancient grain flours if you bake, oatmeal, grits, sweet potatoes, lentils, wild rice, and so on are fantabulous because they get you full and make you stay full for longer
• Add mushrooms to whatever food you're already eating, sometimes, and consume them relatively regularly. They may reduce depression risk. Study abstract and summary
• Do the same with as many fat-rich vegan whole foods as you can, things like avocado, olive oil, coconut and coconut milk, fresh purslane, tahini, sunflower oil, fake dairy, margarine, and so on. You need fat. Fat is great. It keeps you full longer. Even saturated fat, like coconut oil, and possibly palm oil (Spectrum makes a good kind). If you aren't getting this stuff from meat you will probably crave it and even need it from other sources. Listen to your body here. Personally, I use a heck of a lot of olive oil in a lot of my cooking and as an additive to a lot of takeout. Nothing beats extra virgin olive oil to add a lot of calories to a meal. Yay calories! I plan to also try coconut milk as an addition to various things.
• Seek variety in all that you eat so you don't get stuck in a dietary rut
• Make lists of your favorite vegan foods. Make a bunch of categories: Fruits, vegetables, snacks, nuts and seeds, grains, legumes, prebought meals, junk foods, etc. You can't white-knuckle your way into going vegan, and frankly you shouldn't do it that way anyway or you could hurt yourself, so tempt yourself into eating more vegan foods. That way you just wind up eating more of your favorites that just happen to be vegan.
• Since in the beginning, especially in places like Texas (I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but they seem to think lard is a vegetable here), it's nearly impossible to figure out vegan anything, make lists of vegetarian foods in the same manner, and go "mostly vegetarian." Later, you can go mostly or entirely vegan; small steps.
• Roast or fried potatoes with the skin on. Good source of iron and vitamin C, plus other vitamins and minerals
• Sauteed or stewed kale, spinach, lamb's quarters, or collard greens, washed multiple times in a sink or bowl of cold water to get rid of grit, then flavored with salt, sauteed garlic, and a splash of lemon juice
• Saute some crushed garlic and salt in extra-virgin olive oil, add some jarred tomato sauce, serve it over cooked gnocchi or pasta, cook up some storebought vegan meat substitute on the side. Spaghetti and red sauce, hard to get tired of, great with salad on the side, definitely possible to eat this once or twice a week. FYI tomatoes are high in potassium
• For iron: try to consume it with vitamin C to increase bioavailability and 2 hours away from consumed caffeine or calcium. Tomatoes, as much of them as possible, cooked if possible. Lots of salsa and tomato sauce. Lentils, if they make you feel good, but if they don't, have them in moderation. Chickpea flour. Carob. Bok choi, a whole lot of herbs and spices, sauerkraut and therefore probably cabbage, fresh mint and parsley and dill and green onion, in fact fresh and dried herbs in general, obscure salad greens such as garden cress and corn salad and of course the more common salad stuff like romaine and cos lettuce, and purslane; cooked greens such as beet greens, spinach, swiss chard, turnip greens, kale, collards, and pickled grape leaves, and grape stuff such as wine and raisins. Also, molasses, soy products, beets, napa cabbage, green beans, blue corn, and as much chocolate and cocoa as you want. In the nuts section, peanuts, sesame seeds, pumpkin and squash seeds, cashews, and sunflower seeds; to a lesser extent pine nuts, pistachios, and almonds. Legumes-wise: white beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, black beans, lentils, black-eyed peas, lima beans. Moth beans if you can find them. Navy and pink beans to a lesser extent. In the canned food section, pimentos, capers, cucumber pickles, and black olives. In the tea section, peppermint, spearmint, chamomile, lemongrass. Seaweeds: agar-agar, kelp, laver. In short if you want enough iron eating more veg food you can't afford to cook flavorless food. Use the herbs lavishly. And apparently coffee contains a surprising amount of iron though the caffeine makes it less bioavailable. It also contains phosphorus.
• Salads made of kale can be pretty good with a good dressing
• Prepared foods with a surprising amount of iron: papadums, falafel, canned kidney beans, canned white beans
• Beans of every kind. Cooked beans from a restaurant that doesn't add meat or lard are generally a better bet because they're less of a hassle for a busy person. Home cook them only if you have patience to open and buy a bunch of cans, a really reliable slow cooker that works at a high enough temperature to cook the beans at a fast simmer, or a pressure cooker, or several hours every night with which to baby them. An Instant Pot also would work. Never, ever forget to soak dried beans overnight in plenty of water and drain the water before cooking them in fresh new water. They're fairly indigestible otherwise and they don't even taste good that way.
• Salads, and lots of them, with many kinds of vegetables. Not good as a main meal but certainly helpful as an addition to all 3 main meals of the day no matter what kind of diet you have. Develop a taste for this and you might also improve the way your skin looks, since lettuce and other salad greens are so rich in folate, fiber, and other kinds of good stuff. If you hate salads, consider getting good at making vegan dressings, and more or less drown them in it. Will let you know if I find good bottled dressings. The simple Israeli salad dressing I grew up with is just extra-virgin olive oil, salt, lemon juice, and a little crushed garlic. These ingredients are added to roughly chopped romaine lettuce, diced tomatoes and cucumbers, and optional minced herbs like parsley, green onion, mint, or cilantro; whatever's at hand or in season. It works fine on just about every vegetable and works great as a dip for boiled artichokes. You could replace the lemon juice with apple cider vinegar, which works in a pinch, but isn't as good.
• Bananas, just as is or added to things; when they start getting spots peel them, break them up small, and put one each in freezer containers of some sort so you don't lose them. There is only so much banana bread a person can eat. Luckily, frozen bananas make the perfect smoothie addition.
• Lentil soup, if you find a good recipe for it, or dal
• Orange juice or fresh oranges, because electrolytes, and also because vitamin C increases iron absorption
• Nut butters of various kinds, to avoid getting stuck in the peanut butter rut
• Wholegrain bread; can be gluten free - you should probably bake this yourself or find a trustworthy brand because quality varies so much. Great Harvest is generally good. Dave's Killer Bread recently fixed an issue they had which caused their breads to be bitter for some reason, and now they're pretty good again. Food For Life is alright, especially their Ezekiel bread. The gluten free alternatives include gluten-free crackers, home cooked quinoa, white rice, nonstale brown rice, and gluten free pastas such as Tinkyada. Asian rice pasta type stuff can often be found at an Asian food store, including banh trang, rice noodle vermicelli, and glutinous rice cakes which are usually in the fridge or freezer section. If you are gluten free it's a really good idea to invest in a rice cooker. Gluten free breads which are vegan are generally best made at home because I've never, ever had good storebought vegan gluten free bread. Your best bet for finding good recipes is probably Vegan Kitchen Magick
• Gluten-free vegan bread that's storebought and good does not exist. Schar gluten-free crackers are vegan and work as a kind of substitute, at least in terms of nutrition. Same deal with Enjoy Life lentil chips.
• If you have to eat gluten free things, you might have luck with vegan gluten-free flour mixes. I've not had good luck with anything else over the past ten years of baking and attempting to choke down gluten free anything, let alone vegan gluten free anything. Trying to make your own gluten free flour mix is something that has resulted in expensive, miserable failure for me so unless you have the cash to spare, or are far better at baking and very confident, don't make my mistake...
• Any kind of dish with lots of beans or legumes, because protein
• Roast or boiled carrots, sweet potato, or beets, for the vitamin A
• Avocado
• Chocolate, if you happen to like it, because it's chocolate! Also, its antioxidants are spectacularly good for you. Avoid going ham if you have a tendency towards forming kidney stones.
• Trail mix or nutritious snack mixes in case you're hungry and on the go or something. Dried fruits and nuts are rich in minerals, you need those. An emphasis on sunflower seeds, peanuts, and sesame seeds may help. Prunes and apricots are high in vitamin B6.
• Roasted chickpeas
• Green smoothies
• Food bars made of some variation of nuts and dried fruits, particularly dates and roasted almonds, or dates and peanuts

Fresh herbs and greens to add nutrition to a vegan diet, especially an astonishingly high amount of iron (source: Self Nutrition Data Nutrient Search Tool, which are probably worth growing, and definitely worth buying if you can get them fresh or dried

• Parsley
• Chives
• Green onions - during early quarantine this was the fresh vegetable for my family. As in, the only one. We grew it.
• Mints
• Basils
• Lamb's quarters
• Mallows
• Purslane, yes, as in the weed that people try to get rid of
• Mustard greens
• Turnip greens
• Dill
• Thyme
• Marjoram
• Oregano
• Savory
• Kale and/or spinach for the cold season, collards for the hot season; keep this away from rabbits
• Lettuce, corn salad, salad greens: also keep this away from rabbits or there will be absolutely nothing left; Instructables has instructions for making mesh coverings over gardens and this is necessary

Hints for vegan cooking and substitutes, as well as things that are vegan already

• The trick to making vegan anything is to forget all about the health factor. Fuck all that. You want the full fat coconut milk, the deep frying, the baked treats, the sugar, salt, fat, all that and a bag of chips. Literally. Because even with all that, you can attempt to make the unhealthiest vegan food on the planet and it will STILL be healthier than the animal-based alternative. As long as you cook a variety of stuff as opposed to just say, cookies alone, you're set because the world of vegan recipes is so saturated in kale and healthy shit that it's unavoidable anyway. Also, and this is counterintuitive, vegan food is usually too low in fat and a diet too low in fat is spectacularly unhealthy.
• 7/30/22 Another sneaky trick to getting yourself to eat more vegan foods is surprisingly little known. It is this: find the most ridiculously unhealthy, extravagant, white-bread heart-clogging abomination-type recipe you can. Replace all of the nonvegan items in it with vegan substitutes. Congratulations, it is now (somehow) healthy. Ice cream pie? Coconut ice cream and some Earth Balance margarine in a vegan cookie crumb crust, top with vegan whipped cream or whipped topping and some ice cream type sauces. Loaded bacon cheeseburgers with extra bacon? Impossible or Beyond burgers, Lightlife bacon, some veganized special sauce, the usual vegetables, toasted bun with Miyoko's fake butter, and a ton of cheddar Daiya. S'mores dip? GoMaxGo candy bars topped with Dandies and either vegan graham crackers or similar cookies for dipping. "Casserole" dishes normally loaded with like five cups of cheese and condensed cream-of-something soup? Yep, can be veganized. It takes some doing to find the vegan substitutes that work but once you do, your cooking life will never be the same, and plus bonus, less worrying about your cooking giving someone a heart attack.
• 10/26/22 Big gold mines of information for veganism can be had if you look at certain historical records. Specifically, "poor people food." Or whatever is called peasant cooking, country cooking, traditional meals, or the equivalent in whatever area. Historically meat-laden dishes were for the rich and privileged. Things like recipes from the Great Depression, wartime recipes from WWII in basically any country, recipes from your own family from way back when, anything that's stood the test of time for hundreds or even thousands of years, all of these deserve a closer look. That said, a lot of it does have a little bit of meat or fish in it to extend whatever was hunted, fished, or gathered - in the case of seafood. Finding replacements for these might be possible, might not, regardless digging up these heirloom recipes is still worth it. It's like digging up potatoes. Nothing, nothing, hey presto!
• Bland vegan foods, like tofu, beans and rice, or veggie burgers, can be made way better with sriracha. Most baked vegan savory dishes can be improved with pressed or minced garlic added before they cook. Onion powder is the supreme savory seasoning. Fermented foods like kimchi or sauerkraut generally improve bland meals if served on the side but are super expensive, so if you can afford the investment of jars with airlocks and fermenting weights, and if your home's temperature is usually below 75 F, make your own. No, you can't make ferments without these three things, ask me how I know. *grumble*
• There is a particular strip club in Portland and one of its major draws is cocktails and vegan food. Most cocktails are totally vegan, and surprisingly high in calories. Which is good, you want those in a vegan diet. That said, if you have any tendency to alcoholism or a need to escape from your everyday life as opposed to enjoy life, make mocktails instead. Which are also mostly vegan.
• To up your cooking game, try veganizing things from The Pioneer Woman. A surprising amount of stuff on this website is vegan already. Seriously. I used to read it almost every day, there's a lot in there. Bonus: these recipes don't fail. Since they cater to omnivores, taste is everything.
• Tofu is not the answer to everything. Too much will make you sick.
• Once you're cooking vegan foods a lot you will probably use applesauce, tomatoes, cashews, bananas, potatoes, and avocado. They're pretty useful.
• Substitute products include Miyoko's cheese and faux dairy (not that expensive anymore), Impossible Foods, Freely Vegan, Violife, and Kite Hill. I haven't tried the latter four. Kite Hill and Impossible Foods have good reviews. Here are a bunch of vegan fish and seafood substitutes. VegNews article And here is a big bunch of vegan products. GTFO It's Vegan Vegan steak may be closer than we think. Veg News article Ditto vegan milk. Second Veg News article Ditto vegan cheese. New Culture Food
• Miyoko's cheeses are the best on the market as far as I can tell when it comes to vegan cheese. The fake cheddar shreds or blocks are pretty amazing as snacks on top of crackers, but are no good melted. If you want a good melted vegan cheese, Daiya mozzarella has the opposite problem, halfway decent as a melted cheese but absolutely terrible when not melted. Suggestion: try that Miyoko's cheese on top of potato chips. The cheese tested was the fake cheddar, on jalapeno potato chips, but I bet it'd be good on your favorite kind. Bonus: normally when you pig out on cheese you get the itis, but with Miyoko's you feel like a million bucks after gorging.
• Miyoko's mozzarella ball tastes not at all of cheese but tastes delicious anyway once you get over the shock.
• NotMilk brand is tastier than almond milk and arguably also soymilk when used to add some nondairy milk to tea or coffee. Notmilk
• Uncle Eddie's Vegan Cookies are pretty good if you can find those. Uncle Eddie's
• There are some soy-based puddings out there and agar-based jellos. You can find these in health food stores. Check in the refrigerators. The vegan pudding with the panda logo is awesome stuff, try it.
• Speaking of agar-agar, you can order it online in packets as a gelatin substitute.
• Impossible meat tastes like the standard mystery meat you get in cafeteria food. Kind of a cross between pork and beef but less chewy. You can make sloppy joes with it, fill dumplings with it, make burgers with it. It's pretty amazing.
• Kite Hill makes plant-based tortellini and almond-based ricottas. Might be worth a shot.
• Need dry milk powder? Use coconut milk powder, or soy milk powder, or a mixture of both. Chances are you'll have to order it online though
• Agave syrup is a honey substitute. Use the dark kind. To add a bit of a wildflower honey flavor to it consider adding a tiny pinch of any or all of: cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, ground rosemary, ground thyme, ground lavender, and a little chamomile
• Dandies is the vegan brand of marshmallows. As in, it's the only one. Dandies The same company also makes Teese, a vegan cheese substitute, Temptation soft serve, and Temptation vegan frozen dessert, all for foodservice establishments.
• The best kind of vegan yogurt is called Forager. Here is its website It's got an unsweetened kind which is really good. You can also mix it with berries that've been frozen and then thawed. I eat this stuff with honey, but strict vegans can go for dark agave syrup.
• Forager also makes vegan sour cream. Haven't tried it but it's probably good.
• Beyond Meat is okay. It's not great, it's okay. I finally tried their burgers, sausage, and meatballs. It's like "synth meat, the meat of the future, made of holographic cows!" Does it actually taste like meat? I mean, kind of? Avoid it if you have the MTHFR gene defect. They stopped fortifying it with non-methylated B vitamins in most products; check the ingredients list, most if not all of their products seem to be ok now.
• Tofutti cream cheese is actually not half bad. It's one of the old school vegan brands, and it certainly beats having nothing on your bagel
• Beware dried beans! You have to pick out the rocks, rinse the dust off, soak the bastards overnight, drain them, and THEN cook them for four hours. Don't even bother if you don't have either a large stockpot and a lot of patience, or a slow cooker that gets hot enough to actually simmer. Or an instant pot, or pressure cooker.
• Hands down the easiest foods to make vegan are actually baked goods. It's hard to screw up when sugar's involved, but avoid all recipes that use these things in their sugary baked goods: flax "eggs," oil-free anything, fat-free anything, chickpea flour in sweet stuff, quinoa or tofu in dessert, other weird stuff that really shouldn't belong in dessert but somehow is in there. Also, most bread recipes are vegan already, especially the crusty artisan ones like baguette, focaccia, and ciabatta.
• The best vegan mayonnaise is called Vegenaise and the best kind of it is the soy-free kind.
• NEW NOTE 12/22/21 There are three vegan margarines on the market. They're called Earth Balance, Miyoko's, and Melt and they suck. Please someone make a competitor, please and thank you. 12/22/21 It has been made. Milkadamia buttery spread. Tastes more like butter than the other stuff. Should work ok in baking and sauteeing.
• To temper chocolate, chop up half of it, melt the other half in a double boiler on minimum heat and in my kitchen that just means a pyrex glass measuring cup in a saucepan of barely simmering water, take the other half off the heat, stir in the chopped bits, and dip a knife in there until it comes out without looking like it has rainbow streaks on it. Kind of like how oil on a puddle looks outside; you don't want it looking like that, you want it glossy. Dip stuff in the chocolate or dump a whole bunch of stuff in there and stir. Do this quickly before the chocolate hardens. Put the dipped or stirred stuff on wax paper lined baking sheets to cool, preferably in the refrigerator. Good dipped items include dried fruits, strawberries, Dandies, ruffled potato chips, vegan cookies, vegan cake, and whatever else you can think of.
• Fruit plates and fruit salads are vegan by default.
• Crudite trays are also vegan. Just cut up some raw vegetables, find a recipe for vegan ranch dressing or go with Italian dressing, and there you go.
• You can make some simple swaps of stuff you normally get - swap out regular milk for almond or soy, butter for margarine, soy yogurt for regular. These aren't too bad.
• While we're swapping stuff, the keto community has made several ingenious swaps for sugar. You can mine this website for advice. Sugar Free Londoner
• NEW 1/13/22: Future Meat Lab-grown cultured meat with the same dietary values and basic structure as meat from slaughtered animals. They've made chicken and beef analogs. Is it vegan? Honestly, who cares?

Vegan foods I plan to try soon and innovative products, now adding to these 10/23/22

• Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat are apparently adapting their market strategies to make tastier and tastier products. Therefore they may taste different now than they did last year. I will try. 6/18/23
• Quorn has started to listen to consumers going "hey, where's the vegan options?" apparently. They now have these options more readily available, and more of them. 6/18/23
• Climax A vegan cheese freelancing startup that cracked the code for how to make plant-based casein. That's the substance which gives cheese the ability to melt, brown, and generally taste good. 6/18/23
• Redefine Meat 3/9/23 It looks like filet mignon. Does it taste like it? (note: have never had filet mignon, will compare taste and iron content to regular steak)
• Quorn Vegan 3/9/23 Years ago this company made mycoprotein/egg vegetarian chicken cutlets. Nowadays it's branched into the vegan food sector.
• Meati 3/9/23 Mycoprotein meat.
• Teese 3/9/23 Teese vegan cheese. Company also makes Dandies marshmallows, vegan soft-serve ice cream for commercial outlets, and Temptation frozen dessert, as they explain at their website, Chicago Vegan Foods
• Parmela Creamery 3/5/23 Looks like a competitor to Miyoko's.
• Kraft Notco American Cheese Singles 3/5/23 Well, American cheese already has this strange taste to it, can't get much weirder than making it vegan too.
• Solar Foods Solein 10/23/22 Protein made from single-celled organisms nurtured with renewable energy-powered electric current and the nutrients found in air, especially CO2. In other words it's essentially protein made from thin air.
• Tattooed Chef 10/23/22 Frozen vegan meals that might just make the frozen vegan mealscape more diverse than just Amy's Foods 3/5/23 This tastes so bad.
• Hodo Foods They make tofu-based things. This company apparently supplies tofu to Chipotle for its vegan "meat" option, and it's breaking into tofu-based "eggs."
• Veganz A whole market of vegan items. Only in Germany but that probably will change.
• Daiya It lost a whole lot of quality when it got bought out by a megacorp. That said I'd rather try to get its corporate mexi-melt cheese blend than a dairy blend from heaven knows where. So will try it. 10/23/22 Have tried it. Kind of tastes okay, but isn't what I'd call "good."
• Kite Hill Buncha almond-based dairy products. Famous for its ricotta. 10/23/22 Have tried. Gross.
• Perfect Day Supposedly nearly identical to dairy-based ice cream. Definitely hopeful for this.
• JD's Vegan 10/23/22 Ice creams. Since So Delicious sold out, the vegan ice creamscape has been pretty grim. Maybe this fulfills the ice cream need.
• Remilk 10/23/22 Dairy-identical dairy made in the lab

Vegan foods for master chefs of chefness to attempt: I wish I could make these things. I also wish I could buy these things. Want to open a vegan food truck or market stall? Consider making these things as the best street food, like, ever:

• Idlis and sambar, possibly the best breakfast
• Refried bean burritos, gluten free options
• Dhokla
• Masala dosa, also dosas in general
• Chana masala
• Vegan chili
• Vegan chai
• Appam
• Kushari
• Mujaddara with multiple kinds of legumes
• Buddha bowls
• Pizza
• Knockoff versions of any or all of the storebought readymade meals you like, or those I recommended here
• Basically any really filling, substantial curry or dal with lots of beans or legumes
• Really substantial porridges made with multiple grains and legumes, using laba porridge and multigrain/legume/bean porridges from many cultures as an inspiration
• Japanese-style ways with soybeans, such as ganmodoki, edamame, abura-age, homemade soy sauce and miso paste, and fresh soymilk with flavor and sweetener
• Assorted ways with rice, such as fresh mochi and that galaxy of snacks made with it, fried mochi, poha, biryani, upma, Korean soup with glutinous rice cakes, homemade rice vinegar, nukazuke, puffed rice-based stuff such as rice krispy treats and chaat, rice pudding, and vegetarian sushi
• Assorted ways with coconut, such as a large assortment of sweet Southeast Asian dishes, rice with pigeon peas, Jamaican rice and peas, coconut milk, coconut condensed milk, coconut whipped cream on fresh fruit, coconut yogurt, a variety of curries, coconut tapioca pudding, and whatever else you can think of
• Assorted ways with various beans and seeds, such as lotus seed paste, adzuki bean paste, and mung bean popsicles
• Assorted ways with chocolate and cocoa
• Truly epic seasonal salads
• Truly epic seasonal fruit salads
• Seasonal soups
• Well-made pickles, of which in the US we actually don't have many that are widely available
• Seasonal produce type stuff, such as Mexican-style fruit with lime and chile and salt, roast chestnuts and sweet potatoes, roast corn, and mulled cider - farms making this kind of stuff can certainly make these value-added products
• Seasonal holiday-type stuff such as baby vegetables, hot cocoa with marshmallows, and pumpkin soup
• Chaat masala
• Samosas and chutney
• Vadas and chutney
• Bean tostadas
• Bean frybread
• Veggie dumplings, mushroom dumplings, tortellini, gnocchi, and other pastas
• Scallion pancake
• Falafel sandwich and fries
• Halal truck-style falafel
• Onion bhajis and tomato chickpea curry; bhajis in general actually
• Vegan pretzels
• Good smoothies - note: what is it with places overcharging for lousy smoothies? I could make something better at home with $1 in costs?! WTF?
• Soft serve vegan ice cream, with add-ons
• Vegan ice cream cones and ice cream parlor type stuff
• Vegan bubble tea
• Mango sticky rice
• Manju with red bean paste
• Green tea shaved ice with assorted toppings
• Popsicles and paletas
• Aguas frescas, mocktails, and similar refreshing drinks

The Vegan Foods Gallery of Infamy

Hands down the worst, most infamous, most inedible substances to grace a plate. If you would live a happy life, stay away.

• Sophie's Kitchen fake fish - the strange and surreal experience of eating something that looks like food, and smells like food, but doesn't actually taste like food.
• Tofu, plain
• Just Egg - there are no words to describe how bad it is
• Seitan, plain
• Tofu pups - they look like hot dogs. They taste like smoked leather.
• Crispy Western-style rice cakes - they try to flavor these and fail.
• Most brands of veggie burgers - good luck. Amy's has the least worst imho
• Follow Your Heart vegan cheese
• Chao vegan cheese
• Tofurkey
• Sweetened soy yogurt
• Various kinds of nondairy "milk" that are just kind of sad: quinoa milk, rice milk, oat milk
• The Western-style attempt at Japanese-style mochi
• Brown Rice, because it's almost never fresh
• Soyrizo
• Tomato paste - Most brands taste overcooked. Tomato puree aka passata is a better bet.

Inexpensive kitchen doodads for making cooking somewhat more fun or easy

• Popsicle molds
• Corncob holders
• Cookie cutters
• More mixing bowls. More mixing bowls. More! You can never have too many.
• George Foreman Grill. Your fancy panini press is just a glorified George Foreman Grill. Trust me on this one, it is worth it.

Expensive kitchen equipment for going a little extra with vegan foods in particular as well as everything else

• Instant pot or pressure cooker, for things like beans and lentils. No more cooking for 4-6 hours, alright.
• Reliable slow cooker that has a high heat setting, for everything but uncooked kidney and fava beans (poisonous if undercooked or cooked at too low a temperature!). You might want to deliberately seek out a slow cooker with a nontoxic insert to ensure that the surface in contact with the food is not coated in some kind of plastic, both for reasons of taste and health.
• An apron and a stupid looking chef's hat for morale so when you're cooking mostly naked you don't get grease splattered in hurtful places. Not that I'm condoning that, we wouldn't want to be politically incorrect now would we.

Super expensive kitchen equipment that could in theory help with making vegan foods and incidentally all foods. Nope, I don't have any of this stuff but it's good to know it exists!

• Cuisinart or other kind of food processor
• Vitamix blender - even more expensive than Cuisinart. Could also potentially go with that blender sold by the "Will It Blend?!" guy aka Blendtec brand.
• Stand mixer, for uh, bread, or a bread machine
• Ice cream maker
• Mortar and pestle for making stuff like curry paste
• Fermentation gear for stuff like pickles, kimchi, etc.
• Actually good cookpots that hold the heat in for a long period of time, like large enameled Dutch ovens and the like

Links to vegan recipes

Links to vegan recipe hubs

• NEW: Soy Not Oi Zine Best for experienced cooks that can add a little here or there because some of the recipes are kinda iffy
• The Woks of Life
• NEW: Just One Cookbook, Vegan Section
• Full of Plants Expensive, difficult, and very impressive if you can pull it off. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The best vegan recipe websites

• Traditionally Modern Food 11/24/23 Yay! At last I have found an authentic South Indian recipe blog! Most of the stuff is vegan, but so flavorful it's still worth the eating
• A Virtual Vegan 5/29/23 I keep losing this link in my notes so I'm stashing it here for future reference. Haven't cooked any of these foods yet but it's intriguing. Could they taste as good as they look? I don't know.
• The Gentle Chef 5/29/23 Also stashing this here. Haven't cooked from this yet. Has a tendency of containing "holy grail" recipes such as vegan scrambled eggs
• The Vegan 8 5/29/23 And this. Also haven't cooked from this yet.
• The Big Mans World Vegan Section 5/27/23 Have not yet tried these recipes.
• The Spruce Eats Vegan Section Sorted into 4+ stars. 5/29/23 haven't tried any yet
• My Vegan Minimalist 5/11/23 Has some very helpful recipes
• Oh She Glows 5/11/23 I really should have added this earlier. But, memory is terrible. This is likely where the multiple clones of "green monster" smoothies came from. It has the original ones. The author has a knack for taking ingredients that seemingly should not work together but do, if you follow the recipe and have a little faith.
• Thee Burger Dude This one seems relatively new as of 3/17/23. It's got some really interesting stuff.
• Loving It Vegan Really excels at the desserts. As for everything else, it requires great skill in the kitchen, and is difficult.
• BBC Good Food Veganuary Why is the BBC's website better than most others? No idea.
• Serious Eats Vegan
• Follow Your Heart Recipes These read like they were written by Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

The best vegan cookbooks

These were specifically chosen because they do not rely on the "but it's vegan!" ploy to convince people to say, grill up tofu steaks and claim those are good. They don't rely on mimics (yes, a Dark Souls reference) either, such as seitan, tofus, or other food made of other food that doesn't taste like food.

• 10/8/23 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer - lots of nonvegan curries but plenty upon plenty of vegan ones. Although I haven't cooked out of this yet I am looking forward to it.
• The Vegan 8 by Brandi Doming - this is the one to get if you want reliable recipes. Very few mimics, not super lengthy in terms of ingredients lists, doable. Worth your while.
• Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking by Dana Shultz - if any second vegan cookbook has a chance of actually having recipes you can cook on a weekly basis and add to your regular meal rotation, this is it
• The Uncheese Cookbook by Jo Stepaniak because all of the fake cheese recipes on the internet are vastly inferior
• How It All Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer plus the two others in that series. Note: The recipes are hit-or-miss so adapt them until you get results you like. However be aware that this is possibly the best vegan cookbook series on the market and truly surprising with the recipe results. Give it a shot.
• Skinny Italian by Teresa Giudice, for legit pizza dough and tomato sauce recipes
• This Ain't No Picnic by Joshua Ploeg
• Vegan Indian Cooking by Anupy Singla, but beware, for it requires expensive equipment and ingredients
• Provecho by Edgar Castrejon - it is the real deal if you want good Mexican food. Well written also. Have not cooked out of this yet.
• The Vegenaise Cookbook by Bob Goldberg - has some neat tricks I haven't heard of before, such as thickening fresh fruit pie with pectin and cornstarch instead of gelatin, and using Vegenaise in carrot cake. Definitely worth a shot. Have not cooked out of this yet.
• East Meets Vegan by Sasha Gill - Had me goin "son, I am a frighten" every few pages with the fanciness of the ingredients and the elaborate recipes. But these would probably impress anyone you feed these to. If you're serious about cooking, then give this a try. Have not cooked out of this yet. Have followed the guidelines for soaking beans found in the book. They're game changing.
• Taste of Home Holidays & Celebrations, and I'd imagine Taste of Home's other cookbooks - Yep, mostly nonvegan. But the few vegan recipes that are in these are both doable and cheap, and designed for hardcore carnivores so you know they won't suck. What's weird is that you can spend hours, like I did, on their website finding crappy vegan recipe after crappy vegan recipe. Not so with the actual cookbooks.

Old School vegan cookbooks

These are the cookbooks I either grew up tackling head-on or recent cookbooks that don't diverge much from that. They do usually rely on mimics, and vary in difficulty from "doable" to holy shit I've been cooking for two weeks and I'm still not done making one ingredient for this elaborate recipe wtf

• Straight from the Earth by Myra Goodman and Marea Goodman - actually written by people who helped start Earthbound Farm. Belongs to the "old school" of vegan cooking in that the ingredients aren't things you need to buy online from far, far away. Relatively simple and straightforward, and worth experimenting with.
• The Engine 2 Diet by Rip Esselstyn - another "old school" vegan cookbook. Written by a firefighter to stave off heart disease. Evidently used to feed a bunch of burly firefighters in Austin, Texas. This author also made a bunch of other cookbooks as sequels.
• The Oh She Glows Cookbook by Angela Liddon - I used to follow her a lot on her blog and cooked a lot of the recipes she made. She's good at what she does.
• Veganize This! by Jenn Shagrin - it is difficult. You have been warned.

A note on veganism with regards to being hardcore about it: if you are so hardcore as a vegan that you want to avoid things like leather and bone-char-processed sugar and honey, consider this. Humans, being animals too, are living in some extremely bad situations worldwide right now. Clean, safe running water and good air quality are denied to most humans, also good education, human rights, ethical birth control (ahhh, abortion debate again, no I am not getting into that here), good infrastructure, these are things the whole world needs. Humane treatment of humans is just as important as that of animals. And here's one more thing: most of the planet can't actually be vegan or they will die. There just aren't enough b12 supplements and vegan foods available in far-flung places let alone money and resources; hence people hunt and fish, or just (most of the time) go on a see-food diet. Once the whole world actually has a choice as to if they can be vegan or not, then it's appropriate to soapbox about "you should go vegan." Til then it's probably best to do everything possible to help get the world there, to such a situation. If you ask yourself what you can do to help, you'll probably figure something out. I do have to say that vegan eats are my favorite eats because of how futuristic they are, and I am quite a nerd so futuristic is my thing.

A note on veganism as an ethical choice: I think every person who wants to be as ethical as possible can reason this out by a careful study of nature.

All text, not links, recommended books or products, or images, is © 2022 TortillaTortilla.

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