A Vegan Called Bacon

I love growing my own food.  I’m really bad at it, but I love it.  Personally, I don’t think the difference in taste between home-grown and shop-bought is particularly obvious; what really gets me excited is the story behind it.

When you have a potato with a story, suddenly it’s no longer a lumpy, starchy, tasty food.  It’s sweat, cursing, improving the soil over months, agonising over if I should buy animal manure, choosing seed potatoes, planting seed potatoes, weeding, protecting, and then plunging my garden fork into the dark earth to produce little nuggetty golden-white eggs of potato goodness.  That’s a potato.

The other thing that’s exciting is getting weird-shaped vegetables:

I get an instant back-story thrill from wild food; especially mushrooms, with all their could-it-be-poisonous mystique and crazy, unpredictable growing habits.  (Incidentally, I’ve recently found the best edible mushroom book ever written.  Seriously.  It has great photos, a brilliant key, a practical jacket.  My favourite book of the year.)

Now winter’s starting to peer round the corner, and I’ve found what are probably my last edible mushrooms of the year (Wood Blewits, above), it’s time to write about the exciting stuff we got up to this autumn.  It’s been a great season of getting close to the land, and getting involved with food that has a story.

When we got back from our travels in August, we set off on a mission to learn about different sorts of sustainable communities, and on the way, had some great food.

Check out this luscious Victorian walled kitchen garden at Canon Frome Court, overflowing with salad and fruit:

Canon Frome was an amazing place; somewhere we felt we could live.  I’ll write about it more another time.

One of the most inspirational places we visited was Brithdir Mawr in Wales.  They, too, have two incredible vegetable gardens (plus some great buildings; at the top of this garden is a very cool geodesic house):

They also had a beautiful farm kitchen, with a big wood-burning stove for preparing the communal meals:

One important aim for this community is to be as carbon-neutral as possible.  I think they said they grow 80% of their non-staple food (they do buy in a lot of rice, oil, and so on).  Communal meals are about four times a week, and were all wonderful when we were there.

What made Brithdir Mawr particularly interesting, from a food point of view, was the seed company that is run from the property. The concept of seed-saving and heritage foods is best explained on their own site.  Suffice to say it’s an important and fascinating subject, but it also means that they have available a steady stream of interesting vegetables you’ve never heard of.  Check out, for example, these achocha: a type of cucumber, the skin of which you fry as if it were green pepper.  In the foreground is raw achocha; on the plate in the background, some achocha fried for breakfast with home-made beans on home-made toast.  Home-produce-tastic.

While we were there, we also took the opportunity to buy some laverbread.  This is a local speciality: essentially, laver seaweed (a.k.a. dulse), boiled for hours until it is a greenish-black pulp.  You buy it in the butcher’s, for some reason.  They advised me to mix it 50/50 with oats, make it into little balls, and fry them in bacon fat.  I didn’t want to look like a vegan English wuss, so I just nodded, went home, and tried it without the bacon fat.  They were absolutely delicious, and I am gutted that I forgot to take any photos.

That got me going with the idea of collecting seaweed myself.  Here’s Kim collecting sea lettuce.

It was really nice, but I stopped eating it when someone told me about the raw sewage pumped into the estuary where we were collecting it.

Still, food with a story, eh?

Meat-free restaurants don’t usually span a very wide range.  At one end it’s an earthenware bowl of earthy, nutty, lumpy splodge, served with a nutty crust and some earth.  At the other end, it’s big white plates, dotted with vegetarian versions of classic British favourites (i.e. things we borrowed from other countries in the early 90s): something Asian with the rice in a pretty pile, or roasted things with peppery leaves and a balsamic reduction.

All of which can be very tasty, but all of which I’ll make at home some time or other.  So I was hopping from foot to foot and squealing a little bit when we decided to go to Saf, a vegan restaurant that does the contemporary cuisine thing: little fiddly towers of things I don’t normally eat, plated with smears of contrived juice I’d never bother to make myself.

When we arrived, the place was all mood lighting and elegant furniture, and packed with Shoreditch’s finest.  (For the benefit of non-Londoners, this means beautiful people, with surprising haircuts and serious spectacles).  It looked very clean and a little bit special.  Which, being nothing like our kitchen, is a good prelude to getting food I wouldn’t get at home.

First of all, we were presented with a fancy cocktail list.  It’s extensive and exciting, and nearly makes you drunk reading it.  (That, combined with the dim lighting means my photos are rubbish).  Unfortunately, we had to wait nearly 30 minutes for them, after which a lot of the hand-rubbing anticipation had worn off.  Kim’s Mojito Rosa (a mojito with sour cherry infused rum) was the best – still recognisably a mojito, but you could really taste the cherry.  My Jasmine Pearl Martini, however, pretty much tasted like a Martini.  Overall, these cocktails were very good, though not really as excitingly different as their names would suggest.

We loved our starters.  The raw butterbean hummus was creamy and the wafers of bread were crunchy.  The gazpacho (above) was very interesting: it involved tomato, red onion, and melon, if I remember correctly.  It looked stunning, and tasted good.  Most exciting of all was what I assume to be something of a signature dish: cheese and caviar on biscuits.  The cheese was made of cashew nuts, the biscuits were raw and very, very crispy, and the caviar was introduced to us personally.  Apparently someone had injected some kind of fruit juice into some kind of seaweed-based jelly, thousands and thousands of times, to create these little clusters of wobbly balls.

The mains were definitely less unusual and exciting.  The best dish was the buckwheat risotto, which was creamy and had a lovely bite to it, was definitely something I might have made at home.  The Buddha Bowl (tofu, sambal, kimchee etc; below) was also excellent, but again, a disappointingly ordinary concept.

The two raw dishes we ate were the most exciting-sounding things, yet not so pleasant to eat.  A mushroom stack gave us a thrill of excitement followed by mild nausea, both feelings due to its profoundly mushroomy mushroomness.  You could just about manage half a forkful.  The lasagne, presented beautifully (in a stack, again) was a fairly unappetising mix of dull and similar earthy flavours, and was on the chewy side of chewy.

When it comes to desserts, I’m not so sure that novelty and interest are necessarily good things.  I guess Saf agrees, because the dessert menu was largely ordinary but delicious-sounding, and desserts turned out to be largely ordinary and delicious.  The ice cream was excellent and when the Ganache Tart was shared around, everyone make little moaning noises.  But, because I’m obsessed with novelty food, I stupidly went for the Superfood platter.  I can’t remember exactly what it involved any more, other than some goji berries made an appearance, but I can remember that it was a smorgasbord of tough, dry, dull, and sickly morsels.  (And some nice ice cream).

We finished with a pretty hefty bill, but to be fair, this was because we’d all got carried away with the booze.  The actual food, considering the work that’s gone into it, was pretty cheap.

Overall, the experience left me impressed, excited and cynical at the same time. A bit like the prospect of an Obama presidency.

On the one hand, exciting-sounding food often tasted disappointing, and the best tasting stuff was quite ordinary in concept.

On the other hand, it was wonderful to see absurdly elaborate food and drink, presented impeccably to a packed out venue of trendy-somethings, who were presumably either unaware or uninterested in the fact it was mostly-raw vegan.  Interestingly, most of the marketing literature calls it ‘botanical’ food; I am very happy with this because I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the label ‘vegan’, and what’s more, I doubt it would be so full if it was called “The Virtuous Vegan”.

In the end, the caviar and cheese dish is what really streams out rays of slivery light in my memory.  It made me think that taste and presentation are only two thirds of the ingredients of a really good meal.  The other third is a good story.  A hand-syringed drop of fruit juice encased in seaweed jelly makes me think of a bent-over, squinting, line cook, swearing under her breath about the smug scientific chef who came up with the bloody idea.  Caviar just makes me think of dead pregnant fish.

I use my horn-like projections.

From And I Am Not Lying via Two Doctors.

Hooray, mushroom season.  I absolutely love searching out the little fellows.  It’s a gladiatorial contest ‘twixt man and fungus.  I know they hide from me, but I know their tricks.  The tasty ones (like chanterelles) send out their inedible friends (russulas, usually… that’s the slimy red or yellow ones) as decoys.  But I get them in the end. Hunting, vegan style.

Plus, you get the thrill of sometimes deciding, for a change, to select some ones you haven’t eaten before, and to try eating those, and seeing if you die or not.  For example, the other day, I picked a few Amethyst Deceivers.  And if that’s not a name to make you think maybe they’re inedible, I don’t know what is.  (Apart from “Destroying Angel”, I suppose).  Just take a look at them, they’re purple for god’s sake:

They were pretty tasty, in the end.  A nice firm texture, and a bit nutty.

So, whenever I find a new and interesting-looking mushroom, I take photos or a specimen and identify it. And then forget what it was called. The other day I found a new way of remembering them. Here’s what you do:

• Go picking with children, including an 11 month boy.  (Remembering to give all the children lots of lessons and reminders about not touching a mushroom unless an adult says it’s OK)
• Find an interesting new specimen and pocket it, separately from the edible ones
• Go home.  Have a beer and cook dinner.  Get hot and leave your jacket on the floor.
• Have the baby boy remind you that the mushroom was in your pocket by seeing him with it in his mouth
• Become numbed with dread.  Spend 2 hours positively identifying the mushroom and feeling like a dangerous fool

And it turns out it’s not toxic.  Probably.  Very much.

This season, we’ve also enjoyed some shaggy ink caps, hedgehog mushrooms, ceps, and some chanterelles:

If you’ve not gone shrooming before, the only decent way to start is by going with an expert.  In the UK, at least, it’s pretty easy to find Fungi Forays led by obsessive professors in old woodland areas, during the season.  As for cooking them, I think it’s a shame to shroud the interesting flavours that you’ve spent so long hunting down.  I prefer to fry them up in a neutral-flavoured oil, with only a small bit of garlic (if you really must) and maybe a splash of white wine.  And salt and pepper, of course.  And if you can cook them outside, all the better for that wild-man-or-woman-of-the-woods vibe.

Today I read a frustrated rant about preachy vegans. I like unpreachy vegans. I want to be one. When you are ethically pure, morally consistent, infinitely compassionate and most definitely right, it’s pretty hard, but I like to think I try.

When we were in South America we met a great couple called Dan and Laura. Dan is a complete foodie. Especially when he’s had some glasses of wine. Then he starts talking tenderly and excitedly about food. When he talked about his dad’s vegetable plot in Guernsey, it practically made my eyes well up. And when he talked about some kind of meaty chicken thing involving taking all its bones out and rolling it up, even that sounded interesting.

One of the nice things about Dan is that he loves all food. He doesn’t think that a meal without meat is incomplete. He’s just as capable as getting excited about a shiny, bulbous, purple-black aubergine as a pimply, waxy duck carcass. It was great, because we both got to talk about food without anyone getting preachy.

I met a vegan the other day (at the Vegan Social Club of Beijing) who reckons every vegan dreams of opening a restaurant. Well, it has been decided, during our over excited, wine-drenched shouting, that Dan and I are without doubt going to open a restaurant where every vegan dish on the menu has a meat one next to it.

His meats would be “cruelty-free” (at least up to the point of slaughter). I would get a chance to convince meaty people that food without animals is OK. Vegans and non-vegans could go out for meals together. Dan and I would both learn more about food of all kinds. Maybe a couple fewer cows might die or a couple of pigs might lead a happier life.

I don’t know how many vegans would be into this kind of idea. Definitely not the preachy ones. I’m such a softcore vegan that when we were in Ecuador, and I was in charge of the kitchen on the farm, I actually cooked some kind of chicken in cream sauce for the workers (without tasting it, of course). Apparently it was really good, though I think they would say that, wouldn’t they.

I’m even quite interested in the mechanics of butchering and cooking meat. When our friend Esteban had a sheep slaughtered for his birthday I had to go away when they killed it - it was horrible. But once the deed was done, I quite enjoyed watching the neighbour use an ancient kitchen knife, wielded in a swish-slash-swish-sloosh-slash kind of way, to turn a previously terrified sheep into a set of chops, a woolly rug, and, well, a sheep’s head.

So, given I’m really only opposed to killing animals, rather than to meat itself (obviously I’m not going to buy or eat it), I’ve been thinking more about bringing the good stuff about meat into vegan food. It’s quite common to hear people express puzzlement about pretend meats (”I don’t see the point”), and it’s true that I don’t care for the taste of blood. And I have noticed the phrase “that really smells of fish” usually indicates distaste.

But one thing I’ve realised is that there is something missing in a lot of vegan cuisine that you get “for free” with meat, and that’s different varieties of chewy. So I hereby vow to investigate in full all its forms, chewy and preferably proteinous vegan foodstuffs, including seitan, tofu, and weird gelatinous things made from strange plants.

Who fancies some vegan whelk?