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?

Before we went to Mongolia, someone told me that when I returned I would open my bag, and would be knocked over by a warm, greasy wind of gaseous mutton fat.

And experience did prove it to be a pretty counterveganistic culture.  I learned that there are traditionally two distinct food seasons in Mongolia: winter, the time of mutton in all its glorious variations; and summer, season of hard cheese and fermented mare’s milk.

In addition, we found that there were three types of food shop. One, a shop selling various semi-dried, fatty, meat and blood and gristle sausages and pickles. Two, a shop selling slightly rancid butter and a variety of dairy products heavily based on rancid butter. Three, a shop selling vegetables. The vegetables they sell are mostly limited to cabbage, carrot, and potato.  Sometimes you got a kind of supermarket with all three shops rolled into one.  (In fairness, there was a State Department Store with a decent range of stuff, and one OK market, too)

For lunch on our first day, I had a plate of grated carrots, and Kim had two fried eggs. By this point we were starting to feel a bit down about the food.

But then I actually bothered to do some research on the internet, and found a wild claim of FIVE vegetarian restaurants in Ulaan Bataar! And I found a website with them pinpointed on a Google Map, too!

The first we tracked down was the MARS cafe, a slightly grimy old cafe hidden at the back of the third floor of a run-down clothes market.  Everything was written in Mongolian, but I did enough sign language to assure myself it was vegetarian. We ordered a plate of something or other (”looks like little poos” said Kim) by pointing at a photo. I asked them if they minded me watching them cooking it, and it turned out to be a sauce of tomato ketchup and water, thickened with flour, and seasoned with powdery white stuff (I assume sugar and salt). Then a bunch of soya balls were boiled in it, and it was served with salad and rice.  It was hardly amazing but I guess at least it was authentically Mongolian-ish. I was delighted. We ate it while a huge photo of a lady decked out like the Virgin Mary gazed benignly down upon us.

We were puzzled as to how veggie food could appear in such an unlikely location. Later in the day, we visited another vegetarian restaurant (and vegan/vegetarian tour agency) called Luna Blanca (we ordered take-out tofu and satay ‘chicken’.)  While we waited we chatted to the staff, and it emerged that they are vegetarians and vegans because they are practitioners of what they called “Quinin“. They said it was a form of meditation, but I couldn’t get a clear idea of what it was all about. That is, until I saw some leaflets with a woman decked out in some fancy regalia, entitled ‘The Supreme Master Ching Hai’.

Whom I recognised as the Virgin Mary from the Mars Cafe (there she is, above).

Clearly something strange is afoot in Mongolia.  A scary-looking person who looks like a slim Imelda Marcos is promoting vegetarianism in the land of meat and milk. Oh, if only we could have a million Supreme Masters to rescue and love all the dogs that abound! We later found out another new age guru and promoter of vegetarianism, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, is also popular here.

In any case, thanks to the Supreme Master and her followers, I managed to have some amazingly delicious Mongolian-style dumplings, which were big and fat and stuffed with fried cabbage and carrot (and some unecessary TVP chunks). I also tried a Mongolian soup (rather bland); doughy noodles (traditional but not really my thing); a stir fry containing potato chips, mushrooms, pepper and TVP which reminded me of Peruvian Lomo Saltado; and a borscht (delicious).

But still, it made me uneasy.  I don’t want people to be veggie just because The Supreme Master tells them so. However much I like her camp outfits and culty internet TV channel, once people realise she’s a complete fraud, won’t they start to think being veggie might just be a thing for campy, imperious, culty wierdies?

Come to think of it…