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…

Thanks to the excellent Beijingveg.com website, during our five weeks in Beijing we were able to amass enough mock meats to satisfy any gluten glutton.

Pure Lotus is supposed by most listings magazines to be the best vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We found the food quite good, but the way it was served was distracting. The menus are the size of small tombstones and as easy to hold. The dishes have names like “grand swallow nose treasure hot hot cold cold.” (I made that up but they honestly were that silly). And the serving dishes were enormous splats of porcelain, with design features like big holes in the side through which scalding hot liquids could pour.

The vegetable dishes were disappointing, but the mock meats were pretty good. This was where we had the most delicious mock fish we’ve tasted: a soft, flakey ‘meat’, with a thick ‘skin’ of pleasantly chewy seaweed, served steaming hot, in a delicious sweet, dark, bubbling sauce. The mock ribs were decent, but I wasn´t sure about the ´bones´. Having a bit of wood in my mouth just felt wierd. (Elsewhere we´ve had versions with edible ‘bones’ such as celery or lotus root. Much better.)

So, Pure Lotus, while it had some excellent dishes, was overrated, over priced, and silly. Having said that, I do agree with my friend Diana that the dry ice fruit at the end was good silly. And the teacups were cool.

My personal eating highlight in Beijing has been eating with the Vegan Social Club of Beijing at Still Thoughts. The food is reasonably priced, and there’s a good selection of dishes. I ‘m not sure it’s the best vegan food in Beijing; but eating in a group of 10 – 20 other veggies means you get to try pretty much everything on the menu. Highlights included a ‘crispy duck’ of fried tofu skin wrapped around dark, meaty mushrooms; large, soft, slightly spicy green peppers in a black bean sauce (something like a Chinese pimientos del padron); and long, thin aubergine, sliced crossways, with garlic and seitan stuffed between the slices. The green vegetables here were fresh and crunchy.

If that was my favourite eating experience, the restaurant that worked best without needing a big, fun crowd of fellow veggies was Bodhi Sake. It was in a beautiful setting: the courtyards and rooms of a Buddhist temple hung with lanterns and art. The menu had a good selection of vegetables and mock meats. The food was presented beautifully. We had the most memorable mock meat we’ve had yet: pork belly. It was served in an earthenware vessel on top of a bed of salty greens. The ‘belly’ was a type of gluten with a slightly smokey flavour; the ‘fat’ was konjac (or possibly rice-based) and melted in your mouth. We also had a delicious dish of long, dark, string shaped mushrooms, fried until nearly crispy.

As for my favourite individual dishes, the best greens we had were at Lotus in Moonlight. They also did a fantastic dish of tiny cubes of soft tofu, fried to a salty crisp on the outside, while keeping the inside silken.

My favourite mock duck was the duck at Beihe. It had a good savoury taste, a pleasant texture, and was served with celery instead of cucmber, which worked very well. I suspect the real reason I liked it so much was that it came in a comedy “duck” shape.

The best spicy dish was fish at the restaurant by the Big Bell temple. It blew my head off. I liked it so much I went back again on another visit to Beijing. It had a nice atmosphere (maybe a bit too dark though) and that dish was amazing. Also good was the little chunks of ‘lamb’. The place was hard to find, but fantastic value and really tasty.

An honourable mention goes to Cat restaurant, which to my knowledge is the only organic vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. They spoke great English, were incredibly friendly, and served the freshest vegetables I had.

A finally, a dishonourable mention to Gong De Lin. It is often mentioned in guidebooks as thir token vegetarian restaurant, but I have no idea why. It was without doubt the worst meal we’ve had in a Chinese vegetarian restaurant – for example, a mock fish which was a lump of mashed potato with a gluey coating, in a pool of watered down tomato ketchup. Don’t go!

I’m missing Beijing. It´s an interesting city, and a great place to be vegan.

In June, we spent abut 10 days in Xinjiang, the wild west of China. The indigenous population here is Uighur. They speak Uighur, are Muslim, and have facial hair on their upper lips (the men, at least). Nothing here is what an outsider would identify as Chinese (unless you count the roads, buildings, shops and food brought into the cities by the Chinese immigration policy).

Food-wise, we were quite worried. We had heard that it’s meat meat meat in Xinjiang. First impressions confirmed this. The most popular snack is chuan’r: spicy mutton kebabs cooked in the street.

But in the end, we did pretty well. To start with, we located the nan bread for which the region is famous. Street bakers dot the Uighur neighbourhoods in two-person teams, one kneading and rolling out pizza-shaped dough, the other shaping it on a convex surface with a thick crust, impressing a pattern of rings with a spikey tool, dabbing the surface into a mixture of minced onion and cumin seeds, and then sticking it to the wall of a tandoor-style oven to bake.

They sell huge piles of these in the mornings. When it’s fresh and warm, the bread is absolutely delicious. it quickly goes hard (and keeps for days). When it’s crispy, it’s less nice on its own, but goes well with juicy fillings like flavoured tofu from Chinese stores. Some stalls also sold vegan corn breads. It was so nice to have “proper” bread again (i.e. not the sweet, dry, cakelike stuff you get in Chinese bakeries).

Other dry street goods stood out as vegan. Xinjiang is famous for its fruit, and Uighur areas are covered in dried fruit stands, selling up to eight varieties of amazing raisins like nothing you get at home, plus strange but delicious dried tomatoes, figs, plums, apricots, almonds, walnuts…. more than I got to try. Roasted pulses are also common. Once, a bus stopped on a highway for a toilet stop right next to a stand selling at least 15 varieties of roasted pulses: all of which I had never seen before.

In Kashgar, we had one of our favourite meals in a long, long time. Kahsgar is on the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan, and we found a Pakistani street restaurant which cooked us a simple, homestyle meal of channa dahl and a green leafy vegetable. It was amazing.

We also did really well in Urumqi, where there was a fantastic vegan Chinese restaurant called Yuanqi, which did fantastic jiaozi and chuan’r.

However, it seemed a shame not to be able to sample proper Uighur food. So we found a tourist office and got them to write down what we do and don’t eat in Uighur, and we started using it at restaurants and street stands.

In the end we were able to eat three types of authentically Uighur food: pancakes, konjac noodles, and laghman noodles.

Laghman noodles are hand-pulled, doughy noodles, much like you get in other parts of China, but with a rich, tomato and vegetable sauce. I assume the standard version has some meat slipped in, but we succeeded in getting a veggie option. It tasted really quite Italian to me. Pictured is a version we got with small, square noodles, which made it seem even more Italian. It came with delicious rose tea.

The Konjac noodles are also very common. You see vendors in street markets slicing thick noodles off a large, jelly-like block with a big knife. They are served cold, with a range of magic sauces (vinegar, soy, broth, etc) poured on top, and a topping of raw garlic and lots of chilli. A very strong flavour which I loved but which does your breath no favours. I was a little dubious about some of the magic sauces but I took a long time explaining my food choices and they assured me it was OK.

The highlight for me, though, was the pancakes. I first saw them in the Wusi Night Market, an amazing weekend spectacle of lights and fire and smoke and smells in Urumqi. There were two types: one fried in a lot of oil, and one cold. The fried one contained egg, but the other one (xiàn bǐng xiÇŽo cài – pancake with pickle stuffing) was OK. What really excited me, though, was the fillings. About 15 different bowls of salads and pickles. Strips of marinaded tofu. Pickled cabbage. Lightly fried, finely chopped mushroom. Beansprouts with garlic and nuts. You point at what you want and they roll them all into a delicious little package for you. I found variations elsewhere, often with meat, but usually with the option to have no meat. Another delicious one contained a green leafy vegetable, strips of tofu, and some spicey flavourings, squeezed between two thin pancakes, sealed at the edges with water, and then dry fried, rolled, and sliced. Like a Xinjiang pop tart, or something. Serve with icy, dirt-cheap beer.

As our time in China is coming to an end, I thought it was time to list some of tasty or bizarre varieties of mock meat we’ve encountered. I’ve been following the Mocking of Meat at Hezbollah Tofu and can’t wait till I get a chance to do some serious seitanising like this wicked-looking roulade.

´Ribs´, when done well, are delicious. They need to be marinated properly in a really savoury sauce. We preferred ones with edible ´bones´ to those with bones made of wood. Why do I want a mouthful or thick toothpicks?

One of our favourite dishes was ´beef in XO sauce´. No picture, annoyingly. It was strips of seitan deep fried to a crispy/chewy texture, in a delicious sweet/savoury sauce. We had this, and the ribs pictured above, at Pure Lotus in Yangshuo (check out the photos of their food on their website).

An old favourite, and the only one to be found with any regularity in the UK, is mock duck. What´s entertaining here, though, is that sometimes it´s been molded so that it supposedly actually looks like a duck. This one´s from Beihe Restaurant in Beijing. I got the parson’s nose. (Which I just found out is properly called a pygostyle. Mock Pygostyle! Yeah!)

Beijingers are obsessed with ´meat-on-a-stick´, or chuan´r. Tiny chunks of lamb (or stranger meats like a pig´s pizzle) are pierced with a stick, painted with a cumin-chilli mix, and roasted over what appears to be actual lumps of coal. For ages I couldn´t work out what the signs were that looked like this: 串. Then I realised they were pictures of meat-on-a-stick. It took me a couple more weeks to find out that the actual Chinese character for chuan´r is 串.

Anyway, we´ve had it a couple of times, including tofu-in-a-stick or broccoli-on-a-stick variants, but the best meaty one was in a Vegan Yuanqi Restaurant in Urumqi:

Another favourite dish, which also scores high on the ´wierd´ front, was Bodhi-Sake´s pork belly (and I propose to try emulating some real pork belly dishes back at home):

Surprisingly common, yet not-particularly-pleasant, is mock whelk:

We´ve had two much better ´seafood´ dishes: mock fish, and mock cuttlefish. This mock fish was from Pure Lotus in Beijing, and was one of our favourites:

The mock cuttlefish pictured next was from Hong Kong. Mock cuttlefish? I absolutely lack the experience to just its mock accuracy (mockuracy?), but it was pleasantly chewy strips something rice-based, somehow made to go curly, and fried with a crisy, salty coating.

The single most bizarre fishy discovery was mock sea cucumber in Bodhi-Sake, Beijing. A vegetable which is made in the form of a fish which is named after a vegetable. And, what’s more, a fish which looks like a knobbly poo. It didn´t taste of much (maybe like the real thing? I have no idea). But it looked pretty cool.

I think my least favourite mock meat is mock prawns. We´ve had them a couple of times. They are made of some kind of very firm material, molded into prawn shapes, and flavoured like prawns. Most mock meats taste interesting and natural, and stand in their own right as interesting ingredients. These prawns tasted completely artificial, a mockery of mock meat. They are the pink things in the hotpot platter below:

Update: No, James: sadly, on this trip, we are yet to find a decent mock ortolan.

Update 2: Since I wrote this we went back to Beijing one last time, where I witnessed perhaps the wierdest ersatz buchery yet: mock pidgeon