I have started inventing and working with vegan recipes. Although I myself have not yet fully committed to veganism I am very close to it. This is for me for health reasons partly (which is why it isn’t good for me to eat even humanely raised animal products), but because I fully believe that the slaughterhouse and mass production of meat is the primary cause for the ruination of our planet, the collapse of modern morality and a holocaust on our mammal cousins, I am doing it for the dreaded “moral” reasons.

Vegan cooking, or baking, is for me a delightful mystery. I’m partly interested in finding good substitutes for traditional flavors — some can’t be replicated, obviously. And partly interested in simply inventing whole new schools of cooking that are so good no one even realizes they are eating vegan.

Most of the vegan stuff I see is meat replications. And that’s fine, I suppose. If you’re not eating meat chances are you are missing it. But to me that is the most disgusting part of vegan eating. Fake meat, with the exception of some fake chicken and tempe, tastes foul to me. Your mouth knows it isn’t eating meat. So I mostly will likely stay away from that and rather focus on flavor, texture and nutrients, rather than imitating food from the culture of meat. We’ve been eating meat for millions of years now. We know how to eat it. We know that we like it. There is no point in trying to replace it. Giving up eating meat doesn’t meat stuffing something that kind of looks like meat into your mouth and learning to love it. It’s about turning down an entirely different street. My suggestion to meat eaters who are worried about the planet is to continue to eat meat but do two things.

1) never eat meat that you don’t know where it came from. If you don’t know how the animal was raised chances are it wasn’t raised well and it will be bad for you, bad for the planet and horrific treatment of animals. We never evolved to become this monstrous.

2) Only eat meat on special occasions when you can purchase it yourself or eat at a restaurant where the meat is tracked. This is, of course, if you notice yourself giving a damn. Most people don’t. You eat LESS meat this way. It costs LESS because you eat it less. You instantly improve your health, the planet’s health and earn good karma by helping animals emerge from this terrible thing we’re doing to them that we’d all like to pretend we aren’t doing to them.

So that’s it. Hope you enjoy these recipes. I am but a learner.