So today I was searching for “vegan christmas cookies” on YouTube hoping to decide what I might make that could be cutout like a gingerbread cookie but not actually be a gingerbread cookie and while, YouTube did return a lot of vegan recipes, it’d throw in random not vegan recipes. I can’t imagine New York Times or Preppy Kitchen tagged their videos as vegan. Why would anyone want to trick someone? I don’t want to risk veganizing a non-vegan recipe either. With so many resources available, there’s usually not a good reason to. At least in my experience, it’s best to start with an actual vegan recipe. Sometimes flax egg WILL fail you. More often than not, it’s best to alter the ratio of ingredients when not using eggs than it is to add a vegan sub in its place.
This also happens when I try to look for specifically vegan ingredients on the Kroger app by simply typing “vegan” in the search bar. A gallon of dairy milk or an organic gluten-free chicken pot pie will pop up. Gluten-free and vegan are not synonymous! Raquelita was talking about how some people assume pasta or bread is never vegan or rarely vegan, that one I can kind of understand, but why people think gluten-free and vegan are interchangeable does baffle me, especially considering gluten is used in mock meats and seitan. (Which sucks for those with celiac and other wheat issues.) One time I had a sweet family member try to bake me cake and for some reason, he thought that meant he couldn’t add a vegetable-based oil so his results weren’t edible. Well, it kind of baffles me, but then I know there’s a lot of plant-based eaters who won’t eat oil, sugar, salt, even gluten, and so I see the source of the confusion. However, as long as it doesn’t have cashews, I’ll eat it! Fortunately, I don’t think I’m truly allergic to cashews, at least not to a life-threatening to degree. My experience ranges from a mouth rash that itches for a few days to GI issues but I’ve never experienced anaphylaxis, hives or anything like I have when I had a true allergy to a medication. So as long as it’s not directly got cashews, I eat it being that, in the past, I can get away with eating one or two cashews with zero side effects. That’s to say I’m not worried if a non-cashew product was made on a line that has had cashews on it nor does a restaurant need to take extra-precautions when making my food.
Oh, and that’s another annoyance: a lot of the vegan cheeses, the ones that might actually have some nutrition in them, are almost always cashew-based. One time I thought I was going to get to try this fancier vegan restaurant but everything pretty much had cashews. Someone told me to contact them, they were sure they’d make something I could eat, but NOPE, that wasn’t the response I got. They just confirmed everything did have cashews more or less, but I could just leave off a lot of the ingredients to avoid them. Yeah, that’s not so great. I’m not feeling sorry myself, it was no big loss to me, but it makes you appreciate that those with allergies do have it hard when it comes to finding food and restaurants willing to accommodate. And with life-threatening allergies already being a barrier, finding vegan, allergy-friendly (or whatever health issue folks can have like IBS, Crohn’s, etc.) food can sometimes be impossible.
Yes ! Such good points.