Acclimation

"I think it's pretty much agreed that it goes: Open minded: Good. Judgmental: Bad. But are we being too quick to judge judgment?"

-- Carrie Bradshaw

Okay, here's the thing: Along with all the fun discoveries and recipes; the feeling of healthfulness; the pleasure and confidence that come with making a life change that I know is right for me; my longtime disclaimers to dining companions that I don't have a problem being in the presence of meat eaters, so please, order what you want; the reassurances in this blog that I ate meat for 35 years and dairy for 12 more, so who am I to judge? . . . I still judge.

People say, "I could never be a vegan -- I love cheese too much." And I think, "Of course you could. If I can, you can." Even though I also thought I could never be vegan as recently as a few months ago.

At lunch, a colleague tells a story of being on vacation in Greece and having the most fabulous, fresh-caught seafood at a little island restaurant and then noticing some dead octopuses hanging from a hook nearby. She says to us, her lunch companions (of whom I'm the only vegetarian), "And I was like, I know where this comes from, but do we have to look at that while we're eating?" Ha ha ha.

And I'm like, well, no -- clearly you don't have to look in most places you eat. You'd never want to eat fish or meat again if you had to confront daily where they came from and the horrors these creatures went through to get to your plate.

But I don't say that.

Everyone else in my family eats meat. Do I wish they wouldn't? Yes. But I'm a recent convert, and everyone knows there's no one more passionate than a convert. I wish everyone would come to Jesus! (Especially anyone who just ended up here by Googling "come to Jesus" and "convert." Here, have some tofu "chicken" salad.)

I live in a house at least partially made of glass -- refusing an office cupcake one day, then grabbing a handful of Hershey Kisses out of a bowl on someone's desk when everybody's gone. (Hey, she bought them, not me.) Then I go home and make a batch of vegan chocolate thumbprint cookies and think, why do we even need to eat dairy, these are so good?

What I know is this: It is possible to like, respect, love someone whose choices you disagree with. I never could understand it -- and frankly detested it -- when I heard people say things like "I love my gay friend, but I disapprove of his lifestyle." Or "I think abortion is murder, but I still like you even though you had one." Now, as much as I hate to admit it, I'm starting to understand that a little.

And that may be the hardest thing of all to get used to.

Tastebuds

One thing that being vegan has done is given me a new appreciation for flavor. Among the cookbooks I bought in my born-again fervor in late December was This Can't Be Tofu! by Deborah Madison, whose Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone I've had for years. Tofu isn't new to me, either -- I've been using it ever since I stopped eating meat in 1997, most often in stir-fries. It's a great vehicle for flavor, and it's a chameleon of texture depending on what kind you buy and how you prepare it -- though I admit I haven't explored its possibilities too much until now.

I once tried making a mock-chicken salad with tofu from another cookbook that was just eh. I've already written about Deborah Madison's vegan mayonnaise from This Can't Be Tofu!, but the next recipe I tried from that book was the Curried "Chicken" Salad. It doesn't really taste like chicken salad -- even less so than the eh recipe. In consistency it might actually be a little closer to a chunky egg salad. But man, is it delicious. It should just be called curried tofu salad. Why does it have to be anything else?

What makes it so wonderful is the aromatic, green (even when not literally green), fresh flavors -- lime juice and zest, scallions, celery, subtly garlicky homemade mayo (see above), and lots of chopped flat-leaf parsley. (I've never really appreciated fresh parsley, as I so rarely buy it, and when I do, I tend to toss it into something cooked.) It also calls for curry powder and a tablespoon of mango chutney. Who has mango chutney lying around? I skipped that and didn't even miss it.

Then the other day I was in Trader Joe's with D., and -- having no idea that the recipe called for it -- he picked up a jar and said out of the blue (because when has chutney even been part of our discourse?), "Here's mango chutney with ginger." Um, okay . . . thanks!

So I made the salad again last night with that added, and it was even better: a little background sweetness for the other flavors, none of them overpowering. My fingers smelled gently of lime and curry powder and parsley when I went to bed. But best of all of this is the flavors -- they remind me of a spring picnic. Not a bad thing amid the gray-crusted curbsides of February.

This salad on homemade bread has become my favorite sandwich to take to work -- and yes, I have been taking lunch more often, which is another bonus. Today it was accompanied by peanut-butter oatmeal cookies (vegan, yummy, and made by me from this cool cookbook) as well as one of those perfect Mineola tangelos whose rind comes off with ease, whose wedges fall away effortlessly, and whose juice is as tangy as a kiss from someone to whom you have no resistance whatsoever.

Big Slice

Sunday afternoon, D. and I had a lovely winter lunch at Roscoe's, a fairly new wood-fired pizza place in Takoma Park that we've been to a couple of times over the last several months. It was Valentine's Day, and D. isn't a vegan (yet, ha ha), so I said sure, why don't we go to Roscoe's, that's fine -- it's nice. My main thing is to be vegan for myself at home, and elsewhere when I can be.

Well, it turns out Roscoe's has not only a vegan panini (as an editor and the son of linguists, I cringe every time I have to say "a" panini, which of course is a plural) but also a vegan pizza, called the Vegani, with rapini, chopped tomatoes, and mixed olives (and presumably no cheese). I was very excited because this was completely unexpected -- though not exactly surprising: If you've ever been to Takoma Park, you know it's a haven for vegans and other oddballs (I used to live there).

When I ordered it, the cute waiter with the neo-barbershop-quartet facial hair and the tattoos on the underside of his forearms (a star on one, the words "tat two" on the other -- we asked him to pull up his sleeves all the way so we could see them) told me that they had a vegan cheese made from arrowroot now -- would I like that on the pizza as well? Why not? Arrowroot wasn't even on my radar before I started eating vegan, and I'd started noticing it in cookbooks, though I hadn't gotten around to Googling it yet.

Well, the pizza -- with a nice yeasty, charred Neapolitan-style crust -- was delicious. And the "cheese" was tasty, creamy, and a little blistered, though not elastic like melted mozzarella. Fine by me.

It was a wonderful meal not only because of the company and the occasion but because I had pretty much accepted that pizza wouldn't be a part of my life anymore (a letting-go but not a sadness or a hardship, as many might think it would be for a pizza lover like me),* and now here I could eat it again. We'll be going back to Roscoe's a lot.

So how hard is it to have some creative and well-made vegan selections on a menu along with everything else?

Not hard at all.

________

* This reminds me of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, which I blogged about early on. In it, the author -- responding to those who view vegetarians as sentimentalists for avoiding meat -- writes of two friends ordering lunch: “One says, 'I’m in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I’m in the mood for a burger,' but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?"

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cheese

One thing that will probably prove to be an adjustment over time is giving up cheese -- though for the foreseeable future I'll probably still allow myself tastes of it every once in a while.

For instance, last week I was invited to lunch by a PR person who has been some help to me of late and whom I'd never met. She was treating, and she suggested an excellent Italian restaurant down the street from my office. This is a fine-dining place, not one where you can easily choose something like spaghetti with marinara (not on the menu) or simply ask for olive-oil-and-garlic substitution (well, maybe you can, but I haven't tried there). Everything that didn't have meat had cheese, so I ordered the vegetable lasagna, which had cheese. And probably cream.

I haven't yet missed cheese. Even before becoming vegan, I'd been reading a lot about how artery-clogging and caloric cheese is -- a fact I'd always conveniently ignored -- and had already started cutting back. While I love a good Brie or Saint-Andre at a party, I hardly ever buy either one. I do admit to usually having crappy 2-percent American cheese slices in the fridge at all times; so now I'll have a supply of crappy soy American cheese on hand -- what's the difference? Parmesan is great on pasta, true, but does pasta with a good, fresh, flavorful sauce really need it? I honestly don't think so; we're largely conditioned to add it. In sandwiches and burritos, I find that avocado or guacamole provides a nice element of creaminess, such that I don't even miss cheese.

For now, in restaurants I'm not being as strictly vegan as I could be, though I have to say I am being a lot more vegan in restaurants than I expected to be. When I told a friend in December that I was starting to be vegan, I clarified that it would be "mainly in what I cook for myself -- it's too hard to be vegan when out." Well, I already don't think that's true.

I am making an effort to avoid egg and dairy at lunch and have been eating very well -- almost indistinguishably from how I'd been eating before: Yesterday I brought a sandwich of "chicken" salad I made from Gardein Chick'n Filets, fantastic vegan mayo I made for the first time (one of the coolest, healthiest, why-didn't-I-try-this-years-ago? surprises so far), and my own homemade bread. Today, eating out with a friend, I had tofu and broccoli with Thai basil sauce -- no different from what I would have ordered at this restaurant two months ago in my non-vegan vegetarian days. The day before yesterday I had roasted vegetables over greens at a favorite lunch spot, where I now merely have to choose certain delicious options over other delicious options I used to order (i.e., those with cheese).

Having my options narrowed in certain places doesn't seem like a hardship at all when the discoveries multiply every day.