The Vegan Butcher

A Canadian, three Italians, and a Polish girl walk into an all-vegan Chinese restaurant in North London. Sounds like the set up to an awesome joke, eh? Well, it’s not. It was how dinner started last night with a few friends at the Loving Hut in Archway.

My vegan coworker, Fib, swung by work on her day off yesterday with a crew of vegan Italians in tow. They were heading out for Chinese food and, since I was almost finished my shift, invited me to come along. All-vegan Chinese with mock meat options for days? Hell. Yes. (more…)

As if eating together for six hours straight at the West Midlands Vegan Festival wasn’t enough, when we got back to the city Fat Gay Vegan, Josh (his handsome man) and I went for dinner at 222 Veggie Vegan. FGV has talked in the past about how 222 VV was one of his favourite spots in London and I have been keen to try it. (more…)

I am having a full-blown love affair with the cookbooks of Joni Marie Newman and I don’t care who knows it! She’s absolutely genius. This post chronicles the first meal I made from her new book with Celine Steen, Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.

As the title clearly states, this book includes nothing but recipes for substantial, filling food. You’re not going to find recipes for dainty salads in here, I’ll tell you that much for free.

I cracked open this cookbook on a hot, humid, Halifax summer weekend. My friends Jimmy and Kaleigh were coming over to visit that afternoon. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and I wanted to cook outside. Those were my parameters while I flipped through for a recipe.

I found a recipe for the Ultimate Patty Melt topped with Smoky Pub Cheese, a burger served on sourdough bread.  I sounded delicious and it fit the bill. I was happy. (more…)

Get ready for the most exciting blog post of your life in which I make a sandwich from the leftovers in my fridge! I can tell you’re all pretty jacked up about this–perhaps we should all calm down.

The other night I was cooking for a post that didn’t involve a main dish. I didn’t have anything on the go to eat for supper, so I rooted around in the fridge and found leftover seitan and garlic mayo from this meal, and dug in the freezer to find leftover batter coating from this meal. We were in business! (more…)

I invite you to once again join me on my quest to mastering seitan. When I say I’m going to learn to do something right, I’m not messing around. You’re going to see so much seitan on this blog you’ll long for the simpler days of tofu and beans. Take heart, beloved readers! The roads hardest travelled often lead to the best destinations. POWER THROUGH! We’ve got this. (more…)

In honour of passing 666 followers on Twitter, here is a post on seitan. (Ahahahaha. Oh, SO CLEVER, Tracy!) Big up to my 666th follower, @nubiandread!

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I have a vegan buddy in England who wants me to teach him some new kitchen skills when I move there this fall.

“I can totally do that!” I thought to myself as we chatted, feeling confident in my skills, “Just as long as he doesn’t request lessons in making seit—“

“…especially if I can learn to cook seitan!”

Melonfarmer. (For those of you joining this programming in progress, that is the curse I use instead of “motherfacker”. It’s friendlier for my Mama, whom I know reads this blog.) (more…)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. He created the first man and named him Adam. When He was about to create a companion for Adam He addressed him and said, “Adam, I can create you the most beautiful of all creatures and she shall be your partner, but it will cost you an arm and a leg.” Adam considered, and then said, “What can I get for a rib?”

AHAHHAHA. Okay, I seriously hear that terrible joke in my head every time anyone mentions ribs in any context. You had best believe it was being hollered over and over in that echoey and empty cavern upstairs when I was making these bad boys. To drown it out I jammed my earbuds in, put Prince’s Very Best Of album on loop, and cranked it up.

I saw this recipe a couple months ago and immediately wanted to tackle it. It’s fairly labour intensive, so I needed to be in the right physical and mental place to do it. That day finally arrived last week. (more…)

Ahoy, mateys! Disclaimer: I plan to make pirate references throughout this entire post (as this will most likely be one of my few voyages to the sea and I plan to take full advantage of it, read on to see why).

Even before I went vegan I was never a fan of seafood. Growing up on Cape Breton Island (a.k.a. God’s Country, The Most Beautiful Place on Earth, or Down Home) I was often seen as a bit off for not joining in on lobster boils and fish fries and other such seaside rites of passage. The idea and especially the smell of fish have always disgusted me.

My first mate Jimmy and I were parleying the other day about how whenever someone points out something smelling of fish it is never in a positive context. You never hear anyone say, “Mmmmmm! What smells like fish!?!” It’s always, “Uggghhh….is that….is that fish? Do you smell that? What smells like fish?!?” That is because it’s disgusting. Straight up. No sharp, tiny, hidden bones about it.

Now, with all that said, I hypocritically would only ever want or eat fish one way, and at that only about every 2 to 3 years. Every few years I would get a hankering for fish and chips. I would head down to the Halifax waterfront (or if I were down home, one of the countless seafood restaurants on the island), get fish and chips, and be done with it for another 2 to 3 years. Well, it’s been probably 4 or 5 years since I’ve last eaten fish and chips, so I was long overdue. (more…)