Vegan Macaroni and Cheese

 I love cheesesteaks and cheeseburgers. Given that my idea of a fun Friday night includes fried chicken, it was with some trepidation that I embarked on my first 100% vegan meal. I’ve eaten my share of tofu, and am happy to eat at a local vegetarian Chinese restaurant, but when I hear phrases like, ‘nutritional yeast’ I wonder how good the meal could possibly be. But, if someone else is willing to cook, I’m certainly willing to eat. That’s how I found myself at Dara’s apartment in her blue kitchen with floor to ceiling windows that make it look like we’re cooking in the sky. She shares the apartment with her husband Josh and 2 cats, Mackey and Mordy.

Dara Lovitz Van Naarden has been a vegan for the past 4 years and a vegetarian for close to 15 years before that. I first met Dara because she’s friends with my little sister Molly. Even though we grew up living 10 minutes away from each other, Dara and I had very different childhoods. Apparently, when I was hanging out at shopping malls, Dara was attending animal rights protests, the first one of which was in 7^th grade at the Philadelphia Airport. There she was, protesting against an airline for transporting monkeys in unsafe, cruel conditions, when someone handed her a pamphlet explaining where her food came from. That was the last day she ate meat. Much to her parents’ dismay, Dara became a vegetarian and devoted herself to animal rights. As a lawyer, she served as a special prosecutor on a case involving egg-laying hens. After researching the treatment of hens and dairy cows, Dara gave up all animal products and became vegan.  Now, Dara teaches Animal Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law and in the 2010 Winter/Spring semester will be teaching the first ever Animal Law course at the Drexel Earle Mack School of Law. In addition, she’s working on a book about the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. 

What would a vegan cook me for dinner? Good news–Macaroni and cheese. I love macaroni and cheese! YUM. This is when Dara explained that vegans don’t eat cheese. Really? Really, no cheese?  Not only do they forgo cheese, but they also don’t eat eggs, fish, and honey. Nor do they drink Guinness beer. (For more info on the honey and beer avoidance, check out my list of lessons learned at the bottom of this posting). So I’ve accepted that this meal won’t have any cheese. But how will she make macaroni and cheese without it? While the pasta boiled, Dara started making the mac ‘n’ cheese sauce by measuring out nutritional yeast. She buys it in bulk from Whole Foods and swears by its ability to impart cheesy flavor to any dish. It’s this cheesiness that makes this recipe so thrilling to vegans. She brings this mac ‘n’ cheese to potlucks and it’s the one that other vegans are super excited about because it’s usually a dish that they haven’t had since they went vegan. “A lot of people say that veganism is difficult,” Dara said. “A lot of vegetarians say that they couldn’t go vegan because they love cheese so much or could never be vegan because of the dairy thing. That seems to be the one thing that stops vegetarians from being vegan. But, when they see that you can make anything that tastes like your old traditional food with these different ingredients, it makes it easier for people to switch.”

After adding the rest of the ingredients into the blender, Dara stirred everything around with a spoon before giving it a whirr. This insured that the dry ingredients wouldn’t get stuck to the sides or the blender blades. (Full recipes are located at the bottom of this blog post). While Dara stirred, I wondered about living as a vegan. I can’t imagine giving up eating meat and questioned if there was anything she missed. Mostly, she misses the convenience of walking into any pizza place and ordering a slice. When she’s craving a pizza, she’ll order one without cheese and then bring it home and add her own vegan cheese. She’s also become friendly with the guy at the pizza shop down the street so if she brings vegan cheese with her, he’ll add it on there. When people question why she would eat like this, she replies, “I think about how cruel the industry is and it’s the easiest choice I can make. There is nothing hard about it when you really think about where the food comes from. You don’t feel like you are denying yourself anything if you are doing the right thing.”

Okay. I understand that Dara doesn’t eat meat. But, is she one of those vegetarian posers who still wear leather shoes? Nope. Dara buys special vegan shoes and doesn’t wear leather or wool clothing. After checking on the sweet and sour meatball sauce, Dara stopped cooking for a moment to explain that veganism isn’t just a way of eating, it’s a lifestyle. It means making the ethical choice against the exploitation of animals. It’s at this point that the devil’s advocate side of my personality appeared. I asked her about her willingness to eat sugar that may have been picked by migrant farm workers or people living in sub-standard conditions in Third World countries. She buys organic sugar and when able, goes for a brand created through fair trade. However, Dara believes there is a distinction between human suffering and animals suffering; to some extent, the humans can defend themselves. They at least have a voice and can communicate to their oppressors in ways that animals can’t. The humans’ problem may not be easily solved by communicating, but it is a huge advantage over the animals. “It doesn’t make the exploitation of people okay, but there are different levels of oppression,” Dara said. “I have a choice every time I sit down at the table.”

We sit down at the table and began enjoying our salads. I remembered reading about farmers who really do let their chickens roam free. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked. ‘Those chickens are really happy.’ Dara disagrees. She doesn’t believe humans are superior to animals. She says it’s a speciesist concept—to believe that your species is superior to another species. She doesn’t think we have established or proven in any way that we are superior to non-human animals. “We assert our dominion over them out of this false sense of superiority and they suffer for it,” Dara said. “We are using them. We make them our slaves. We make them work for us and entertain us. We make them give us their eggs. We take their children away from them. All based on a false concept of superiority. What do we base the differences on? That they don’t speak English? That’s not really fair—what about human beings who are mute? Is it because they don’t have what we consider to be our level of intelligence? That argument suffers because that means if someone with a lower IQ for instance doesn’t deserve rights, then what do you do with a human who has a lower IQ? Should we kill humans and eat them if they are not smart and can’t do math? Free range and cage free animals are still being raised on the belief that it’s okay to eat them because we are superior to them. If you treat your slaves well, does that make slavery okay? I don’t think so.” Have I mentioned that Dara is a lawyer? And really eloquent? If I were voiceless, I couldn’t think of a better person to have fighting on my side.

Finishing up the salad, we moved on to the main course of mac ‘n’ cheese which was surprisingly tasty. I could serve this at my next family get-together. It’s cheesy without feeling heavy. I had no idea nutritional yeast could taste so good. The sweet potato fries were fantastic but I’ve always been a fan of sweet potatoes so I knew I would like those. The meatballs? Well, the sauce was terrific, but the meatballs themselves were obviously not real meat. They were the only part of the meal that I could immediately identify by taste as vegan. Their texture wasn’t as thick and hearty as the meatballs you get from Sam’s club (or if you’re lucky, from my mother-in-law). Meatballs aside, overall it was a great meal and one I would happily eat again.

For those of you out there thinking, ‘hey, I could maybe become a vegan,’ then this paragraph is for you. Before you go to bed, take a leather shoe and put it under your pillow. At night, the vegan fairy visits and will replace the leather shoe with what Dara recommends as vegan pantry staples: a bag of nutritional yeast to add cheese flavor to food; kosher salt/sea salt; ground flax seed; tofu; Dijon mustard; Sriracha sauce. In addition, buy some veggies from your local farmers market and then check out www.vegweb.com for vegan recipes and cooking tips. If you’re feeling like you need some additional inspiration to avoid animal products, watch a video called ‘Meet Your Meat.’ I watched a short bit of it and trust me, it’s like the animal equivalent of ‘Scared Straight.’ You can also join local vegan groups. Dara supports the Humane League of Philadelphia, Friends of Animals, CARE (Compassion for Animals, Respect for Environment) and the League of Humane Voters.  For all of my readers across the country, she loves the non-Philly-based groups (national groups), PCRM (Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine) and Vegan Outreach.

As soon as I finished watching the video, we started in on some awesome banana bread and fruit salad. The soft bread had a good heavy weight to each slice and tasted like fresh bananas. There was a perfect ratio of bananas to chocolate chips. After realizing that vegans don’t eat milk chocolate, I checked Dara’s recipe and discovered she used ‘choco’ chips. Not sure if this meant dark chocolate chips or carob chips. If it was carob then points for you Dara. I never even noticed the difference. I must have really loved this bread because when I came home and reviewed my shots, I had about 40 photos of just the bread. Compare this to the 15 shots of the meatballs and you can guess what my favorite part of the meal was. Don’t get me wrong—the mac ‘n’ cheese was excellent (as was the salad, sweet potatoes, etc), but if I have to choose between dessert and a main course, dessert will win every time. It helped that this was a great dessert. Perfect sweet ending to a fantastic meal.

And the real test of Dara’s vegan food? I took leftovers home to my husband Kevin. ‘Homemade mac ‘n’ cheese!’ I told him. Oops! I may have left out the fact that it was vegan. I warmed up a big plate in the oven for him. ‘Smells cheesy, huh?’ I asked. Kevin ate every bite. The same man who could happily eat a steak for dinner every night, the same man who won’t eat tofu—this same man ate every bite of that vegan mac ‘n’ cheese and said it was delicious. Kevin, I know you don’t read my blog so you’ll have no idea the next time I make this for dinner. Thanks to Dara, this will be the healthiest meal on my table.

Lessons Learned:
-Does Nutritional Yeast rise? Dara correctly said that it didn’t have any rising properties. According to: http://www.sundancenaturalfoods.com, Nutritional yeast is grown on mineral enriched molasses and used as a food supplement. At the end of the growth period, the culture is pasteurized to kill the yeast. You never want to use a live yeast (i.e. baking yeast) as a food supplement because the live yeast continues to grow in the intestine and actually uses up the vitamin B in the body instead of replenishing the supply. According to Dara (and several websites I found), you can add nutritional yeast to popcorn, pastas, anything that you want to taste a little cheesier.

-Turn off my audio recorder when someone is using a blender. When I went to play it back, I couldn’t hear what they said and it’s really loud in my ear which causes me to jump spastically while typing. Luckily, I take copious notes in my notebook so I referred to them during the blending portion of the audio.

-It’s difficult to shoot tofu. How do food stylists make tofu look sexy? I’m open to suggestions. . .

-Cool cucumber decorations: Dara drags a fork all around the vegetable from the top down length of the cucumber to the bottom. This creates decorative ridges for when she slices it. Many of you probably already know this trick, but for me it was new.

-There is something called ‘bone char’ that is used to process refined sugar. The sugar industry uses animal bones to help color sugar white. To avoid this, use organic sugar.

- Dara bakes a lot and uses an egg substitute—she mixes ground flax seed and water and says that when using it for baking it has the same properties as eggs.

-Guinness beer is not vegan. According to a number of vegan websites, to clarify the beer, it’s filtered through Isinglass which is part of a fish’s swim bladder.

ANOTHER VEGAN MAC AND CHEESE (“Vegan Mac and Cheese 2”)
Serves 8-10 people
Ingredients:
¾ cup plain soymilk
½ cup water
1/6 cup tamari or soy sauce
¾ cups nutritional yeast
½ TBSP paprika
½ TBSP garlic powder
½ teaspoon salt
1.5 oz firm tofu
½ cup canola oil
¾ pound macaroni noodles
1 teaspoon mustard

Directions:
-Preheat oven to 350.
-Boil water in big pot for macaroni noodles; cook macaroni per instructions on box.
-Put all other ingredients in a blender to create sauce. 
-Once noodles are cooked, drain and put in a baking pan and pour sauce over the noodles. (Dara used a 13×9 baking dish and sprinkled it with whole wheat bread crumbs made from two slices of bread and little pieces of earth balance butter)
-Cover pan with aluminum foil and bake approximately 10 minutes.
-Remove the aluminum foil and put the pan under the broiler until the top of the pasta looks slightly browned and crispy – total cooking time about 15 minutes.

 SWEET AND SOUR MEATBALLS SAUCE

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup ketchup
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons soy sauce

Directions:
-In a separate medium bowl, mix together the water, vinegar, ketchup, cornstarch, sugar and soy sauce.
-Pour into pot and add the meatballs.
-Allow sauce to thicken in a pot. Continue to heat until the sauce just starts to bubble.
-Dara dresses hers up with sesame seeds.

 VEGAN BANANA BREAD

Ingredients:
1/3 cup vegan margarine
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 cup soy milk
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup choco chips

Directions:
-Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
-Cream together the vegan margarine and sugar.
-Stir in the flour and baking powder and baking soda.
-Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.
-Pour into an oiled bread pan and bake for 50 minutes.

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Tagged as: animal rights, cheese, macaroni, vegan