Vegan southern food
I took up a really interesting challenge tonight for dinner called making a home cooked Southern meal entirely vegan. I chose this challenge because if you know anything about Southern cuisine, you probably would not say it's vegan friendly. So I thought it would be interesting to try to counter that stereotype and show that veganizing any cuisine is 100% doable. I am not trying to convert Southerners, or anybody, to a vegan diet with this post. I would totally support anyone who chooses to go vegan but I also understand and respect the decisions and traditions of those who choose not to. It's a lifestyle choice everyone must make for themselves. I just wanted to have fun with this and maybe learn a thing or two.
I apologize upfront if I did something not as a Southerner would have done it. I am not from the South and I simply did a Google search for ideas for a Southern meal and did the best I could with it. It's a learning experience and I was not trying to offend anybody.
The foods I prepared were whole wheat mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, biscuits, steamed green beans, and sweet tea. I used Daiya cheddar cheese shreds in a vegan cheese sauce recipe and the chicken nuggets I use are the Gardein brand ones. They're my go to brand for imitation meats because they're always vegan and are of great quality. It's a good way to trick a picky eater into eating plant based food.
The sweet tea was wayyyyyyyyyy too sweet for me and I had to water it down a lot, which I guess means I did it right. It was sweeter than sweet tea at restaurants that serve it, so if that's not sweet enough to be Southern sweet, I don't know what is.
I had a little bit of a challenge with the biscuits and chicken nuggets. They're cooked in the oven and the coconut oil in the biscuits leaked off the baking sheet and burned at the bottom of the oven, causing the smoke alarm to go off! After allowing the smoke to escape the house and calming down my panicking dog, I moved the biscuits and chicken nuggets into a skillet and did it on the stove, so as to not use the oven until it could be cleaned as I did not want the smoke alarm to go off again. I know sometimes Southerners make cornbread in a skillet so I figured that as odd as that culinary practice sounds to me, it might just work. The skillet method worked but was a little more time consuming but safety comes first so I rolled with it. And because the food cooked slower this way, this allowed me to work on almost all of the clean up as I was cooking.
After I finished (with plenty of leftovers. I'd intended for this to be a family meal), I had some frozen peach slices for dessert as I was really craving some raw food. I am not fully raw vegan and don't plan to be but I do eat more raw food than I did before going vegan so I could not remember the last time I had a meal that had absolutely no raw food. As good as the food was, I was having withdrawals and needed a raw dessert that wouldn't yield any more dishes as the dishwasher was full. I guess I technically didn't cheat as peaches do come from Georgia so I guess that counts as a Southern dessert. The oven had to undergo cleaning anyway so I couldn't make a peach cobbler either way.
My questions for you are:
1. What other Southern foods should I attempt to make vegan?
2. What other types of cuisine should I undertake the challenge of veganizing?
3. What foods do Southerners eat raw?
4. What types of major cooking mishaps have you guys had in the kitchen?
5. If you do a lot of home cooking involving multitasking because you're cooking multiple things at the same time, please share some life hacks for how to do that without something going wrong and having things be ready at the same time so nothing gets cold.