DAY 4: VEGAN MAC & "CHEESE"
January 5, 2015
THE HUNGER JAMES OFFICIAL RATING:
For Christmas, my roommate got me a Macaroni & Cheese cookbook. It was the perfect present. Pages and pages full of recipes and ideas for my favorite comfort food. The one problem? I can’t have cheese for 31 days.
I looked through the pages yesterday, with my mouth watering and my stomach growling, dog-earing the recipes I would need to try in February. While sifting through, I noticed one of the recipes was vegan: meaning no dairy. Intrigued, I went to the grocery store (cookbook in hand) and purchased the ingredients.
It wasn’t until twenty minutes of roaming through the aisles did I realize I would need to go to an organic health food store to purchase 90% of the ingredients. Mostly, the tofu and nutritional yeast. Once I found one within “walking” distance in Astoria, I purchased the remainder of the requirements.
Once home, I unloaded my grocery bags and began prepping. While the pasta was boiling, I started preparing the “cheese” sauce. I am going to use the word “cheese” in quotes from now on because the mixture was nothing like cheese at all.
To make the “cheese” you put tofu, soy milk, soy sauce (huh?) and nutritional yeast in a blender and puree until creamy. And that’s it. Well, when I did it, my sauce never got creamy. It just liquefied. When the pasta was cooked, I poured the mixture on top and stirred it in a pot with the macaroni on low heat for five minutes. And then it was done.
I put some on a plate and ventured into the living room with a glass of wine to enjoy my macaroni and “cheese.” I took one bite and wanted to kill myself.
It tasted NOTHING like cheese. The color was a pale orange, more like a brown, and it had the worst smell. There was not enough salt in the world to give this dish flavor. Not wanting to waste the 20$ I spent on making this dish, I shoveled three more spoonful’s into my mouth before walking to Wendy’s for chicken nuggets.
I don’t know how you vegans do it. Just stop. It’s not the same. It’s not food. Eat the damn cheese.
