Old-School Sunday Dinner

Remember that vintage vegan cookbook project I was working on? Well, I've taken quite a break from it. No reason other than I just haven't been terribly inspired to create new recipes (or type them up!). For the past six months or so, I've mostly just been interested in cooking from other people's cookbooks. But the inspiration bug strikes me every now and then.

Most recently, I was inspired after reading Mark Hawthorne's article "The Way We Eat" in the August issue of VegNews. It's all about America's broken food system and looks at how we used to eat back in the day before industrialization, factory farming, and the birth of modern convenience foods and fast food. A sidebar with the article showed sample meals from past decades, and the one for 1900 listed "broiled prairie chicken, mashed turnips, green corn, potatoes, soup, Lima beans, slaw, watermelon, and baked Alaska."

I picked a couple of those foods to veganize for the 1900 chapter of my book. By the way, if you're not familiar with my (neverending) cookbook project, I'm veganizing trendy foods through the past century. For this meal, I created a Baked Prairie Seitan in place of the broiled prarie chicken. This is a homemade seitan that's rubbed with vegan butter, dried rosemary, and lemon zest.

I cut it into thin slices and topped with some Leahey Foods No Chicken Golden Gravy (from a package!).

That meal description with the article also mentioned "mashed turnips," which I'd never had but sounded really good. I love turnips. I created a recipe for Mashed Turnips using peeled, boiled turnips, shallots, herbs, and Yukon gold potatoes. Also topped with gravy because everything is better with gravy.

I served the two new recipes (Sorry, saving them for the book! Also, too lazy to type them up right now!) with simple sauteed green beans and a B Free gluten-free dinner roll with Miyoko's Cultured VeganButter. Full review of those B Free rolls (and other bread products) coming soon in a later post.