Thrift Week 2020, Day 2: Hits and misses

Well, I've only been on my one-week vegan challenge for one day, and already, it seems, I've committed one technical foul. This morning, Brian realized that his Basic Brown Bread—the same bread I ate for breakfast last morning, and with my lunch—contains honey. So technically, my very first meal of the one-week challenge was not vegan.

Fortunately, this was only a minor infraction. The amount of honey in the three slices of bread I ate yesterday was only a trivial percentage of the total volume of food I ate yesterday. And although honey is undoubtedly non-vegan (all animal products are off-limits, and bees are definitely animals) it's far less destructive to the environment than most animal products (and, as The Guardian points out, has a lower carbon footprint than most other sweeteners that could replace it). And more to the point, declaring my one-week vegan challenge to be a failure right out of the gate, simply because of a trivial amount of animal product I didn't even realize I was eating, would make this a really boring Thrift Week. So I'm simply going to declare this my First Lesson Learned of the challenge: Going 100 percent vegan is harder than it looks, and you have to check and double-check everything to make sure you're doing it right. Which I will do for the rest of the week.

Brian was very contrite about this oversight, and he's making two fresh loaves of bread today with organic sugar rather than honey. And he made it up to me by fixing me oatmeal for breakfast this morning, which I ate with raisins, brown sugar, chopped walnuts, and almond milk. Plenty of fiber, some healthy fat, and not too much sugar. And it's only a bit more expensive than my usual breakfast, which is pricier now since I switched to almond milk and quit using artificial sweetener for my cocoa (after seeing some disheartening studies about its possible effects on metabolism). The two slices of toast still cost around 14 cents, but the cocoa now costs 40 cents: 34 cents for the almond milk, 2 for the sugar, and 4 for the cocoa. This breakfast costs about 16 cents for the oats, 13 for the raisins, 15 for the walnuts, 17 for the almond milk, and maybe 5 for the sugar. So it's 66 cents as opposed to 54, which isn't bad.

On the plus side, I can report that last night's dinner was definitely a successful vegan experience. The restaurant I chose for my birthday meal, Veganized, more than lived up to its high star rating on Yelp. Perhaps because we chose to go on Friday night rather than Saturday, the place wasn't very busy, so it didn't take long at all to get our food. And what food it was! We started with an order of grilled oyster mushrooms with a garlic rosemary marinade, which cooked up exquisitely crisp, and which both Brian and my dad swore tasted like steak. (I haven't tasted steak in over 25 years, so I couldn't say.) My dad said they really cried out for a piece of bread, which does not come gratis with your meal, but when he asked our server to bring some, she went and fetched a couple of slices of their sandwich bread, which was firm and pleasantly chewy.

We weren't even finished with these before our main courses arrived. I ordered the BBQ skewers, which were hearty and flavorful, with big chunks of chewy seitan, onion, and tomato in a spicy (almost too spicy) barbecue sauce. They were accompanied on one side by saffron rice and white beans (which were a little bland, but served to cut the spiciness of the skewers) and on the other by some more of those grilled shrooms, served with a maple dijon mustard sauce. All beautifully presented, as you can see here.

I didn't taste any of my mom's dish, which was "Pasta and Neat Balls" in a kalamata olive sauce, a flavor I don't care for. But I tried a smidgin of both Brian's and my dad's meals, and both were excellent. My dad got the "Angelica" sandwich, with smoked tofu, roasted veggies, cashew cheese, and lemon pesto on more of that chewy bread, which had plenty of flavor and a pleasing variety of textures. My normally tofu-skeptic father liked it so much that he wondered aloud whether it's possible to buy smoked tofu in stores, which we assured him it is—if not at the nearest Shop-Rite, then certainly at the Whole Earth Center.

Brian got the Deluxe Burger, which is the kind of veggie burger we both like best: one that doesn't try to taste like meat, but instead to create the most interesting possible combination of flavors and textures from veggies. It was a flavorful blend of lentils and mushrooms, served with grilled eggplant, onion, and other fixings on a tender sweet potato bun. For a side, he chose the sweet potato wedges with cashew cheese sauce, which was the only part of the meal I found less than extraordinary; it was just a mild white sauce, slightly salty, and I didn't feel like it really added anything to the dish. But everything else was delicious, and my meal was generous enough to leave me with leftovers for lunch today.

The atmosphere of the place was really interesting, too. It was obviously an old building, with lots of exposed brick, dark woodwork, brightly colored walls, and Tiffany chandeliers. Even in the rest room, the dividers between the toilets were dark wood with antique-looking brass fittings. And the dining area was spread across multiple levels. You enter at street level and descend to a below-ground-level bar area with some tables, and the main dining room is upstairs, with a couple of tables on a secondary level a little higher than that. I commented to my parents that the place looked as if it might have started life as a speakeasy. Altogether, a very congenial atmosphere for a meal, enhanced by our server, who was unbelievably pleasant and attentive.

I don't know what the bill came to since my dad picked up the tab, but based on the menu prices, it was probably around $110 with tax and tip — certainly less than the cost of my mom's and Brian's birthday dinner at The Blue Bottle, and I actually liked my dinner choice at this place better than that one. Although the place has a liquor license and some interesting-looking cocktails on the menu, we stuck to water and skipped dessert in favor of the chocolate cake with coconut frosting that Brian had made for me at home. (This time, he used plant butter instead of coconut oil in the frosting, which meant it didn't have quite as strong a coconut flavor, but the texture was creamier. And the cake itself was, in the words of the immortal Jonathan Coulton, delicious and moist.)

So, despite the minor setback with the bread, I'd say my first day as a vegan (okay, an imperfect vegan) was on the whole successful. Day two will continue with restaurant leftovers for lunch and, if all goes well, a birthday drink from Dunkin whenever we venture out into the snow to see if we can pre-order the new Critical Role book at our "friendly neighborhood game store." (It's not really in our neighborhood, but at least it's within a half-hour drive, which is better than some people have.)