Thrift Week 2020, Day 6: The best way to vegan

The last two days of my week-long vegan challenge have been not just uneventful, but rather enjoyable. As planned, Brian made Sesame Tofu for dinner on Monday and Pasta Romesco on Tuesday, both of which are favorites of ours — not just favorite vegan dishes, but favorite dishes full stop. And both of them made enough leftovers for the next day's lunch, so I've had two full days of delicious vegan food.

Both of these dishes fit the first of the three types of vegan food I identified on Monday: they're vegan dishes that were made to be vegan, with no changes or substitutions. A lot of our other vegan food favorites — like Brian's Eggplant and String Beans in Garlic Sauce and my favorite soup, Pasta Fagioli — also fall into this category. And this got me wondering: are these vegan-as-vegan dishes, in general, the best?

It's not that we don't like any foods in the other categories. Both of us, for instance, like our chili with Gimme Lean beef more than any chili we've tried with real ground beef, and also more than any "non carne" chili we've tried with just beans. But we've also had some attempts to veganize recipes that were real duds, like our heavy tofumpkin pie and gluey oat milk cocoa. On the whole, it seems like the safest, surest way to find a vegan dish we really like is to pick one that started out vegan, rather than being converted.

It's also, in most cases, the cheapest way. Consider the dinners we've cooked so far this week. The most expensive of the lot was clearly the butternut squash and sage pizza, which used $4.56 worth of homemade vegan mozzarella. (The rest of the ingredients cost less than a dollar, but only because the squash and the sage were home-grown.) By contrast, the sesame tofu, a naturally vegetarian recipe, only cost about $3 for the entire meal (which provided both dinner and lunch for two). And the one vegan product I bought specifically to "take the place" of meat, the seitan, cost $4.69 for the package (though we've only used a quarter of it so far) and didn't even make a significant difference to the flavor of the dish. It probably would have been just as good as a straight-up veggie pot pie — vegan as vegan.

So I'm going to tentatively label this my Fourth Lesson Learned from this vegan eating challenge: the best vegan recipes, in general, are the ones that are vegan by nature. Converting a meat-based or cheese-based recipe to vegan form can still be satisfying, but it probably won't be as tasty, as easy, or as cheap — in short, as ecofrugal — as a dish that's plant-based simply because everything it calls for is a plant.

In accordance with this view, Brian is currently cooking up a butternut squash and barley recipe from our new vegan cookbook. The only ingredients in it are hulled barley, butternut squash, raisins, apple juice, and ground cloves. Nothing, in short, that had to be altered in any way to make the recipe vegan. It's perfectly simple, and I think it can hardly fail to be satisfying.