Vegan cooking on the cheap, video style

I love cooking.  When I went vegetarian in my pre-teen years and then vegan in high school, my family didn’t really know what to do with me, so I learned pretty quickly to make my own meals.  (I remember, actually, that I had a Mickey Mouse cookbook when I was, like, seven or eight years old, and I’d make simple dishes like macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from its pages.  I thought I was so accomplished.)  Even now, years later, one of my favorite activities is to make and share a meal with friends; there’s something cathartic about chopping vegetables, stirring pots, and making food magic from raw ingredients.

I’ve been talking with friends lately about how food is sometimes treated as “toxic” or “bad,” especially by female-identified people.  There’s such emphasis on thinness in western culture that we are taught to feel guilty about putting food into our mouths, despite the simple fact that it’s food that keeps our bodies functioning normally.  One friend of mine remarked that her female coworkers are always lamenting what they ate the night before and are endlessly resolving to go on a diet.  And, sadly, vegans are not immune to this kind of behavior, either.  Veganism has been sold as a dietary panacea, and the underlying implication (or sometimes, the straight-up message) is still “fat=bad.”  I’ve had my struggles with this in the past, and one of the things I’ve been working on for the future is eating as much food as my body needs, without feeling bad or guilty about it, and making a point to incorporate as much healthy, local, sustainably-grown foods as possible into those meals.

I keep a pretty good-sized pile of vegan cookbooks on my shelves, and I’m quite adept at Googling for recipes containing a particular ingredient, but I often bump into a few issues when I am trying to plan a cooking extravaganza.  For one, I don’t have a lot of money.  I’m not someone who can waltz into the natural foods store and drop $20 on a jar of coconut cream and then use a tablespoon of it in a recipe.  In fact, I pretty much have the same twenty (cheap) ingredients on-hand all the time and try to incorporate them into different recipes to keep things interesting.

The other problem I have, especially when finding user-created recipes on the Internet, is that sometimes the written directions aren’t very clear.  I’m a kinesthetic learner, meaning that I prefer to see and do something with my hands in order to commit it to memory, so reading words on a page (or a screen) doesn’t always translate into a delicious dinner.  However, the Internet saves the day again, because ingenious people have begun making vegan cooking videos and sharing them with the rest of us, for optimum kitchen awesomeness.  Check these out, and if you’re inspired, send me your videos.  Maybe we will start a regular L.O.V.E. featured video cooking series, which is a lot more fun and energizing than always writing about heartbreaking things.   (Though I will probably still do that as well.)

The lovely P.M.A. (aka Tara) has created a charming series of vegan cooking videos that include easy, simple gluten-free and vegan recipes for both humans and nonhumans.  Here is her delicious tofu scramble:

The folks over at Veganism Is the New Evolution (VINE) have started a video series called Cooking With Real Vegans, featuring sanctuary founders Aram and Miriam in their real kitchen making real food.  This is making me hungry:

And finally, I love Manjula’s Kitchen.  She creates simple, delicious, vegetarian Indian dishes, including this tantalizing plate of chola tikki:

I find these videos so much more instructive than looking at letters on a page.  The filmmakers and hosts are so charming, I sort of wish I was in their kitchens making these dishes with them.  As it stands, I’ll probably just haul my laptop into my tiny New York kitchen and try to find room to mince garlic on the keyboard.  That can’t be bad for your computer, can it? Well, if I never write a blog again, you’ll know what happened.