This is not a vegan stuff post. Okay, it's a vegan stuff post, but it's not a useful vegan stuff post; I'm just calling your attention to this recipe, which illustrates something important. Take a look at it.
First of all, butternut squash muffins sound absolutely delicious. They'd be a lot like pumpkin bread, I imagine, which is one of the most wonderful things in the vegetable-teabread pantheon. That's why I clicked on the recipe when Gmail's random link generator offered it to me. I was almost certain it would be unvegan, but teabreads are gloriously easy to veganize. You just replace the eggs with egg replacer and none of the gooey sticky candy-sweet unhealthy wonderfulness is lost.
What I found when I clicked on the link horrified me. This recipe could only have been created by a group of very focused individuals sitting down and thinking very seriously about terrible things to do to muffins. They removed the gooey sticky candy-sweet unhealthy wonderfulness with surgical precision, and still left the motherfucking eggs in. We have spelt flour, rice oil, and reduced apple juice where we should have white flour, unbutter, and three cups of sugar. And four eggs. For twelve goddamned muffins. They're practically omelets; they've even got pepper in them.
The good thing about this is that it serves to illuminate something about vegan food. Vegan baking does not mean spelt flour and hemp oil. Vegan cooking does not mean unwashed beet greens doused with turmeric. No, it means you take out the goddamned meat and dairy and if what's left is greasy and sugary and nutritionally appalling, then so be it. The spelt flour and turmeric and beet greens come from godless communists with no souls, who can just as easily be meat-and-dairy-eaters as they can be vegans.
I am not a godless communist. I made so much cookie dough last week that I've been bringing some in my lunch every day and I still haven't finished it. It's got more sugar in it than it has flour, and a half a tub of fake butter.
Posted by dianna at September 28, 2005 10:00 AMSpeaking of unhealthy Vegan foods, I forgot to thank you for that brownie recipe some weeks ago. I made it and it was very tasty. TOO tasty, in fact; I was reminded why I tend to avoid baking sweet things. I have no willpower, and eat until I get a sugar-based tummy ache, and then, as soon as I'm starting to recover, I have another brownie and the whole mess starts again.
But that's no defect on the part of your brownies. If anything, the problem is that they were too tasty by half.
Posted by: Zach S. at September 28, 2005 02:30 PMIn retrospect I really should have put "no dairy" in "quotation marks."
Posted by: Chris at September 29, 2005 03:37 AMI think it's better the way you had it. Also, I will forever cherish the mental image of you chugging melted ice cream out of a Vermonster bucket, and therefore I'm not surprised at all by your skepticism at my no-dairy ways.
Zach: you can't possibly say you weren't warned. They're called Death By Chocolate brownies, for god's sake. You can't have the chocolate and expect not to have the death.
Posted by: Dianna at September 29, 2005 09:27 AMOh, and try those brownies warm with a scoop of Double Rainbow white-chocolate-and-raspberry Soy Cream. You'll die all over again.
Posted by: Dianna at September 29, 2005 09:32 AM