This weekend, I did my grocery shopping on Saturday morning. I'd planned to re-make the amazing Thai Chicken Coconut Soup that we'd loved so much last January, and I was super excited about it! Then, I flipped everything on its head by deciding to make my Sunday night meals totally vegan...
I had to scramble to make some revisions to the recipe, and ended up in the "meat alternatives" aisle at Whole Foods today, staring at the limited options available. I couldn't really find anything to sub the shrimp that we'd used last time, so I ended up going for potatoes. There were some soy "chick'n" options in the store, but most of them contained egg somehow. So I ended up grabbing the only bag that was genuinely vegan.
The meal turned out ok. It was pretty obvious that I'd scrambled to make it happen. The chicken was an odd texture, but you could kind of battle it by making sure you always had chicken and potatoes on your spoon in each bite. Potatoes was a weird choice. And I made way too many of them for this soup. I probably could have done without them totally, but then the chicken would have been too obviously weird. So maybe it was a good thing?? The soup broth was still tasty, but the vegetable broth again wasn't as flavorful as a true chicken broth. Thank goodness for coconut milk and Thai spices to make it still very edible!
It looks like we have a lot of research and work to do from here. I know that cooking one vegan meal a week should TOTALLY be do-able. There wouldn't be this huge community of people in the world if vegan food always tasted odd. We just have to figure it out on our end, and see what we can find.
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