This past weekend, when I was in NYC, I ate at an organic restaurant that had scrumptious food.
First off, I ordered water with a splash of cranberry juice at the bar. It wasn’t a bright red like it usually is. It was reddish brown. Cranberry juice doesn’t usually list a food coloring in it’s ingredients, but now I suspect one is used. <sigh> As for the flavor, it was a little different, but I can’t really describe it. Less acidic-tasting is the best I can do.
Then I ate a kale beet mango salad. It was terrific. Pure, unadulterated food.
The waiter came around at the end asking about dessert. And he told me that he had a special dessert to recommend for me, seeing as how I liked vegan/raw food. It was a blueberry cheesecake, made with a walnut crust, coconut oil and cashew cheese (I think that’s what he said) and topped with blueberries. He was so excited about it, I didn’t have the heart to say no, and I ordered it without looking at the dessert menu.
I hated it.
It was so blah. It didn’t even taste like real food, except for the 3 blueberries on top. I kept reliving the non-taste of that dessert all weekend long.
I asked Kelly, later, if there had been a dessert of just plain fruit on the menu. She said there had been. Now that’s what I would have liked!
As I’m thinking more and more about how to eat more raw and mostly vegan, I keep wondering why I see all these “mock” foods. Mock desserts, mock meat, mock cheese. There has got to be a better way to embrace vegan.
And I know it. It’s to eat food in it’s most natural form.
But we don’t recognize the beauty of those flavors anymore.
Here’s a for instance. I volunteered to make sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. But the first vegan recipe I came across that looked good adds sugar to the casserole. And it’s not necessary. Because sweet potatoes are….
wait for it….
sweet!
They don’t need any added sugar! They are perfect as is. Which is probably how I’m going to make them. I’ll probably just roast them with some herbs.
When I was in NYC trying to figure out how to eat around the conventional options available, I had an interesting revelation. We really don’t eat much food in it’s pure form.
I was able to find fruit at the hotel buffet, a whole wheat (hmmm, maybe, I did my best) bagel without anything on it at the bagel place (the bagel guy really wanted to put something on it, I finally had to tell him I had a belly ache), a Caesar kale salad that I asked them to take the cheese out of and bring the dressing on the side (switched to a vinaigrette because the Caesar dressing had cheese), etc. It was hard. I don’t eat like regular people anymore.
Nor do I want to. I want to taste and savor real food. The flavors I’ve been missing all these years. The real taste of food.