Generational food

[xemcats]

This is a follow-up to this post about how cabbage rolls are inexpensive "peasant food" carried over by immigrants.

Have you ever veganized recipes that your immigrant families have been making for generations?

My family has so many of these and they've been some of the hardest recipes to veganize, but I'm totally determined to do it. Food is

Comments

[rocksalt]

Being mostly Irish I would say vegan corn beef and cabbage is damn near impossible. And potatoes are good.

The only recipe passed down in my family is a Italian/German tomato sauce that is so easily veganized it's silly. All I do is leave out the sausage chunks.

GREAT topic btw!

[subpolka]

(Psst...I made this Seitan Corned "Beef" for St. Patrick's Day and it turned out quite lovely.)

[polyphonicvegan]

*bookmarked* My mom and I were going to make that (not from scratch, tragically) but we got lazy and just ate colcannon and soda bread instead.

[rocksalt]

HOLY BLEEPING BLEEP. REUBEN SANDWICH.

*doing this tomorrow night*

[cailin_t]

tons! all of my grandmother's cookie recipes, most of which were easily veganizable by substituting the egg and butter with applesauce and earth balance.

also, tons of pasta dishes, esp. stuffed shells (tofu instead of ricotta, etc.)

[shoocu_shoocu]

My husband's Lebanese, and while we're in Lebanon, his mother veganizes EVERYTHING for us. It's amazing. His father even got his family's butcher to make vegan meat pies (never mind all the complicated questions that come up with having a butcher make anything vegan!) We're also lucky that a lot of Lebanese food is already so vegan friendly, eh?

At home, we make a few variations on kibbe, and put tofu in Molukhia recipes, and I cook a lot of naturally vegan "heritage recipes" that people don't usually eat anymore.

Another thing I love about Lebanese food is that there are so many tasty vegan desserts or desserts that only require replacing butter with veggie oil, like sfoof (tumeric cake) or Meghly (rice flour pudding with caraway).

[xemcats]

Oh wow, I'm incredibly jealous! That sounds amazing.

Also, you may be the perfect person to ask this. None of the recipes in my family have ever been written down. We only know how to say them, not spell them, and I'm sure as they've been passed down we've bastardized the pronunciation too. If you have *any* idea how to actually spell any of these I'd be immensely and forever grateful!

One of the things we make we call "Fatyres" though I'm sure they're not spelled that way. It's basically hamburger, onions, and spices wrapped in bread dough and baked. Does that ring a bell? They're actually really similar to what people call "pasties" in the upper midwest, but they're filled and folded differently:

[fantasticdamage]

Wow, vegan Lebanese food sounds great! My grandfather was from Lebanon so I grew up eating alot of kibbeh, tabouli, hummus, etc. My Mom has a cookbook that has recipes in Arabic & English which is pretty neat.

[bestepisodeever]

I've veganized a couple of Filipino dishes. Filipinos use EVERYTHING from animals... from pig's blood to beef tripe. They pretty much waste nothing, and animal products are found in almost EVERYTHING. Living in LA, I've been lucky enough to find some great fake meats to replace the meat products though.

[bestepisodeever]

Yeah, there's one in El Segundo called Papillon. I haven't been yet since I live in the valley. It's not really veg, but they have both vegan and regular versions of everything. They said they will do that until they can afford to be entirely vegan.

But I've veganized arroz caldo, fish sinigang, chicken adobo, mami noodles and I can't remember what else. I'd like to try a vegan pancit and lumpia shanghai. I don't really make breads, but I'd like to try since I miss the fluffiness of pan de sal. I also don't have a vegan recipe for leche flan either...

A lot of the desserts are already vegan, like ginataan and kutsinta. I want to figure out a good ube cake recipe too...

[kingfissure]

My mother's family is from Japan, and as a child I learned how to cook from my grandmother before she passed away. A lot of it is understandably seafood-oriented, of which I've occasionally worked on making rough vegan equivalents, usually to cure a sudden bout of nostalgia.