2015 Favourites: Just Mayo

I’ve been meaning to do this for a bit – say, about a month? – but have been taking care of personal stuff so haven’t had the chance. Until NOW, that is! I want to share with whomever reads this a few of my favourite vegan things from last year; I promise that when I say ‘a few’ a mean exactly that – my top three discoveries. Any one of these items has likely been around a lot longer than a year, but I just didn’t know about it until sometime within the last 13 or so months. So, without further ado, the first in my three-part series:

1. Just Mayo, by Hampton Creek

   

   Mayonnaise is probably my favourite condiment. I was about to say that I would literally put it on anything, but that’s not true. I don’t use mayo on my fruit, or in my oatmeal. But, um… yeah. Everything else. As a vegan who is steadfastly opposed to eggs and dairy, mayo has been the hardest for me to resist when eating out. To be honest, if I get a veggie burger from an omni restaurant, more often than not I will eat it with whatever mayo they put on it. Its the one thing I just can’t resist

   When local vegans began posting that Just Mayo was available for an amazing price from our neighbourhood Costcos, I made sure to look for it as soon as I possibly could. And when I brought it home and gave it the first taste test, with some crinkle cut french fries piping hot just out of the oven, the sauce passed with flying colours. The smell, the taste, the colour, the texture – there is no way someone would notice any difference if every restaurant and fast food chain were to suddenly start using Just Mayo rather than the egg-and-dairy-based stuff.

   Now, I’ll be honest – the health benefits to switching from egg-based mayo to Just Mayo are limited to one very key difference – Just Mayo has absolutely ZERO cholesterol. Bad cholesterol leads to heart disease, and with the amount of mayonnaise I can consume when I’m on a savory food bender I was at a serious risk for developing too much of the bad cholesterol that could cause me to suffer a stroke one day. While the calorie count and fat count are relatively similar between traditional mayonnaise and Just Mayo, when eaten in moderation, Just Mayo will make a much bigger difference to your health in the long run. Another benefit is not to your body, but actually to your wallet! Just Mayo is MUCH cheaper than regular mayonnaise. And, best of all, ZERO innocent animals were subjected to misery and torture to create this product. So now when I go out, I can bring a little container with this delicious stuff and use it on my restaurant food so I can have my cake (mayo) and eat it too!

   As a little note – it was announced yesterday or today (who can remember anything these days?) that Hellman’s, the company that sued Just Mayo for calling itself mayonnaise even though it did not contain the traditional egg ingredient, is now set to release its OWN vegan mayonnaise. I’ll be sticking to Just Mayo as long as it is available to me, but it’s inspiring to see more and more vegan options become available.

Sweetness in the Belly

I was craving something sweet yesterday. Like, real bad. I’d actually been craving vegan donuts all weekend, but because I couldn’t make it to the south side to indulge in Frickin’ Delights donuts at the Strathcona Market. So, I decided to give the good ole college try with this vegan cupcake recipe I found on Babble: http://www.babble.com/best-recipes/the-best-vegan-cupcakes-ever/

Now, I’m not going to say that my cupcakes were the best ever. In fact, they were far from perfect. Next time I’m going to bake for a couple of minutes less as they were just a touch overdone. And while the icing was delicious as is, I wasn’t a fan of the colour, so I’d add some food colouring just to make the cupcakes a little more festive. Otherwise, my favourite vanilla on top of vanilla taste combination was more than satisfactory. My cravings were sated, and I still have cupcakes left to last me the next few days!

And, because its loosely related, I found this song on iTunes and its currently my favourite.

Eggless Egg Salad (or, Getting Ova Eggs)

Removing eggs from my diet has not been a hardship. A few years ago I learned that eggs are essentially the product of a hen’s menstrual cycle, and ever since then I cannot look at an egg without visualizing the egg being squeezed out of a chicken’s lady parts. So, save for egg salad sandwiches (which were always a weakness for me) and the occasional scrambled egg breakfast at Albert’s restaurant, I haven’t made the high-cholesterol high-fat artery-clogging food a part of my everyday eating.

But, as mentioned above, I have always loved egg salad sandwiches. Well, I love sandwiches in general – when people ask me what my favourite food is, or what food I would choose if I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, its the sandwich. I love bread. I love the things that go between pieces of bread. I love the spreads that go on bread. So, having exhausted peanut butter sandwiches since going vegan, I decided it was time to try this fantastic thing I had been hearing about… eggless egg salad.

I wasn’t very adventurous: I literally followed the recipe on the side of the Mori-Nu Tofu package, using the ingredients I had on hand (so no capers, and regular mustard instead of dried). This was my first hands-on experience with tofu, so it made the endeavour even more fun. Following advice I had read online, I unpackaged the tofu and put it on a plate between two dish towels, and then sat my Forest Feast cookbook on top for weight. I left it for half an hour, then replaced the damp towels with dry ones, and let the remaining water drain from the tofu for another thirty minutes. The rest was simple: I smushed the tofu in a bowl until it actually kinda resembled hard-boiled egg whites, mixed in the Veganaise (I was careful with this part because I didn’t want the tofu to smooth out – I wanted it to remain chunky), then mixed in the rest of the ingredients (shallots – or onions, as that’s all I had, and the mustard, and a lot of salt, and pepper).

Voila! Egg salad sandwich!

Now, obviously I knew that what I was making was not going to taste exactly like the egg salad I grew up with. But, I have to admit, the mixture really did take on a surprisingly similar texture to what I have been accustomed to, and made for a satisfying lunch.

You know, I’ve really started to understand that the trick with veganized versions of our favourite recipes is to accept that these new versions are not going to taste exactly the same as their carnivore-catering counterparts, and to simply do our best to enjoy them for what they are – delicious foods that are tempting to the taste-buds in their own right.