i was raised vegan, in the 1980s, when it was neither trendy nor particularly easy to do (health reasons coupled with the fact that my mother hated touching raw meat). the most prominent food memory I have is one thanksgiving when my mother took it upon herself to introduce us to seitan. if you’ve never experienced the joys of seitan, made from scratch, in the essentially pre-internet days where it was difficult to get a recipe that wasnt either awful or untested (presumably someone came up with the recipe but they must have been suffering from chronic mental illness), then you havent lived. after eating it, I too was wishing I hadnt lived.
seitan is wheat gluten - you make it like you’d make bread, but then you cover the dough with water and leave it alone for a day or two, then strain out the gluten. the resulting mass is then shaped and cooked. it looks like a pre-cancerous mass in shades of brown, and has the consistency of a fibrous sponge - when you’re struggling to choke it down, it’s like eating old chewing gum that has no flavor, or a nice lump of gristle without the beneficial nature of gristle. it’s foul beyond belief. anyone who actually enjoys it should be prescribed meds & involuntarily committed to the mental ward.
I love my mother but what she created in her kitchen for that thanksgiving dinner was a crime against man and god - an unholy marriage of allegedly healthy food (on a day that revels in unhealthy overconsumption) and abdominal malaise. I was raised to eat what was set in front of me - it’s polite manners, and it compliments the cook - but I really just couldnt do it and my stomach was rebelling. I was in severe gastric distress. since my folks were health freaks and they had any number of naturopathic/quack-science remedies for common ailments, I was prescribed charcoal pills (used to treat food poisoning - yeah, let that sink in). after an hour or so I became nauseous and then began projectile vomiting chunky, partially digested seitan and stomach bile that was black as night - similar in many respects to that scene in the Exorcist. it went everywhere, and the smell…
anyway that’s my not-so-fond childhood food memory.
i was raised vegan, in the 1980s, when it was neither trendy nor particularly easy to do (health reasons coupled with the fact that my mother hated touching raw meat). the most prominent food memory I have is one thanksgiving when my mother took it upon herself to introduce us to seitan. if you’ve never experienced the joys of seitan, made from scratch, in the essentially pre-internet days where it was difficult to get a recipe that wasnt either awful or untested (presumably someone came up with the recipe but they must have been suffering from chronic mental illness), then you havent lived. after eating it, I too was wishing I hadnt lived.
seitan is wheat gluten - you make it like you’d make bread, but then you cover the dough with water and leave it alone for a day or two, then strain out the gluten. the resulting mass is then shaped and cooked. it looks like a pre-cancerous mass in shades of brown, and has the consistency of a fibrous sponge - when you’re struggling to choke it down, it’s like eating old chewing gum that has no flavor, or a nice lump of gristle without the beneficial nature of gristle. it’s foul beyond belief. anyone who actually enjoys it should be prescribed meds & involuntarily committed to the mental ward.
I love my mother but what she created in her kitchen for that thanksgiving dinner was a crime against man and god - an unholy marriage of allegedly healthy food (on a day that revels in unhealthy overconsumption) and abdominal malaise. I was raised to eat what was set in front of me - it’s polite manners, and it compliments the cook - but I really just couldnt do it and my stomach was rebelling. I was in severe gastric distress. since my folks were health freaks and they had any number of naturopathic/quack-science remedies for common ailments, I was prescribed charcoal pills (used to treat food poisoning - yeah, let that sink in). after an hour or so I became nauseous and then began projectile vomiting chunky, partially digested seitan and stomach bile that was black as night - similar in many respects to that scene in the Exorcist. it went everywhere, and the smell…
anyway that’s my not-so-fond childhood food memory.