I Can't Believe I Failed to Eat Vegan: IMBB #19

Anxious to get involved in the IMBB scene, I spent days pondering vegan recipes. Vegan gingerbread? Falafel? Can pasta be vegan? I was uninspired. After much consideration, I decided my only choice was to counter-blog IMBB #19. But it seemed inadequate to simply cook some meat and thumb my nose--not at all in the IMBB spirit. Instead, I devised my own little challenge: create the ultimate anti-vegan meal, and thus redeem myself in the eyes of Becks and Posh and the rest of the (blog) world.

I used this post at Is My Blog Burning? as my shopping list. The goal was to consume as many types of animals and animal products as possible in a single meal.

The first course was goose liver pate on baguette. I would have used full-on genuine morally objectionable foie gras, but I shop at Whole Foods. (What does it say about me that my grocery store has more of a conscience than I do?) The label informs me that I consumed the internal organs of goose and duck.

(NB: I realize that not all vegans choose to eat the way they do for moral reasons. But to create a truly anti-vegan meal, I thought it would be best veer as far as possible for the vegan beaten path.)

For the main course, I would have liked to get some Chilean Sea Bass, since it is apparently being overfished and threatened with extinction. But alas, I was thwarted by Whole Foods once again. I settled for sauteing a salmon steak, on the grounds that having the word "steak" in the name got me extra negative vegan points.

On the side, I planned baby squash roasted with coins of chorizo sausage. Eating tiny, infant veggies seems to go against the "compassionate, just, and kind" spirit of veganism, so I deemed baby squash to be the most anti-vegan vegetable. The sausage contained both beef and pork, making it a culinary double word score. I popped the whole mix under my broiler with a few sprigs of rosemary for 25 minutes and--because you can't be too careful--I drizzled everything with butter.

There was, naturally, a cheese course.

For dessert, I opted for buttermilk biscuits, topped with honey-baked plums and yogurt. The honey was the key ingredient here--the stolen fruits of untold hours of honeybee sweatshop labor--but the buttermilk, eggs, and yogurt did their part.

I cooked the meal wearing high-heel shoes boasting "authentic leather uppers" and used wool potholders. The table was set with a silk cloth. And I used a leather-bound book as trivet, just for good measure.

My only regret is that I was unable to figure out a way to work in animal gelatin. Mostly because I didn't want to think too hard about what such a thing might consist of. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere, right?

***
My badge of shame:

Tagged with: IMBB # 19 + Vegan