When I was a kid, we ate pretty much anything: eggs and bacon with our Sunday breakfasts, beef curries, lamb chops, chickens that we had raised and killed, even a whole roast pig once. Then I met the spouse-unit who, after being raised vegetarian and experimenting with steaks and cheezburgers cheeseburgers in his teens, was back to being one of those fish-only vegetarians. Once we got married, most of my meat cooking went out the window. I think it’s in part because I grew up in a pretty typical South Indian household, where food is cooked in bulk. You just don’t cook a few portion-sized steaks for the evening meal; you buy half a lamb from the butcher, freeze half, cook the other half and then freeze all the cooked stuff, other than what the family might eat in a day or two. And needless to say, you don’t buy lamb again for months. So when I moved out on my own, I still cooked like that, which explained the 10 lbs. of crab curry stashed in my freezer to curious friends. But marrying to the spouse changed a lot. I ate better vegetables for starters. I still remember my very first organic heirloom tomato. It was sinful. I remember wondering in bemused horror what all those round, red things I had previously thought to be tomatoes were really made of and how had I managed to miss real tomatoes all my life. Truly, good veggies make it so much easier to give up meat. I bought vegetarian cookbooks and learn how to make amazing meals without a speck of meat and, though it took a little while, I learned to enjoy them just as much.
Since being preggers with Spice, though, I’ve gone back to eating meat more. When you’re pregnant, you’re supposed to have some insane protein intake, like 60-100 grams per day, depending on your body weight, etc. I’m really into eating things as unprocessed as possible, so commercial protein shakes were out of the question. For those of you jumping up and down yelling “Beans!!”, I’m also terrible with legumes. Or rather, my insides are, to put it delicately. Since I didn’t really care about eating meat so much as meeting my protein needs, I started buying meat products that were quick to make and as single-serving as possible, things like pre-cooked sausages, deli meats and canned fish. (Yes, yes, I can hear the Stepford wives of you out there panicking over salmonella and e. coli from deli meat, mercury in fish, etc. Don’t worry, I was careful – I made sure to finish off my glass of sake when I ate sushi.) These foods are often as palatable as half-baked mud. The thing we do for our children, eh?
From time to time, I try the latest faux meat products – mostly out of curiosity. During a vacation in Southeast Asia a few years back, my family and I ate at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant where classic meat dishes were re-created with various meat substitutes with amazing detail. I remember trying roast duck that not only looked like chopped duck, but even had that crispy layer of skin on top like the real thing. Ever since then, I’ve been on the lookout here in the U.S. for that same degree of authenticity in faux meat, but most of it is just awful. Until I tried some sausages by Field Roast.
These things are incredibly good. As in, I would totally serve these up as vegetarian hot dogs at a barbeque. They look like compacted grain from the outside, there isn’t any attempt at a casing, like the intestines used for meat sausages. I tossed mine on the stove in a cast iron skillet and turned it a few times to get some nice burn marks. I could easily imagine it crumbled and scrambled with eggs or on top of pizza, it’s just that good. If more faux meat were like this, perhaps persuading more people to eat less meat wouldn’t be so hard.
UPDATE 02/20/09: Beware of the italian sausages. I’ve so far encountered needle-sharp stick-like bits while eating, I’m assuming the stem of whatever herbs they’re using.
