Vegan?!?! Who'd a thunk?!?!

If you would have told me 5 years ago I would be eating Vegan food and loving it I would have laughed in your face! My thoughts of Vegan food were that it would be totally nasty tasting and no meat..ARE YOU KIDDING?!?!?! Today tho, I can proudly say that I love Vegan food and have eaten quite a few dishes that are quite YUMMY!!!
These awesome tasting dishes are the creation of my oldest daughter Chanine. She chose to become Vegan a few years back along with her hubby. His family is also Vegan, so it seemed to be the right thing as well as the healthy way to go. While it was normal for them, the rest of my family was completely baffled by the whole process! Like I have said, we are a family of foodies, and no meat or dairy products would be an insult to our taste buds! How would we include them in our get-togethers? What could we possibly cook that would taste good and fit in with our scrumptious abundance of goodies?! The task of finding great tasting vegan dishes seemed impossible. All I could think of were vegetable trays, but then you couldn’t even have ranch dip to dip the veggies in, so what were we to do? I had never heard of vegan sour cream or vegan cream cheese, and soy milk or tofu was for those crazy health nuts!..LOL :)Little did I know I was totally wrong. At first. Chanine would bring along dishes that they were able to eat. We would try them, quite reluctantly at first, but soon we all began to realize that Vegan cooking could be quite flavorful. So we all began to delve into finding recipes that we could make and incorporate into our get-togethers. My daughters cooking skills have grown by leaps and bounds the last few years and she has made some of the most awesome tasting Vegan dishes. One recipe I ”NEVER” thought she could Veganize, was tamales. How could you turn the sacred tamale that you use lard and pork in, into a tasty Vegan specimen?? She has proven me quite wrong in this area, as her Vegan tamales are the BOMB!!!! They are filled with black beans, corn, black olives, her green sauce and her vegan cheese blend and taste fantastic! Last week she made a Vegan Christmas dinner for our Christmas in July celebration and it was out of this world! We had stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, home-made rolls, tofurkey and even pumpkin pie!!

Pumpkin Pie

There are countless other dishes that she has made that have totally changed my view as well as the family’s view on Vegan cooking. She has even taken some of our traditional family dishes and made them into delicious Vegan fare. So Chanine continues the legacy of great cooks in our family with a whole new avenue of thinking. I think she makes us all proud with her passion for cooking
While I have no plans on becoming Vegan any time soon (I love carne asada and pork roast too much!! ), I can say that my daughter inspires me to eat healthier, because I now know that eating healthier can still be YUMMY!!!