vegan boy scout dinner = yummy!

It's getting to be the cold weather that longs for filling comfort food, so I decided to attempt a vegan version of a favorite childhood meal, the boy scout dinner.  The basis for this meal (also known as a hobo dinner according to my brother-in-law) is meat and veggies cooked in tinfoil over a fire.  My stepdad always made it for us with potatoes, onions, carrots, and polish sausage (a lot of online recipes call for ground beef) all mixed together in the tinfoil and cooked in the oven when we weren't camping.

So for my meal I chopped up some Yukon Gold potatoes, a small onion, and a couple of carrots and piled them on top of a Field Roast Smoke Apple Sage sausage (awesomely vegan).  I drizzled on a little olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and wrapped up the tinfoil into a pouch and threw it in the oven at 375.  After the potatoes were still pretty hard after 45 minutes, I called my mom and asked her what temp I should set the oven at and she recommended 400.  So they were at 375 for about 1 hr 15 minutes and then at 400 for another 20.  Next time I think I'll just start at 400 and try for a little over an hour.

But they turned out so yummy!  I ate them with some sauteed kale with garlic and feasted.  Such a comforting meal on a cold night which reminded me of being a kid.

Took this pic when I'd already started eating, so it's not the prettiest but the food was going fast!  I like the sausage dipped in a little dijon mustard, so that's what the smear on the top of the plate is.  I made two packets of this, so I'll have tasty leftovers for tomorrow.

my vegan story, part 1

Every vegan has a story; except for those born vegan, no one actually wakes up one day and decides to become vegan for no reason.  As with a lot of my life, my story starts with a book:  PopCo by Scarlett Thomas.  I read a good review of it in the LA Times Sunday Book Review and checked it out at the library; I don't think I even knew there were vegetarians and vegans in it.

Along with all sorts of fun stuff like codes and pirates and anti-capitalism, the main character meets a guy who explains why he became vegan.  In the scene he's explaining that he saw some study where pigs can play video games and right then decided if they can play video games he's not going to eat them (it's much better in the book, trust me).

Well it's not as though I up and quit right then, but it got me thinking.  And when I start thinking I like to do research (I especially liked to do research at my job because back then I was a receptionist with a lot of time on my hands).  So off to the internets I went...