I have to admit it at long last: I really really don’t like Tempeh. At least in huge chunks. The dry, nutty, fermented flavor of tempeh suggests to me something that died—a long time ago, and sat in the fridge to ferment in its despair and solitude. No thank you. A sole exception has to be made, of course, for the sassy, delectable, divine concoction that is Tempeh Bacon. As far as I’m concerned, smother anything (vegan) in maple syrup, soy sauce, and liquid smoke, and its fair-game as face-fair. Yum!
But that’s another story. Point is, tempeh tastes like fish sauce and bricks and I usually sidestep it. It’s not that I haven’t given it fair game. I’ve been veg for nine years and vegan for four, and tempeh never worked its mojo on me. Tempeh adventures I save for bolder and more heroic times, not the everyday. Knowing, however, that I would be spending as much as four weeks in my parents West Virginia home doing absolutely nothing (cue Dueling Bangos), I picked up a slab of tempeh for another one-on-one to see if we could come to terms with our differences.
Simultaneously, having been in the deliciously nerdy habit lately of taking pictures of everything I eat, I came to the sudden and unsettling realization of how anti-green I am (by which I mean food that is the color green, indicating that it is nutrient-dense. Vegan food is almost always in the ballpark of the Green Movement, and a vegan diet taken as a whole certainly is). Veg*ns everywhere beware: Having sworn potential pets, and maybe their reproductive secretions, off of your plate does not in any way entitle you to thinking you’ve got your green covered indefinitely. Eating green food is a conscious project for all of us. A harmless and joyful project, but one that needs our attention anyway. So lately. In response to the drolling monotone of what I thought were a series of seriously nutrient-packed dinners, I’ve decided to see just how green I can go with dinner. It seemed that between my tempeh-therapy and my green-boosting, a pretty interesting dinner conbination was underway tonight.
Enter red-quinoa-spinach-tempeh-lemon-food-thing, and it’s humble sidekick, brocolli-water-chestnut-food-thing. Tonight I made red quinoa with roasted tempeh crumbles, spinach (a hell of a lot of spinach I might add, about 50% of the dinner was spinach), lemon, ginger and garlic. It came from this stellar book I’m always going back to: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It’s not all-vegan, but it’s mostly vegan and all the vegan recipes are labeled as such. I took some liberties with the recipe though, adding veggie stock and lots of ginger. The sidekick tonight was ginger broccolli with water chestnuts and sesame seeds. Pretty damn, healthy, if I may say so myself, and the profoundly Eurocentric theme that saw unity in all flavors ‘other’ was enough to make any quasi-postmodernist MacVegan* blush with embarrassment (quinoa—S. America, Tempeh-Indonesia, Spinach—southwest asia, water chestnuts—china, etc.) Still, nothing too wring with that.
*MacVegan is a term my sister coined which refers to the painfully identifiable post-hippie vegan culture that I, admittedly, ascribe to. Vegans with MacBooks. The ones that like Yoga and irony. If a series of related images aren't blossoming in your head right now, see Stuff White People Like
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