Keep Your Turkey Away from my Chili!

There's this guy in the office who eats chili every day. OK, he may not eat it every day, but he eats it so often that if I smell chili reheating in the microwave, I assume he's nearby.

His chili smells really good, and one day I asked him for his recipe. He told me his recipe wasn't authentic, and Ireplied that I didn't believe there was such a thing as an authentic chili recipe. But then he told me that his was made with ground turkey and lima beans, and I changed my mind.

Then again, I eat lentil soup that tastes like dirty water.

Anyways, Spousal Unit bought organic, free-range, antibiotic-free, all-natural, old cow ground beef the other day. I asked him if, for the love of all that was good and true, he could, for once, not insist on making spaghetti with meat sauce with it. He asked what I suggested, and I suggested chili with black beans.

Spousal Unit hates black beans -- but he loves lima beans, ironically enough -- but he made it anyways. I brought the leftovers for lunch. He made himself a turkey sandwich instead.

Not authentic, but lima-bean-free.

Non-Vegan Beans on Toast

I was made with animal products.

Once upon a time, I did a radio show about books, and I was a vegetarian.  One day this vegan cookbook comes my way.

Now, my show was not a book review show, but an author interview show. I used to read the books, then interview authors about their books. Hence how I met Kirsten Koza. If the author wrote, say, a cookbook, I would have to, you know, make at least a few recipes from that cookbook.

This wasn't the first time I had a cookbook author on the show. On an earlier show I had eviscerated poor Evelyn Raab, author of The Clueless Baker, because my boyfriend at the time (aka Spousal Unit) totally fucked up every recipe he tried from that cookbook. And if my clueless boyfriend couldn't follow a muffin recipe from a book called "The Clueless Baker", then obviously that cookbook wasn't really made for the clueless.

Of course, the recipes rocked otherwise, but I still grilled that poor woman about why she claimed that the recipes were for the clueless when she had, evidently, never tested them on the clueless. It was ... not pretty.

Anyways, I decided that I would be nice to this vegan cookbook author. The problem was that I really hate tofu, I can't stand eating meatless (read: fake) meatballs, and, at the time, had the tiniest kitchen in the universe (that was also somewhat crawling with roaches). So any recipe that used tofu, required loads of kitchen prep, or involved faking meat was out of the question.

In other words, all I could make were the bean dishes.

So I made her black beans on toast. Of course, I made a million substitutions, like using real garlic instead of garlic powder, and using tomatoes and hot peppers instead of bottled salsa. I also added maple syrup, grated (real) cheddar all over it, and topped it off with a fried egg. It was very tasty, if not exactly vegan -- or anything like the original recipe.

It's a meal I enjoy to this day.

PS: The vegan cookbook author was really nice. I interviewed her over lunch at a vegan restaurant. I ate kohlrabi, chickpeas, and chocolate cake. The chocolate cake was made with tofu and its "frosting" was made with avocado and cocoa. It was OK, but I farted a lot.