The Chef: AureliaThe Menu: A delicious, exotic curry comprised of green beans, carrots, zucchini, kale, and faux duck all simmered in rich coconut milk and savory curry. Yum! Served over quinoa and with a vibrant side salad of mixed greens, bell pepper, heirloom tomatoes, and avocado, this was one mega-satisfying main course.
The Goods: Yes, you read that right: faux duck. Our offices have been awash recently with uncommon faux meats in preparation for an in-depth look at the history of meatless eats which will appear in our September+October Food Issue, coming your way in a few short weeks! So, since we've got all these, um, interesting items, we thought the best way to share them with you would be by literally sharing them with you. Conveniently, today being the last day of July (sniff!), it's time for our Café VegNews Giveaway! For loot we have something that we're pretty sure has to be the strangest thing we've ever offered: vegan haggis! We figured that you might want visual proof of this one, so check it out below. Also, just in case faux-Scottish-nasty-potted meat doesn't turn out to be your favorite new food, we're also including a signed copy of VN columnist Rory Freedman's book, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch. On the cookbook theme, we'll be making recipes from cookbooks all next week, so don't miss it!
The Question: So here's what we're wondering: What's the strangest faux meat you've ever seen? You may get bonus points for having eaten it, but then again, you may also get bonus points for not having eaten it. Leave your answer in the comments by Friday, August 8, and we'll select a winner. Good luck!
9 comments:
we were in korea and they had fake muscle, in shells!!! no thank you, too real for me (they also hade fake octopus. no way!!!)
I was a 4th grader in 1971 & I don't know what was worse~the 10 cans of WHAM I had just spent a month of allowance on & made my mother drive all over Buffalo, NY hunting it down only to gag at it OR the "mock loaf" my Polish grandma made me out of kasha, nuts and some grey gravy shaped into little chicken-like legs that made me cry.
Choices have gotten better since then but once in a while I am still scared by products like "Skallops" that just creep me out!
I generally avoid mock meats like the plague because they creep me out, but once I saw a can of vegan "scallops" that I found particularly unsettling. I think there's no reason to re-create meat when there are already so many delicious vegetables, grains, etc. (which is why I love vegan cookbooks)!
As if the name "wheat meat" weren't bad enough...I recently saw some abalone-flavored wheat gluten in a can. Blech!
I am terrified of seitan in any guise but especially the direction for it which include boiling it, rinsing it, squeezing it and other terrible things that you should NEVER do to something you are actually going to EAT!
oh good lord...mock duck scares the hell out of me as does any mock seafood!!!!!
I recently finished a semester abroad in Germany and went to this vegan chinese restaurant that had fake everything a non-vegan chinese restaurant would have... shark, octopus, and squid were the most bizarre! I stuck to fake chicken, just to be safe, though I'm kind of wishing I'd tried the shark just to say I did!
Some of my friends and I went to an all-vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant without realizing that the menu consisted almost entirely of mock meats. The soup that I ordered had faux shrimp in it; they were molded to into shrimp shapes and were even dyed pink to make them more realistic. I thought it was very strange for the restaurant to go through so much effort to emulate meat when that was what their customers were seeking to avoid in the first place (although the vegan haggis in your blog seems like it might give the shrimp a run for its money in terms of strangeness)!
Without a doubt, Veg Fairy Roasted Eel is the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
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