The Secret to Chips Ahoy
I can think of only one thing a vegan ever taught me: how to make all-natural homemade cookies taste like storebought.
Perhaps you are asking yourself, why would a perfectly nutbag vegan baker want their cookies to taste like Chips Ahoy? Hopefully you are answering yourself, too, because I got nuthin’ other than: because they taste like forbidden.
The secret ingredient, for whatever reason, is cardamom.
I swear this to be true. The next time you make chocolate chip cookies, whatever your regular recipe, add maybe 1/8th of a teaspoon (up to a 1/4, taste the dough as you mix) of ground cardamom — so little that you essentially can’t even taste it — and it’s like a magical artificially flavored fairy came along and tinkled on your cookies. I’ve mentioned this here before, but I thought I’d reiterate having just recently made my favorite Immature Style chocolate chip cookies again. I’m telling you: cardamom.
February 15th, 2010 | Make It So, Obsessed
I think cardamom is one of the great secrets of food.
Between it and fish sauce, we never know what hit us.
I am having a love affair with cardamom right now, I’m putting it in nearly everything.
I can think of only one thing a vegan ever taught me
Ain’t no need to hate on vegans, yo. I can think of worse things to be.
I ain’t hatin’! I just haven’t absorbed anything else.
I tried veganism for two years when I was a young man searching for the Holy Grail of eating well. When friends, whom I trusted for their honesty and intelligence, began to tell me I didn’t look right and they were worried about me, I dropped it like a bad habit. I’ve been an ovo-lacto-pesca-vegetarian (harrr!) for 36 years, consistently, with zero back-sliding (btw: I think these labels are plain silly!). Basically, I just don’t eat meat or fowl, but everything else in moderation. I’ve known many vegans over the past 40 years and I can truthfully say (without hatin’) that not a single one has shown me that veganism is an efficient or healthy way to eat. In fact, two dear friends, a married couple, were hospitalized and near death as a result of a fanatical vegan diet and their ignorance of the body’s nutritional needs. Every ‘true’ vegan I’ve known has had poor body-strength, low energy levels and a wan skin tone of a sickly hue. I’ve discovered that the great majority lie about having strict adherence and regularly sneak many non-vegan foods, often to the extreme (cheeseburger and fries anyone?). I have found that for most self-styled vegans, they take the moniker for social aggrandizement among their peers, especially young college-age students. They wear the vegan ‘badge’, but are less true vegans than The Hamburgler.
When a person refuses to eat commercially farmed honey because s/he believes the poor little bees are slaves and being exploited, well gang, I’m thinking that person has some reality issues that dietary factors alone are not going to ameliorate any time soon.
If you believe my observations to be incorrect, unfair or downright false … then bring it! I’ve got 40 years of first-hand experience and personal trial on the subject.
Nope, I’m not hatin’ on vegans either, just saying they’re misinformed and haven’t done their homework on the subject.
Vegetarianism, si … veganism, no.
One world, Jah! Pastafarians unite.
Ha-ha! Uh. I’m going to be behind this blast wall over here if anyone needs me.
No need for blast walls, Sunday, I really don’t have a dog in this fight. In all due respect to your aged wisdom, oh Quagulous One, I have heard the “pale and wan” argument applied to ovo-lacto vegetarians, as well as anecdotes about ovo-lacto vegetarians being hospitalized for malnutrition and former ovo-lacto vegetarians experiencing miraculous recoveries from chronic maladies once the blessed flesh of food animals touches their lips. I remain unconvinced, mostly because unlike some other food-isms, a well planned vegan diet has held up under the scrutiny of nutritional science (such as it is) for many decades. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of stupid foodisms out there, and I have known a few people who appear to be using food politics to cover for problematic control issues and eating disorders. I’m also not very fond of the tendency of college kids to discover simultaneously the joys of Noam Chomsky, torn wife beaters and black bandannas, not using deodorant, and ignoring the rules of road sharing, at which point veganism becomes almost compulsory. I will freely admit that when I was vegan I mostly subsisted on poor-quality carbohydrates and sodium-laden processed meat substitutes. None of that means the diet itself is faulty, but it’s often associated with douchebaggery and/or executed poorly…like gun ownership.
As it stands now, my favorite cookbook of all time is Vegan with a Vengeance (the beet, barley and black soy bean soup is a Moscow winter in a bowl), and I try to make sure we eat a lot of home-cooked, vegetable-heavy vegan meals because they are the biggest nutrient bang for your calorie buck. We also go through dozens and dozens of eggs, gallons of milk and a handful of luscious little blocks of Beecher’s Flagship every year, and if I could stick my head in the Copper River and grab the salmon with my teeth I probably would. I’m no vegan, but had I never been one I would probably be raising my kids on mashed potatoes and Shake and Bake pork chops, a well-documented recipe for at least one big trip to the hospital later in life.
BTW, if you ever want to experience the full spectrum of self-imposed food restrictions in all of its glory, try attending a child’s birthday party in Oly. Oh. My. Fucking. God.