Question
Dan Marek
Can you tell us a favorite family recipe that you used to enjoy before going plant-based that you have converted to a WFPB recipe? Was it easy to convert and why?
Answer
So last week I taught an a live cooking class, um, in person, uh, at the mainline school night where I'm a member of the culinary staff. And I made what is called Penta, not Panta, but Panta. And it is, uh, what my grandmother called, uh, bread soup. So it is a big gigantic bread soup. And then you take stale bread and you cover it with the bread, and then the bread gets soggy so that when you eat the soup, you get full quickly. And my grandmother, uh, would serve it a lot during the Great Depression of 1929. And we can re, I can remember my parents saying, oh, mom, I wish she would make some Panta. And she would say, no, no, no, that, that dish has bad memories for me. So Pat Patta. But Dan, I have to tell you that I have been able to convert the majority of every single recipe of my grandmother from making an almond, uh, an almond ricotta, uh, to making lasagna, to making, uh, manta, uh, and all kinds of things. Um, you have to remember that my grandparents were from the southern part of Italy, which is largely agricultural. So growing up we did not eat a lot of meat and fish and other, uh, types of meat. So vegetables are what I grew up with. And we always ate our vegetables first so that we would get full on our vegetables. And just like Jeff Novik and everyone else shows you that diagram of 400 calories of vegetables and your stomach and how filling that is. So the hardest thing to recreate though, uh, would be desserts because a lot of 'em are based in lots of oil and lots of, uh, sugar and other things like that. But I'll send you a recipe card 'cause it had a great recipe card, uh, made for the pentacot to hand out to the students. But soups and pasta, you can never go wrong.
