— Mary Janicki

So, impossible meat. Um, I always look at it as impossible meats is a great converter, right? So if you're converting from being a hundred percent, you know, like you're eating mostly meat, going over to plant-based, impossible meats are a great way to be able to convert from one to the other. They have the look, the feel, the taste, you know, of a regular burger. So, um, you're, you know, you're getting the same kind of thing, but you're lowering your cholesterol levels on those. Now that being said, um, if you, uh, impossible burgers definitely have a lot of stuff in them, even more stuff than burgers would, you know. So, um, I definitely wouldn't stay on that for too long. It's not like you, they're not meant to be like a thing where you eat all the time on the impossible stuff. So I might veer away from that a little bit, um, on, uh, the Impossible Burger side. So, you know, it's a great when you're just kind of converting over, but definitely look at a, a plan to be able to kind of escape over into, um, more of a plant-based and whole food diet. Now, the second part of that question is, do you have any good recipes? Not for mushy plant foods. So, yeah, plant-based foods don't always have to be mushy or soups or salads. In fact, uh, my wife and I, uh, you know, we always kind of like when we're going to a restaurant, the only thing that's available for us is a salad. We usually pick a different place. Not that we don't love salads, we love salads, um, but we just want something that's a little more inventive than that. Now, non mushiness is, I think that's kind of funny because there's a huge variety of foods out there that are non mushy in the plant-based world. Um, you know, the same kind of crusts that you can get on all kinds of things you can do in, uh, plant-based foods. So just even from like fries and, you know, doing like beets and having, you know, different vegetables you can, you know, uh, do a cooking technique on them to be able to make them nice and crispy. In fact, eggplant and zucchini are one of those things that we love to, um, do like a, we'll roast them first in the oven and then we'll do, uh, a broil on them to be able to kind of crisp them up. They do the same thing with, um, Brussels sprouts too. We'll do a nice roast on the Brussels sprout, Brussels sprout, and then I will broil them at the end and get them nice and crispy where there's kind of some burnt Ds on them and they're really, really crispy. And then I'll toss 'em in a kimchi as well to make kimchi, um, brussel sprouts. So depending on the cooking techniques that you're using, you can get that kind of crispiness that you're looking for. Now, if you're looking for different things like in, like in tofu as well, um, I do a couple different dishes where, where I'll do like a crusted tofu. A lot of times I'll bake them off to be able to have a crust on the outside. Um, I'll do certain dishes where I'll toss them in like, um, you know, a flour or corn starch to be able to get a nice crispiness on the outside too when you're cooking them. Um, so sometimes I'll bake them and then do the corn starch and then, you know, put them into a dish typically with like an Asian sauce or something like that when I'm doing that. But those, uh, stand out really nice and have a nice crunch to them where they're crunchy on the outside and soft in the inside. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of different, uh, things that are non mushy in the plant-based world. Um, I think just exploring a couple of cooking techniques is probably where you want to go to be able to make that happen. Um, and even in your, you know, taco fillings, you can do things like that, like doing, you know, Tempe bacon or different, um, you know, things my wife and I were talking about doing. Uh, we used to make this rice paper bacon, um, which is basically mixing like a tamari mixture and some liquid smoke or so smoked salt, um, you know, a little paprika together, soaking those and then baking them off. And it becomes this nice, nice crispy bacon like texture that you can put into sandwiches for like a BLT. But using, not using bacon, using the um, uh, the, uh, rice paper instead. You can also do the same thing with seaweed. I've seen a lot of those too. Um, our favorites are probably the mushroom bacon, um, which can be crispy as well. Do a shiitake bacon like that, mix it up and think it's kind of crispy at the same time.