Question
Mel Dorling
Would you be able to recommend a couple of meals which I could give to meat eaters who have never eaten plant based to show how delicious it can be?
Answer
So, for example, you could make the Yo Adrian burgers and then set up a burger bar where you would have all of the fixings that you would use, lettuce, tomato, relish, onions, et cetera, because they know what that is. They've been to a burger bar before. They just haven't had one of your burgers. And I was thinking today of a time not too long ago where I taught a class, and I brought a very popular whole wheat hamburger roll that has lots of seeds on top, and I thought, "This isn't going to work because they're going to take a look at the flax seed and everything else and go, 'I'm not going to eat that.'" So instead, if you live on the East Coast, there's a very popular Portuguese bakery called Viera, and they actually make a whole wheat hard roll, and hamburgers taste delicious on them. So you want to introduce familiar foods, and I think that's one way. The other thing, true confession time, I had never eaten tofu until I became a student at Rouxbe, and our baked tofu recipe sort of converted me to appreciate how a well-made tofu dish can taste. So if you wanted to introduce a tofu dish, that might be risky for the non-plant-based people, but a stew, a chili, a rich, hearty soup. And what I like to do with soups is, just before the soup is finished, to add maybe a half to three-quarters of a cup of old-fashioned oats so that it thickens up a little bit, and then you're going to serve that with a beautiful salad. And who doesn't love a beautiful salad? And everyone has eaten a salad, so they're not going to see too much of a difference. But let's hope that they would see a familiarity or similarity in the way that you cook. So those are my recommendations. To meet people where they are, do what you know, and have fun, because I always say that at the end of a dinner or whatever, you don't remember exactly what you ate, but you remember the conversation, the funny joke that someone may have shared. So I would go with that. And Nell, always a pleasure to hear from you.
