Lard-free Brunch

Two things you should know: growing up, Sunday brunch followed Sunday Mass. Pancakes came after penance, waffles after worship, eggs after Ecclesiastes (sorry.) (you get it.) Second, the family priest had the thickest St. Louis accent ever to be articulated, rendering our “most holy Lord” into a very very sacred lard. This has humored me for years. Often, today is “the lard’s day” at my house, and we’re always so grateful for the fact that “the lard provides.”

Last Sunday, I had brunch with friends. Probably because of the ever-present lard associated with brunch and my overly controlling healthy food-choice lifestyle that just doesn’t allow for that in my diet, brunch has never done it for me. But friends invited (vegan ones, too!), and so I went. (At lest the lard wouldn’t be partially hydrogenated!) (sorry again)

I of course wanted to put my new cookbook VEGAN WITH A VENGEANCE to use, and I was extra excited because I got to crack open those breakfast pages that I never ever look at (who cooks muffins?).

I choose the asparagus sundried-tomato “egg” frittata. Now again, being a near-vegan, I usually avoid eggs (my auto-response is set for “dead baby chickens”), but when I go to the gym frequently, I usually crave serious protein. Plus I still have a lingering fear of over-soying myself. So I’d have been inclined to just cook the eggs, it’s Sunday brunch after all, and thus, the day of lard. But these are my vegan friends.

So I do it—buy the tofu, nutritional yeast, etc. and set to work making fake eggs. Here’s the weird part (it’s so weird): you crumble firm tofu with your fingers, mix in a few drips of soy sauce, a tablespoon of mustard, and some nutritional yeast, and you are suddenly facing a bowl of scrambled eggs. It looks like eggs, it smells like eggs, and yes, even though cold and uncooked, its tastes like eggs! Again I say, wha? huh?

Sauté onion and asparagus, stir in sundried tomatoes, mix, bake, done: frittata. And it was pretty good, I have to say. The end product tasted a heck of a lot less like eggs than pre-cooking, but it still registered “brunch” on my radar. Not bad. I like that Isa Chandra.

The rest of the brunch, though, is what wowed. These two are true Isa Chandra junkies, having baked and consumed probably literally 75-100 batches of her cupcakes (god, I mean lard, it could be triple that, truly), they make recipes like the sweet potato crepes on a regular old week night, and research her other publications just for fun. These are some serious PPK cooks. Here’s what they provided: banana-walnut waffles (ohmygod who knew that bananas CARAMELIZE when waffle-ironed??), grits from heirloom corn plants in North Carolina, and homemade seitan sausage (OK satan’s sausage on the lard’s day…. now this is coming full circle.). It was surreal. To relive Sunday Brunch, on the lard’s day, with the balls of seitan present, in full veganese. Now that’s something. I love this life. Praise jebus!