My favorite, and easiest, recipee for soups is to put a can of chickpeas or cannellini beans into your slow cooker. If you don't have beans, put a cup of rice in the crock with the beans, and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. When the rice is done, you can turn the slow cooker off and just enjoy the rest of the meal over the rice. If you have any tomato paste left over, it's even easier. Put it in a saucepan with your beans and cook them together for just a few minutes, and you're done. Soups can be eaten on their own or used as a base for salads or sandwiches, or whatever you feel like. This is a particularly good way to use up leftovers. For instance, if I have leftover soup, I put a bit of leftover chopped roasted veggies in it and then eat it with a sandwich. Soups also make a great canvas for extra grains, like cracked wheat, millet, or quinoa. Here are some of my favorite soups: • Minestrone soup, from Minestrone: Eat Soup with a Loaf of Garlic and Herbs and Vegetables by Rozanne Gold. The soup is full of veggies and beans, and flavored with herbs, and herbs are really good for you. • Bean soup, from Homemade Vegan Pantry: A comprehensive guide to making your own vegan pantry staples by Victoria Boutenko. • Creamy chickpea soup, from Vegetarian Planet. This one is the kind of soup that can warm you up on a cold day. It's creamy and filling and has all sorts of stuff in it. • Pea soup, from the pea soup chapter in The Hippie Food Guide by Freya von Mogel. • Chunky vegetable soup, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone: Comfort Classics for the Vegetarian Cook by Deborah Madison. I particularly like it because I really like the taste of canned tomatoes. # # MEAT AND THE SEARCH FOR SPECTACULAR FLAVORS Sometimes after eating a delicious meal, I have a strange feeling that I've been eating something I shouldn't. A couple of days later, I'll get a craving for it, and not be able to decide which version of it I want. What the heck is going on here? It's this thing people refer to as the "food memory." A memory of a bad food experience gets buried under layers of familiarity until you start wanting it. It's also the idea that flavor memories are stored somewhere in your brain, separate from the visual memories of things you see. At least, that's what I have found to be true for me. When I was young, I had bad experiences eating certain foods. I remember being in a bad mood and having a hot dog or some noodles for lunch and getting totally overwhelmed with how disgusting they were, and only a few months later I was dreaming about that food and trying to eat it again. As a kid, you don't notice these things so much, and you don't understand the reason for them. It took me years to figure out what had happened. It might have been the sodium in that processed food. It might have been some random chemical in the food that I had never eaten before. Whatever it was, eating this one kind of food makes me want to eat it again, and so the memory of it remains buried under layers of its replacement, but with the memory still there. On occasion, this can happen with an ingredient that I used to have a problem with, and that sometimes crops up in my cooking. But on the whole, I feel great about the fact that I have learned that I don't have to eat certain foods because they cause nausea or any other adverse reaction. It takes some of the mystery away from cooking for me and means that I can use my food choices as a way of choosing the kind of person I want to be. # VEGETARIAN MEAT I don't even like the taste of cooked meat. One of the reasons I try to avoid meat is that it can be really expensive. It was so hard for me to watch my mom struggle to pay the bills when we had to feed three kids. I couldn't bear to have my mom struggle like that. I'd been through that struggle before, and I did not want anyone to experience that. My mom wanted to make sure I had all the things she never had. Besides, it's totally unnecessary to eat meat if you're vegan. Lots of people feel uneasy eating meat that didn't come from an animal. It's a strange thing to consider, but there are just some ingredients that, when used in cooking, are hard to think about in nonanimal terms. When you look at a meaty flavor in food, there's no "way to put it," as they say, for animals, and no way to know how many different animals were involved in getting the flavor. We don't understand those processes, and that might be a factor in the fact that we're not fond of the taste of cooked meat. It's also hard for us to put ourselves in the place of an animal in other ways. It's fun, when cooking for a group of omnivores, to make something that tastes like meat. There's a kind of challenge in the idea that you might have to cook up a plate of fake meat to satisfy a group of carnivores. It's sort of a game for me. I'm always thinking about ways to make fake meat as convincing as I can. I've done some things with bread dough to make mock meat, and that's pretty easy because you can make a convincing slab of meat out of any kind of bread. Here are some of the ways I've made mock meat: • I made little flatbreads with little circles cut out of them, with a hole in the middle, to get the shape of a burger. It's like an origami burger! • I put pita bread dough in a bowl, rolled it into balls, flattened them, and fried them up in a pan with a little olive oil. • I'll even make fake "seitan" by taking a big block of tofu, slicing it into slabs, and boiling it until it breaks apart. Then I put it in the blender with some nutritional yeast and a couple of tablespoons of tamari, and I get a really good imitation of "ground beef." One of my favorite recipes using fake meat is for the Seitan, Lima Beans, and Greens Tacos. When I was a little kid, my family would go to a Mexican place a few times a month for a big lunch. I would order a plate of tacos with refried beans and some rice on the side. It was so delicious, I didn't mind that it was so expensive. At the time I wasn't thinking about how it was that they were able to afford all these things like meat. When I became vegan and started cooking for myself, I made a version of this dish using fake meat, and I've never been able to get it the way I did the real thing. # HOW TO FIND FLAVOR IN VEGETARIAN MEAT Sometimes when people are vegan for a long time, they don't get excited about eating plant-based food. They're afraid it will be really boring, like eating iceberg lettuce all the time. But plant-based food is full of amazing flavors. With some cooking techniques you can really extract flavor from the plant sources you are using. I like to use a lot of seasoning in my recipes. My favorite way to do that is to take olive oil and cook it down on a very low temperature until it turns into a "liquid smoke." You might be thinking, "What is liquid smoke?" It's a liquid made from wood that has been processed into a liquid to make food less "overwhelming." Olive oil is so versatile, but sometimes it lacks flavor. Sometimes the flavor of your food comes from spices, and if you're vegan, you can use some pretty amazing spices. So what spices are in liquid smoke? Here are some of my favorite spices: • Cardamom • Pepper • Cayenne pepper • Thyme • Cinnamon There are so many great combinations, you can even put your favorite spice from your spice rack on some toast and eat it as a snack while you make the food. I even like to put salt on it if I'm making a vegetable stew. Let's use my favorite spices to make fake meat. • Cardamom makes chicken. • Pepper makes burgers. • Cayenne pepper makes a nice burger. • Thyme makes anything taste amazing. • Cinnamon makes fake beef so it's like "leather" to eat it. Try some of those combinations for burgers and for some meatlike tasting vegetables, like carrots and potatoes, but don't stick all your energy into one kind of fake meat. Make different kinds of fake meat to try out lots of combinations. There's a world of flavor waiting to be discovered. # FOOD WRITING: A LOVE OF WRITING WITH TECHNIQUE When I was eight, I started writing a lot of songs and poetry and that kind of thing. I liked doing that, and I would write poems that were really about