I was approached by a coworker today about bringing a dish in for our holiday luncheon. I could either do this or donate a dollar amount. I immediately realized this was an excellent opportunity to expose more of my circle of friends to vegan food!
One dish that I can eat over and over is ‘Creamy Macaroni and Cashew Cheese’ from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s ‘The Vegan Table’.
A friend of mine (who I have made this dish for before and thoroughly enjoyed it) overheard me offer this dish up and commented, “Well, you can’t really call it cheese” in a halfway joking manner.
I then started to quasi-defend it (only because we have this type of good-natured, sarcastic relationship) and replied with this :
“Well, the ‘cheese’ that is referred to in ‘Macaroni & Cheese’ is typically from a cow, but we don’t call it ‘Macaroni & Cow Cheese’ or ‘Macaroni & Dairy Cheese’, so the cheese can be looked at as a general term. Cheese is a product of milk, and we can get milk from a variety of sources…nuts being one of them (NOTE: Please forgive me if I am not completely 100% precise, but I figured I was close enough for the sake of the discussion). So I guess you could say that I am bringing ‘Macaroni & Nut Cheese’ to be more precise.”
No sooner than did these words come out of my mouth, that I realized just how this sounded.
Now, I know that some people can be turned off by their perception of vegan food, but I don’t have to help at all by offering them some of my “nut cheese”.
P.S. Colleen, I am sorry to have dragged your good name into this sophmoric story.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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