Vegans aren’t the only ones who can enjoy the al-fresco dishes in Carla Kelly’s cookbook.
Maybe your guests are vegan, or maybe you just want more vegetables in your life. Either way, Carla Kelly has recipes for outside dining that will please everyone
Yes, the word vegan is right there in the title: Vegan al Fresco (Arsenal Pulp Press). And author Carla Kelly has been vegan for nearly a decade. Before that, she was a vegetarian for years.
But her new cookbook is not aimed solely at vegans, who consume no animal products or animal-derived products: no eggs or dairy products or even honey. Rather, it’s for anyone interested in increasing the amount of vegetables and fruits they consume — and that’s lots of people these days, she says. And it’s for those who find that more vegans than ever are turning up at the table when they entertain.
The pleasure of outdoor dining is synonymous for many with summer. And summer has finally arrived. Vegan al Fresco, subtitled Happy & Healthy Recipes for Picnics, Barbecues & Outdoor Dining, “came from wanting to create food I could eat outside and take with me outside,” said the New Zealand native, who now calls British Columbia home. She and her Scottish-born husband live in Burnaby with their two daughters, 12 and 9.
Whereas the outdoor menus of many are focused on steaks, burgers and sausages, “looking through my book, they will realize it is not a big deal to host vegans,” Kelly said.
Her flavour combinations are bright and inspired. Several recipes feature tofu or tempeh, both soy products, as ingredients — there’s a great Mojito-inspired tofu, for instance, and a recipe for maple tofu barbecue skewers that Kelly made for the first time for Canada Day a few years ago — but there’s way more to the book. There are terrific grain and vegetable salads, spreads, salad dressings and finger food as well as recipes for muffins and desserts.
There’s also a section featuring themed menus, including Japanese fusion, Latin flavours and a Canada Day menu featuring pickle and asparagus potato salad and hearty three-grain salad (see recipes) and including tomato & olive tarts, cedar-planked rosemary and lemon tofu, and maple and walnut cheesecake made with vegan cream cheese.
The recipes are simple enough to follow, and the layout, with the ingredients on the same page as the instructions, makes it accessible even to the novice cook. “It makes sense,” said Kelly, who is 42.
And summer, with the casual outdoor dining that defines it, is probably the easiest time of year to entertain vegans, she said: Simply prepare an array of salads that everyone can eat — produce is abundant this time of year and most salads are vegan, when you think of it — and then perhaps grain- or vegetable-based burgers for the vegans and, if you like, hamburgers for the others “and everyone is eating pretty well the same thing. Or maybe make the entire meal vegan.”
There was a time when a vegan diet felt like a sacrifice, but to judge from the recipes in books like Vegan al Fresco and most of the dozen or so vegan books that have landed on my desk in the past year or so, that’s no longer the case. There’s an absolutely stellar recipe for baked falafel pitas with chopped Greek salad and roasted cashew sauce in Straight From the Earth: Irresistible Vegan Recipes for Everyone (Chronicle Books, 2014) that makes for a perfect warm-weather meal.
So does the summer pesto pizza in the new vegan book by the mother-daughter team of Myra Goodman and Marea Goodman, perhaps served with the quinoa tabbouleh. Myra Goodman founded the California-based Earthbound Farm in 1984 with her husband; today, it is the largest grower of organic produce in North America.
So many salads and grainbased dishes, so much of what so many of us already eat, is vegan, when you think about it. So many pasta dishes. Tomato sauce. Bean-based chili. Many soups.
Kelly believes people might be a tad nervous about cooking for vegans — but less than they once were. There is more vegan awareness today than even a few years ago, she said. In Season 3 of Top Chef Canada, for instance, competitors were asked to prepare a vegan dish.
“The mystique is slowly lessening — and I think with high-profile people like (former United States president) Bill Clinton eating a vegan diet for his health, it is becoming more widely known,” said Kelly, whose background is in hotel catering and management; today, she is a cake decorator.
Plant foods are high in fibre, whereas animal products are not, the Goodmans write in Straight From the Earth. And eating more fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains, while decreasing one’s intake of animal products, can reduce the risk of developing such diseases as heart disease, hyper-
“The mystique is slowly lessening ... (vegan diets are) becoming more widely known.”
CARLA KELLY
tension, diabetes, arthritis and many types of cancer.
Another benefit of choosing plant foods over meat or dairy is that one is helping to reduce greenhouse gases and other pollution generated by livestock production, they write. Eating meat generates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined, as physician Dean Ornish observes in the foreword to Mark Bittman’s VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6 p.m. to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health (Clarkson Potter, 2013). In the book, the New York Times food and opinion writer suggests to readers that they consider a vegan diet part-time: He includes vegan recipes as well as others.
“Our goal in writing this cookbook is not to turn omnivores into vegans,” observed Myra Goodman in the introduction to Straight From the Earth.
“Rather, it’s to offer a diverse and delicious collection of recipes that makes choosing more plant-based meals too tempting to resist.
“‘Vegan’ has been a mysterious and slightly scary term to many people, and we want to demystify it — to let everyone know that eating vegan is a wonderful choice to make as often as possible.”