you.Sexy Vegan.you

This is the newest addition to our ever-expanding vegan cookbook collection, entitled The Sexy Vegan by Brian L Patton. It features “extraordinary food from an ordinary dude” and it is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek take on recipes, cooking and interacting with the reader. The (very abridged) intro to the book is as follows:

"Once upon a time, in early May 1977, my dad got into my mom’s pants, thus planting the seed, which eventually sprouted arms, legs and, thankfully, a head. Shortly after this seed was sown, with my tiny, gelatinous, cellular self forming in my mommy’s belly, my parents went to see a new, state-of-the-art movie called Star Wars. I only mention this because it marked a turning point in my life: it thrust me into geekdom faster than the Millenium Falcon did the Kessel run...about nine months after that, on February 16, 1978, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, I was welcomed into the work by being carved out of my mother’s womb, because I was all upside down and shit.

Then one day, I went to college. Four years, two beer-pong trophies, countless blackouts and one miraculous diploma later, I ended up on my parent’s couch...for a year...which I know they loved...finally in October 2001, I decided to strike out on my own and joint the real world...so I moved to Hollywood for no other reason than that one of my friends was moving there, and I had nothing better to do. So we loaded up the car and trucked across the country. After a few friendless, penniless, shitty job-having years, I found myself unemployed with zero direction. Tinseltown, my ass!

Back to being a fat, jobless, twenty-six year-old loser. Oh, I didn’t mention fat before? Yeah, I’m about 5 feet 9 inches, and I was pushing 260 pounds at the time. As depressed and directionless as I was, I did see my unemployment as an opportunity to choose a path. My cooking got to the point that I felt just confident enough to serve my food to other humans, and since I had no interest in ultimizing my $100 000 public relations degree (something else my parents really loved), I thought this would be a great time to see exactly how much I enjoyed preparing food, so I tried doing it for a living.

Now don’t worry, we’re getting to the part where I become a supersuccessful vegan cookbook author, but I have to become vegan first...

Being the only meat eater working for Vegin’ Out, I thought I’d try becoming vegan for a month...I thought this one-month “diet” would give me a solid kick start to getting back into shape. Actually “getting back into shape” implies that I was once in shape. To clarify, there had been only about forty-eight months of my life where I was actually in shape, and nine of those months I was in utero. So I was really just hoping to get in shape.

On September 2006, I cooked myself up a nice porterhouse with mushroom gravy and some roasted potatoes and the next day I went vegan. I realize this means that my first day of being vegan was on September 11, but I wasn’t making any symbolic statement; it just happened to be a Monday, and, as we all know, diets start on Monday.

After this animal product-free month, I had more energy and I’d lost about eight pounds, so I thought I’d give it another month, and then another month. My energy continued to sky rocket and my doodie became more and more, um...attractive which was very nice. When you’re an obese man, eating a terrible diet, your day kind of revolves around defecation. Your doodie schedule is unpredictable, and after you go, you don’t really feel, um, right until you’ve showered. Wow, this really took a turn, huh? Everybody still hungry? Good. The point is, I was becoming healthy on the inside, which was beginning to show on the outside: my complexion improved, the whites of my eyes got whiter and after ten months I’d lost sixty pounds!

One the same level of importance as having consistently enjoyable bowel movements, was the fact that my new way of life lent the value to my work that I had felt it was missing. I realised that consuming vegan food and preparing it for others served the world in countless positive ways. I certainly could have written about the health, ecological and ethical benefits of a vegan diet, but that is a totally different book, for someone way, way smarter to write. The key is that once I discovered that I could not only survive but thrive without taking the life of another being, I was sold. I was vegan. For good.”

The cookbook is so fun and humorous and contains recipes for cocktails (such as "The Bloodbath", "The Knucklehead" and "The Dirty Dudetini"), a chapter on “Beatin’ The Meat” and making meat substitutes (what do you call a roomful of vegan dudes? A soysage party.) Further chapters are on breakfasts, soups, salads (such as “The Girlfriend’s Favourite Salad That She Constantly Asks Me to Make and Won’t Shut the Hell Up about”), handheld sandwiches (such as “The Seitan Worshipper", "The Portly Fellow" and "The Fat Ass”), entrees (such as “Mexicali Quinoa with Black Lentils and Pretend Chipotle Sausages”), a whole chapter dedicated to PIZZA (yay!), snackages (such as “Jalapeno Poppers” and “Buffalo Wangs”), condiments and sauces (such as “The Crazy Shit and the Crazy Shit Vinegar”- which, personally, has to be my favourite recipe title in the book) and finally, ice-cream (which recipes do, however, require an ice-cream maker).

The only slight downer is that a lot of the recipes seem to have tempeh in them which I’ve never come across in South Africa. Notwithstanding this however, there stills seems to be more than enough tempeh-free recipes to fill the book. I'll be delving into the sexy Mr Patton's recipes soon enough- as much as to make his awesome food as to read his acerbic humour.