Street Vegan: Recipes and Dispatches from The Cinnamon Snail Food Truck: A Cookbook

Street Vegan: Recipes and Dispatches from The Cinnamon Snail Food Truck: A Cookbook

by Adam Sobel
Street Vegan: Recipes and Dispatches from The Cinnamon Snail Food Truck: A Cookbook

Street Vegan: Recipes and Dispatches from The Cinnamon Snail Food Truck: A Cookbook

by Adam Sobel

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Overview

Meatless meals revamped by the Cinnamon Snail, the vegan food truck with a cult following.

What's the secret behind the Cinnamon Snail's takeover of New York City streets? In all kinds of weather, vegetarians, vegans, and omnivores alike queue up for addictive vegan cuisine from truck owner Adam Sobel. Now Adam brings his food straight to your kitchen, along with stories of the challenges of working on a food truck while still finding ways to infuse food with imagination, love, and a pinch of perspective. Street Vegan brings the energy and passion of the Cinnamon Snail's creative cooking from truck to table, including:
 
· Breakfasts: Fresh Fig Pancakes, Fried Dandelion Greens with Lemon Garlic Potatoes, Poached Pear-Stuffed French Toast
· Beverages: Vanilla Sesame Milk, Cucumber Ginger Agua Fresca, Peppermint Hot Chocolate
· Soups and Sandwiches: Korean Kimchi Soup, Jalapeño Corn Chowdah, Brown Sugar-Bourbon Glazed Seitan, Gochujang Burger Deluxe
· Veggies and Sides: Lemon-Soy Watercress, Maple-Roasted Kabocha, Horseradish Mashed Potatoes
· Desserts and Donuts: Roasted Mandarin-Chocolate Ganache Tart, Pine Nut Friendlies, Rum Pumpkin Chiffon Pie, Vanilla Bourbon Crème Brulée Donuts, Cinnamon Snails

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780385346207
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date: 05/05/2015
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 144 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

ADAM SOBEL is the chef and owner of the four-time Vendy Award-winning vegan food truck the Cinnamon Snail. He has appeared on Food Network and PBS and has written about vegan food for Vegetarian Times. He teaches vegan cooking classes at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York. When he's not in the city, he and his vegan family can be found in Red Bank, New Jersey--usually practicing yoga and snuggling with their doggies.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

How I Got Started Cooking All These Vegetables

I grew up eating all kinds of animals and never thought I would grow up to help people eat their veggies from the side of a truck. But when I was sixteen, I started hanging out with this really cute girl from Jersey named Joey (now Ms. Snail). Joey was a French fries and canned soup vegan, aka a vegetarian who didn’t really eat much in the way of vegetables. (For the record, I really like French fries. Canned soup, not so much.) Joey and I fell in love, and because I really cared for Joey, I wanted her to eat better food. I would spend hours in bookstores copying vegan and soon-to- be-veganized recipes from cookbooks into a notebook, which I would experiment on at home. I also decided that to advance my skills, I would look for work in restaurants.

The first restaurant I worked in was Tom Valenti’s Ouest, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Ouest was far from a vegan restaurant—I mean, come on, they had a dish with a poached duck egg deep-fried in duck fat, not exactly animal-loving. But I learned a lot of skills and cooking methods from working with the extremely talented crew and chef: my care for the integrity of our ingredients, respect for the customer’s experience, and the creative treatment of food that preserves its natural appeal (for instance, not making savory watermelon sauces and sweets
involving mushrooms just because it can be done).

As I experimented with creating meals for Joey, and developing my culinary skill set, I came to understand the ethics behind veganism. I learned about factory farming, the suffering caused to animals, the harmful effects on agriculture, workers’ rights, and the disrupted balance of life on the planet caused by the Standard American Diet. I woke up to the fact that our dietary choices are responsible for a lot of things that we’d like to change in this world. Folks would occasionally come into Ouest and ask for modifications of dishes to make them vegan or vegetarian. The cooks would grumble, but I found myself standing up for the desire these customers had to avoid animal products. Finally one day, the cook asked, “Well, then why aren’t YOU vegetarian?” “Maybe I should be,” I said, and it was done.

The thing that had stopped me from becoming vegetarian sooner was that I thought it would be a limitation on my freedom, another dogma to have to follow . . . but the truth is, vegetarians and vegans have no rules. When you commit to a vegan lifestyle, all of a sudden there is a wide-open culinary frontier to explore. You are sort of forced into checking out new cuisines, cooking methods, and ingredients from all over the world, on your mission to seek out nourishing, interesting, and satisfying flavors. Before I was vegan, there were probably twenty to thirty different things I would eat. Now I have the freedom and inspiration to check out everything this earth has to offer. Rather than being limited in my choices, I am finally really free!

And while you can’t consume dead animals, you also no longer want to. You are aware of the suffering you cause by harming animals, and it’s just not something you feel okay with anymore. Once you are aware that you can live a happy, fully satisfied life without causing harm to animals, being a carnivore is a tough thing to justify.

I became fully vegan on the day my first daughter was born. I was nineteen years old, and we had a fantastic, natural home birth, during which my wife labored for twenty-two hours. The whole time she labored, I thought about how important breast-feeding was going to be for our child, both physically and spiritually. Knowing how sacred that connection is between a mother and child, I decided I could never get in the way of that process for any living creature again. How could I drink milk when that milk had always been intended for a baby calf or goat? So I left my love of fancy cheeses behind and never looked back. When your intention is to cause as little suffering as possible, you begin to discover many ways in which you have been harming others, and become determined to root those behaviors out.

Sure, eating roadkill or leftover hamburgers out of the garbage causes no direct suffering to animals; but I’d prefer to eat a nourishing salad of wild edibles, or greens from my front-yard garden, any day. Without wanting to be a real downer or to get too technical, I want to just suggest that perhaps taking eggs, milk, honey, skin, and other “by-products” from animals causes them suffering. If you have some kind of free-range fantasy about the lives modern farm animals live, you need to do some diligent research. No question about it, our modern factory farms, as well as those smaller farms that claim to produce “happy,” humanely raised meat, are terrifying, sad places. Here’s a good way to judge if an animal is being raised humanely: Ask yourself if you would put yourself, your mother, or your child in the place of the animal. Would you be happy seeing your child held captive against its will to produce milk or eggs all of its life? What happens then after your child is “spent”? Where does it go from there?

I had been working for years at a vegan restaurant that abruptly went out of business. That closing was an opportunity for me to finally go out on my own and do my own thing. For a couple of years, I did vegan catering, taught cooking classes, and Joey and I had a stand at the farmer’s market in Red Bank, New Jersey. We would stay up for almost forty-eight hours every weekend, baking nonstop, and by the time we opened the stand on Sunday, we were so tired. But our stand got popular really fast, and we sold out of food almost every week. Our kids grew up going to the farmer’s market with us; Red Bank is also where we live, and it’s such a treat to be able to serve our community every week. I have been making food for some of these folks for a decade, since long before I had my own business. There are customers whose kids we have watched grow up, and Joey has made every birthday cake for them since their mom’s baby shower.

Red Bank Sundays are really differently paced from the other days of the week for us—nothing like the lunch rush in New York City. Most everyone on the Snail’s line takes the time to hang out with complete strangers, and the community sparks. We serve a diverse crowd in Red Bank, including families, farmers, people of all economic and social backgrounds, and more than a few doggies; even the cops know where the best donuts can be found. This is really one of my favorite things to see while I am hustling hard on the grill: people from all walks of life uniting on behalf of yummy nonviolent food. I like to think that beautiful connections and special friendships get formed at the Red Bank farmer’s market. I hope we can always be part of it and continue to form the backdrop with the aroma of pancakes.

For about eight years I had been dreaming of running a vegan food truck, and Joey and I had started looking for used food trucks to realize that dream. We had such pure intentions: We simply wanted to have a vegan food truck to change the world, to end factory farms and bring on absolute animal and human liberation worldwide. We saw a gorgeous food truck for sale near scenic Keansburg, New Jersey. They were asking seventy thousand dollars, way more than we could possibly get together; but Joey had a great plan! Since we were doing this project as a mean to end suffering for countless beings, we would get a lottery ticket. And because of our mission, we would definitely win, and that meant we would be able to buy the truck.

That afternoon, I went to our corner store to purchase the ticket. I had never played the lottery before, but because we were going to win no matter what, it didn’t even matter what numbers I picked. A couple of days later, Joey told me to claim our winnings so we could buy the truck. I walked into the bodega, waving my ticket in the air, announcing, “I’m here to claim my money!” The lovely Gujarati woman at the counter scanned my ticket, then said, in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Sorry.” I burst into hysterical laughter. I hadn’t even considered for a second that we didn’t have a winning ticket. It was so funny. We still ended up getting a food truck started, of course—just not that way.

As it turned out, we didn’t know anything about the mechanics or economics of mobile food vendors when we finally got our first truck. Joey and I hunted around car lots, eBay, and Craigslist for something within our very small budget. The truck we found was a twenty-year-old box truck that had been a halal food truck (and before that a Southern food truck, and before that a bread delivery truck). It had well over one hundred thousand miles, and when it arrived it came with more problems than we realized. When we took it on its first test drive, we hit a bump and heard a nasty crashing thud. Everything from the catalytic converter and back was just lying there on the ground; the whole exhaust system had fallen off. But I was in love. The guys selling us the truck took off another five hundred dollars, and I purchased the truck that day for eleven thousand dollars in cash.

Okay, I was a total sucker—but a sucker with a dream.

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