J & Q's Cooking Demo with the Syracuse Vegan Living Program

Last Saturday, Q and I leaned into the discomfort of growth-curves and tried our first cooking demo; and the delay in this promised post with handy links to all the recipes mentioned during that demo is directly mirrored by the general delays on this site.

I realized in horror that I hadn’t been on here since December! I knew that the bulk of this site’s writings still hail from 2020 & ‘21, that I’ve relied on the ease of our Instagram accounts as we’ve become increasingly busy, but TWO posts for all of 2022 was a bit of a eye-opener. It’s hard to devote time to this long-form method, but we need to try harder.

And looking through the old recipes that Emily shared via the Syracuse Vegan Living Program page was another eye-opener —but for comedic reasons— and caused further delays as I read through each old recipe.

As mentioned in the cooking demo (and our Vreedom Quest podcast interview): the tone of the earlier posts is a lot more fiery than you’ll find any of the last few years of Jasquatch & Quillanscrafts Instagram posts. I’m not at all regretful or embarrassed for the earlier tones —because they were a direct reflection of the anger-loop grief-cycle we were in regarding speciesism and preventable environmental collapse, and if/when anyone else goes through that I want you/them to know we understand that howl & we’ve been there—, but we like to say that we’re in the “acceptance” loop now: just as fired up, but with a lighter tone and still amplifying out solutions while showing what we’re doing over here to mitigate needless damage to our planet & its species that we love so much.

So with the above in mind: please take a breath of lens re-focus if any of the recipe posts rankle you, I hope to update this more frequently with our current vibe, and I’ll follow this (in an innumerable amount of days) with an update of what we’ve been up to.

Most importantly, we’ve been doing a lot of volunteering with VeganCNY, through them we learned about the amazing Syracuse Vegan Living Program, and then started volunteering with them too. Both aim to spread compassion and information on how/why to veer vegan while offering free services to our community; but the former also does free in-person transitional coaching and hosts free cooking demos for the community.

Which brings us back to that growth-curve. :-)

Leading a cooking demo had us all sorts of squiggly, but we realized that even in the worst-case-scenario we’d leave with lessons learned, and best case: we’d sway a soul or two to try some compassionate & sustainable feasting.

Thankfully it was option 2 in spades.

Despite what I felt was a living-nightmare performance (<— cooking for & serving 12+ folks while simultaneously trying to talk-over-silence during a live-stream was a new level of internal terror :-D), thankfully folks loved the food, we received humbling feedback, and the biggest surprise was seeing at the tail end of the 1.5 hour slog that my childhood bestfriend and his lovable lady had turned in from Wisconsin for the duration! They later texted that they’d been inspired to try out some lentil tacos, so heart-huzzahs all around. <3

You can view the whole demo here compliments of Emily & Dan: Syracuse Vegan Living Program Cooking Demo with J & Q. It goes over four meals (lentil tacos, refried bean bowls, peanut sauce bowls, and sesame noodle salads), grocery staples and where to find them, why we pair Vitamin C with Iron, and why vegan foods are beneficial to our health & environment.

Below, I’ll share the recipes we shared. They are: kiddo-approved, some of our most-beloved nutritious/delicious meals, relatively swift to whip up, and their leftovers make for handy weekly meal-prep.

LENTIL TACO RECIPE - the recipe for these can be found here, and also in the sidebar menu under either “Mains” or “Beans & Lentils”

It isn’t an exaggeration when I say that we eat Lentil Tacos about once a week. The whole family loves them, they never grow old, and it’s a delicious/nutritious/cheap meal.

Lentils also get a particular swell of love because these tasty legumes abound with health benefits (from fiber, to protein, to iron & other minerals, etc), and here’s Cleveland Clinic, Harvard, and Medical News Today also tooting the ol’ lentil horn.

And per materials mentioned within the demo, below you’ll find the nutritional and environmental line-ups of plant-protein vs animal protein. One promotes better health, compassion, & sustainability; the other involves increased risk of disease, needless suffering, biodiversity loss, and an unsustainable environmental future for our kin and millions of species.

Easy mental choice, eh?

You just need some recipes & resources to help you on down the path.

Lest the carb number shock you, whole carbs are essential for healthy bodies.

The toppings for the lentil tacos are the same as the toppings you can use for refried bean bowls (the second meal in the demo), and we like to make both in a week so we can swap their shared sides.

In the demo, both meals came with: chopped greens, bell peppers, and quick-pickled cabbage; but the tacos were served with hardshells, and the beans were served with rice. You can swap those bases, or also try either in burrito form, nacho form, etc.

REFRIED BEAN RECIPE can be found right there, but also in “Mains” or “Beans & Lentils”

Here it is served with guac, greens, peppers, quick-pickled cabbage, and tortillas that’ve been toasted with vegan cheese and pickled jalapenos.

CASHEW QUESO RECIPE - can also be found in “Sauces”
Goes great on tacos and bean bowls, alike.

QUICK-PICKLED CABBAGE RECIPE - also found in “Sides”

Quick-pickled cabbage is a daily love over here, we eat it with just about every meal, and it’s no wonder that it was the first recipe I shared on this site. It’s full of fiber, Vitamin C, and deliciousness; and as answered in Athena’s query of which vegetable we’d chose if we were stranded on a deserted island: it’d be red cabbage.

Hand’s down. No question. Every time.

It’s also not just us that is crazy about it: all four food samples in this demo came with QPC and by the 4th meal the folks in attendance had had about 1/2 cup each of QPC and I asked for a show of hands for anyone who wanted me to leave it off the last dish, and no hands were raised. :-)

What I didn’t share at the demo, but I see is on the lentil taco pic, and is something that we super love and will be in season very soon: our 10-MIN TOMATILLO SAUCE.

Recipe found via that link, or also in “Sauces”.

We served the bean bowls and the 3rd meal (peanut sauce bowls) with brown rice, but that cooks up the same as this BLACK RICE RECIPE.

***If you do have an InstaPot: our preferred method is 3 cups of rice, 4 cups of water, season per your desire, cook for 18 min. Turns out swell every time.

PEANUT SAUCE RECIPE - also found in “Sauces”

As stated in the video, we pour this over rice, noodles, and salads; or we thicken it up (by cooking just a little while longer) and then adding to sandwiches and wraps.

We didn’t catch any photos of plates-served at the demo, but here’s a Peanut Sauce plate from a recent road-trip we did (because we travel with these ingredients too) with the same line-up as the demo: brown rice, QPC, greens, bell peppers, and SoyBoy Organic Tofu.

This is so dang good you’ll be dancing to it all week, and it can be freshened up by turning it into a fried-rice stirfry or adding some of the ingredients to wraps.

Emily took this shot of me filling everyone in on how much we love SoyBoy: it’s organic, cheap, and delicious (firm, not-at-all spongy, flavorful with a feast of different marinades).
However, I had no idea this tasty wallop comes from Rochester! Local CNY crew: get yourselves some delicious SoyBoy. We see it in most local grocery stores, and it comes in: plain, Caribbean Style, Sesame Soy, & Smoked.

And the last tasty meal was sesame noodle bowls topped with Quillan’s favorite dressing. We didn’t get a pic then, but above is him fixing one for lunch.

Sesame noodle bowls are also a handy way to use leftover ingredients from peanut sauce bowls. In the demo, the bowls were the cukes, peppers, cabbage, and tofu from the previous meal; and then we added rice noodles and sesame dressing.

This is also one of our fave meals to bring when we need to come packing with food and can’t be heating it up. We load up a cooler with a stack of zero-waste containers and off we go. As seen below, they are our fave cold meal to have on a hot beach.

SESAME DRESSING RECIPE - found in that handy link, and also under Sauces

That’s it for recipes from the meals we served. If you ever have any meal or kiddo nutrition questions, you can also message me on Jasquatch or I’m easily found on FB as Jacqueline Cappello. Quillan and I have been doing free coaching for years (we consider it an essential community service) and we’re here to help any time.

Thanks for the photo Emily; and thanks to Emily, Dan, and Shelly for letting us try something difficult, but helpful. We’ve learned lots for next time. :-)