The Care and Feeding of Visitors With a Vegan Diet

I just survived a three day weekend with my sister-in-law and her son, both living the vegan lifestyle. Faced with feeding a hungry meat-eating husband and vegan houseguests, I needed to come up with a plan. Eating out for nine meals was not an option.

From past conversations with my sister-in-law, I knew that I’d need to prepare meals not only without meat but without eggs, animal fat or dairy products. This meant that even a simple vegetable side dish of mashed potatoes would need to be modified. Normally, I mash up the potatoes with a bit of milk and butter, both off limits to vegans.

To make the weekend go as smoothly as possible, I would need to hit up the grocery store and check labels carefully. Most large chains carry the basic items a vegan needs such as soy milk, tofu and meat substitutes such as vegetarian hot dogs and sausages.

For our breakfasts, I decided to keep it simple. Oatmeal with soy milk and fresh fruit would have to do. For our Sunday breakfast, we decided to get a little more deluxe. I bought some vegetarian sausage links and let my sister-in-law make her famous vegan scrambled tofu. She used tofu, curry powder and a product called wheat gluten to create a scrambled egg like dish.

Making sandwiches for lunch for my vegan visitors presented a few challenges. First, whey, a milk product, is a common ingredient found in bread. Second, I couldn’t use mayonnaise because it contains eggs, strictly off limits to those living the vegan lifestyle. I thought of substituting plain yogurt then remembered that yogurt is a dairy product. Fortunately I found some sourdough bread at the store with no whey. One day we had veggie sandwiches with a little olive oil, avocado, sprouts, tomato, spinach leaves and cucumbers along with tomato soup. The next day, I served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and organic potato chips. On the last day, we had vegetarian chili dogs using leftover vegetarian chili from the night before, vegetarian hot dogs and whey free sourdough rolls instead of hotdog buns.