Tuesday, March 23, 2010

ingenuity in cheese and chips

Food science, especially when something vegan is involved, will never cease to amaze me. They can make mock snails from wheat (seitan) and ice cream from hemp and that's all well and good, but now they can make cheese out of oatmeal! OATMEAL. WTF. It's made of oatmeal and it's really good and tastes cheesy! My parents didn't raise a liar.


I heard about We Can't Say It's Cheese a few months ago, but, honestly, there are so many brands of vegan cheese out there, a name like that just doesn't cause one to drop the Daiya/Cheezly/etc. The other night I was at the grocery, planning to make quesadillas and not being able to find vegan sour cream (boo Market of Choice, boo). Near the regular sour cream was this fine product. Oh! Recognition! Intrigue! "Mexi-Cheddar"! Sounded like it would go equally well with quesadillas, so that was that. 

This stuff is really good! It is a little thicker and milder than non-vegan jarred queso dip, but overall it's very similar and has a good flavor. It reminded me of a queso-style dip someone made at a vegan potluck a few years ago from Jo Stepaniak's Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, if that means anything to you. Overall I can't think of any way to improve it without veering too far into territory of "This tastes so much like what it's a vegan version of, it's kinda gross" (e.g. ricemilk tastes too much like cow's milk to me, so I hate the taste). Hooray oatmeal cheese!



WCSIC (oh, name it something else) in the bowl, being tasty




yum! A segway into the other part of this post.....make your own tortilla chips! You don't need a deep fryer or anything fancy (other than yourself). Cut a tortilla into eighths, spray a cookie sheet with baking spray, and put it in a 350F oven for ten minutes or so. So much healthier than fried, probably cheaper than buying bagged tortilla chips, and they have better flavor. DO IT. 

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