Travelling Lentil + Sprout + Lemon Salad

   My love affair with lentils having reached something of a fever pitch, it seems high time I shared another lentil-based recipe.

   This salad has been saving my butt all week. I made the lentil base, courtesy of that spectacular mensch, Mark Bittman, and have been playing with that as a base for other creations. My experimentation came to an abrupt end, however, after making this variation, which I think is generally an indicator of a winner.

Sausage! [vegan]

Despite recent efforts to live my life less online and more in reality, my best culinary and creative inspirations often come as a result of browsing the net. This recipe was the catalyst of my most recent adventure. It really hadn’t occurred to me that you could do a vegan spin on breakfast sausage without labor-intensive, expensive, or otherwise complicated ingredients like TVP or seitan.

Happy Cinco de Mayo + Hard Times-style Haystacks [vegan]

 

    One of my favorite restaurants is a subversive-looking little joint in Minneapolis called Hard Times Cafe. Collectively owned, the place is open nearly all night and offers an unapologetically vegan and vegetarian menu, as well as some really delicious coffee. Hard Times has a personality that’s simultaneously welcoming and a little scary. The interior is casual and grungy— you feel perfectly at ease dumping your stuff in a booth and lounging around like it’s your own living room, just redone with more feral houseplants and anarchist graffiti. When one hears of a vegetarian restaurant, you typically expect little portions of artisan salads followed by raw deserts and herbal tea eaten at sleek tables by couples in Tevas who smell of patchouli, not nihilism and a casual refusal to fit into any recognizable mold, culinary or otherwise.

   You’ll see college students there, and people who look homeless, and others who look like they’ve done a lot of acid and are going to do a lot more in the future, and even the occasional trifecta of these things. My point is, Hard Times draws a mixed crowd, and vegetarianism isn’t exactly their selling point as a business. Awesome is their selling point. Awesome, and fantastic food, and not really caring about what you or Minneapolis or anyone else thinks. Being Hard Times.