I read over at The Worst Horse about a new show on TLC called The Food Buddha. The writers at The Worst Horse sum the show up pretty well with an emphatic, “Zzzzzzz.”

I have to agree with them.

Hey, I love food. I love Buddhism.

But, calling a guy who’s not a even a Buddhist The Food Buddha because he has a “Zen” like quality? What’s next, The Kitchen Christ, a show about a guy with a penchant for sandals who demystifies Middle Eastern cuisine over at Lifetime?

Yuck.

I’ve got a new post over at Elephant Journal about my struggle with giving up pizza. It’s my one big, cheesy, saucy, yummy hurdle on the road to being Vegan.

Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been vegetarian for a couple of years now. I slowly let a vast array of meats fall away as I settled nicely into the very comfortable dairy and eggs only category (octo-lavo-something or other, right?). That was fine for a while. But alas, I now feel a tug toward the next step and find myself faced with the toughest food choice ever: Vegan or pizza?

I know what you’re thinking: Hey Coe, they have vegan cheese and vegan pizza now.

And there lies the potato starchy rub. You see, I love, love, love pizza. I’ve driven miles, hours even, to try great pizza. One of those long drives was to try a vegan pizza. Which is why I am now struggling so much with the final big step into culinary moksha. The vegan pizza, while decent, just wasn’t pizza-esque enough for me.

Read the rest at Elephant Journal. It is good to support the Elephant.

The Field Roast Artisan Vegan Italian Sausage is fantastic. In fact, it’s my favorite new veggie product. I made a Bolognese sauce using the Field Roast sausage, whole wheat spiral pasta, Roma tomatoes, freshly minced garlic, red chili flakes, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Damn, was it good.

The sausage had amazing flavor, a firm texture and had a hearty fennel flavor which infused the entire dish with a robustness that I absolutely love. This is a great product for any vegetarian and non-vegetarians who want a lower fat option without sacrifing flavor.

The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I’ve ever seen. The typography is beautiful, the colors exquisite, the food photography completely tantalizing.

And that’s just aesthetics. The recipes themselves are amazing. This book, along with Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet provide an incredible Vegan one-two punch of delicious, natural, earth and animal friendly cooking with flair, flavor and tons of taste.

In The Conscious Cook, we get to see what the new face of Vegan cuisine looks and tastes like. There are no bland, boring or dull dishes here, only rich, savory and satisfying dishes.

Before I became a vegetarian I had this fear that I’d get easily bored with the cuisine. I also had a sense that the faux meats where horrible. I was wrong on both. Granted, the psuedo-saugage, veggie burgers and other veg-meats have made great strides. So much so that I’ve dined at veggie restaurants where you’d never know you were eating chicken or beef if you weren’t paying attention.

This is a great cookbook. It’s full of photos, information and dynamic recipes. The layout is clean and fresh. Designwise, this is one of my favorite cookbooks ever.

Wendell Berry, one of the great voices of American sustainability, agriculture, food and culture has this advice on how to eat responsibly. The following can be found in his essay, “The Pleasures of Eating” where he also writes famously that “eating is an agricultural act.”

Indeed it is. So, then how do we eat responsibly?

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer, Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will he fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence,
4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers. and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

I find Berry’s writings and ideas to be for the most part beautiful. His thoughts on food and the merits of local, sustainable agriculture rings true with me. And while to follow these suggestions is a challenge in our convenience obsessed society, making the effort is well worth the price of participation.

My obession with ice cream is no secret to people who know me. It’s a product of my years growing up in Wisconsin where there’s an ice cream or custard stand on every corner (There’s a bar on the other corners, but that’s a different story).

The other day, while at Starbucks, they were giving away free sample size containers of Starbucks Java Chip ice cream along with a coupon. There was a long line so I took a container and begrudgingly tried it. What was I thinking? I’ve always deliberately steared clear of all types of coffee ice creams because the combination of my two biggest vices, coffee and ice cream, only promised to be much like crack for me. I was right. The Starbucks Java Chip ice cream is rich, creamy and has a subtle coffee flavor that matches perfectly with the chocolate chips. In other words: Damn. Damn, damn, damn, shit, hell, son-of-a-bitch and yum.

I now have a pint of Java Chip ice cream in my freezer and I caught myself having a spoonful this morning with my coffee. This is an ominous sign. I fear things could get out of hand as Java Chip ice cream gets rationalized as a legitimate dinner option. A perfectly acceptable lunch selection and course, good for snacking on around the clock. I won’t even get into the milkshake potential. That’ll have to be for an entirely different post.

And now, I must go, the container is calling.

Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve been back to the Taqueria a few times in the recent weeks and it seems like I am well on my way to being a regular. To me this is great news, because I am bound and determined to get in good with the guys at the tiny gem that is Taqueria Mi Casita near my house.

On my last visit, after ordering my usual: two tacos al pastor, one taco de carnitas and a glass of horchata, the waiter actually talked to me. Here’s how the conversation unfolded:

“Te encantan tacos, verdad?” he asked. Which was true.

So I said, “Si, me encantan. Especialmente los tacos aqui. Estan muy buenos.”

“Claro,” he replied.

Can you believe that? It’s like I’m a regular now. Holy shit. So after that, after getting my tacos and horchata and eating, after getting my bill and paying, as I’m walking out the door, the old man on the grill says, “Nos vemos, amigo.”

Amigo. He called me amigo. It was at that point that I truly new that I was on the verge of getting in good with the guys at the Taqeuria. From here it’s just a matter of time before I’m getting invites to gatherings and quinceañeras where I’ll get to eat pozole and carne en su jugo, while drinking mezcal and micheladas. Que barbaro, estoy super contento con todo. If you know what I mean.

If you’ve never ventured into a Mexican Panaderia, I urge you to do so. I guarantee the discoveries you’ll make will change you forever. In fact, once you’ve tried some of the stuff you’ve discovered, you’ll wonder how you’ve gotten through life up until now without them. Pan dulces, Mexican sweet breads, come in many shapes, sizes and flavors and they have colorful names like conchas (shells), novias (girlfriends), orejas (ears) and cuernitos (little horns).

If you hit your local Panaderia at the right time, you can get the breads while they’re still warm. Get to know the baker and learn a little Spanish and you’re on your way to pastry heaven. I find myself stumbling into the Panaderia near my house on frequent Saturdays, always sure to get there just when they come out of the oven so Domingo, the baker, can load me up still hot conchas and cuernitos. Once I get home (if they make it home) I always eat my pan dulce with chocolate caliente (Mexican hot chocolate). Again, if you’ve never had Mexican hot chocolate, you haven’t lived. So, if you’re reading this, stop now and find a panaderia. You won’t be sorry.

This past holiday season signaled a major paradigm shift in my life.

For starters, I saw the amazing documentary Super Size Me which details the widening of America due to increased portions, increased fat intake and an increasingly lethargic population.

While I’ve always been relatively health conscious, what I saw shocked me. After the movie, I began to do a little digging around and came across some alarming trends regarding America’s health and well-being. My synopsis of what I found is this:

1. We are completely clueless when it comes to nutrition.
2. We eat more and move less, choosing the inactivity of our nation-wide TV obsession to exercise.
3. There are healthy alternatives to what we eat and there is no excuse for our increasing reliance on fast food.

Duhhhh. These are obvious points. But my point is that if it’s so obvious and easy, why do we do nothing about? Why do we slip further into this greasy abyss?

Now for some good news. One of most refreshing discoveries in my internet wide search was Slow Food USA, a not-for-profit organization committed to promoting a return to the table in American food culture.

Their cause is the alter-ego of the eat on the go, eat in your car and do it as fat, I mean as fast as you can mentality that has led to our absolute dependence on fast food and other processed, modified and pre-packaged meals. Instead, what Slow Food envisions is as follows.

People have responded to the growing movement, because they have become tired of buying the same things, eating the same foods and living the same lives. With these interests in mind, our mission is to create a robust, active movement that protects taste, culture and the environment as universal social values. Slow Food programs are dedicated to the mingling of taste, culture and the environment.

Amen to this. In fact, it’s essential that we begin to think differently about eating. I’ve recently read research that suggests that the new trend is that parents will now be able to buy completely different prefab, preboxed dinners for each family member so that the son can have a hotdog, dad can have meatloaf, mom can get the baked chicken and sis can eat mac and cheese and French fries.

And we’ll be able to have our family dinner on the way home from the store in convenient to go containers. I say the hell with that. Give me slow food. Good food. Food grown where I live by farmers who actually tend to crops, nurturing them without hormones or chemicals. I’m a member of Slow Food. And while they may not be the only answer to some of our nation’s problems with diet and nutrition, they are a powerful and growing force dedicated to finding a solution.

Pick any night and my default food choice is pizza. I want to know why? Sure, pizza is great. All that cheese, sausage and tangy tomato sauce, that chewy crust. Yeah, it’s divine. I find my pizza palette insatiable these days.

And, as much as I love Chinese food and Mexican food and well, just about all food, I wander back to pizza like that ex-girlfriend who is always around, always up for you coming over to visit no matter how much time has passed and no matter where either of you are emotionally or relationally. I want pizza now and I’m still drinking my morning coffee.

Making matters worse is that I’ll eat any old pizza. It doesn’t have to be from Alfredo’s or Davenport’s (my favorites here in Birmingham), when the craving hits, I’ll sneak into a low rent chain and emerge pissed off that I just spent 15 bucks on what tasted like grocery store private label pizza, complete with cardboard crust and plastic cheese.

Am I the only one who suffers from this?