I love cooking, baking and fermenting, as well as eating and sharing food with people I care about. I am vegan, and have been for roughly 13 of the last 20 years. This page includes some of my thoughts about food, as well as some recipe resources that I like and reference often.
Favourite Recipes: I never used to use recipes when I cooked, but recently I have started doing it more so that I could recreate dishes with more consistency. Some of the recipe sites that I use seem like they've been moving toward a paywalled or in-app-only model, so I have been saving recipes that I use often on a Cooked.wiki account just in case they become inaccessible. At some point I might also try and start documenting some of my own recipes to add to here.
I would like to expand this section with more resources in the future, but for now I'll keep it to some lists. Eating fermented foods adds a lot of complex flavour and makes me feel really good, and once you learn a few basic techniques it can be really approachable. Probably 90% of everything I know about fermentation came from an ancient, brine-soaked copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, which I lent to someone and is hopefully still out there.
I am vegan. I adopted a vegetarian and then vegan diet when I was a teenager, so I have been cooking for myself since around that time; I had been upset by the general idea of killing animals for food since I was a little kid, and those feelings were validated when I learned more about the cruel and ecologically destructive practices of industrial agriculture. I stopped being vegan for part of my 20's. I was really disillusioned with the idea that my consumer choices could make a difference in mass human and animal suffering, plus I was basically never paying for food at that time anyways– I was working in restaurants and a soup kitchen, and I had access to a great food pantry which redistributed food waste from grocery stores. When my excuses ran out, I re-adopted veganism in my late 20's. I am still disillusioned with the consumer angle, but reiterating my commitment to eating vegan feels like returning to a relationship with food that feels right to me. I understand that there is no "perfect" when it comes to ethics and consumption and that plant agriculture is also very destructive in its own way, but the line always hads to get drawn somewhere, and this is where my line is.
Being vegan has been great for me, and I try to support and encourage those around me who are trying to do the same. I also recognize that people who have survived colonialism, enslavement, and disposession have a very different relationship to food than I do, and that restricting access to food traditions has been a central aspect of the violent colonization of the land I live on. As an uninvited guest living on stolen land, I try to have as minimal of an impact as possible on the continued destruction of this place – one small, concrete way I can do that is by eating vegan. However, I don't tend to aggressively espouse that everyone should go vegan, because I know that staying connected to or reconnecting with traditional foods and lifeways can be an important aspect of decolonization, and it doesn't feel like my place to prescribe that to anyone else.