Vegan mac’n'cheese
A query for you, o ever reliable and resourceful Metroblogging Seattle readers:
Who in Seattle sells vegan mac’n'cheese and is it any good?
I’m not a vegan myself (I can’t even manage to stick with vegetarianism for more than a couple weeks at a time) but while I was at Whole Foods the other day having their very delicious mac’n'cheese my mind got to wandering.
You can’t be serious.
I think you can find vegan Mac n’ Cheese by Annie’s in the freezer section of your local supermart. Not sure where you’d find it at a restaurant, though — maybe Cafe Flora?
Quickies in the U-district has Mac’n'yease, it is really good. You can also pick up mac and chreese at whole foods.
Avitania: the annie’s isn’t vegan, it has casein.
Restaurants that serve vegan mac & cheese (I’m pretty sure):
Wayward Cafe (u-dist)
The Globe (cap hill)
Hillside Quickies(u-dist)/The Cafe(cap hill)
Cafe flora does not serve vegan mac n cheese. You can get the vegan “shells and chreese” in a box on the shelf at pretty much any natural foods market. There is no frozen vegan mac & cheese AFIK–the closest thing is Amy’s non-dairy, but that is not vegan.
Might want to ping over on chowhound.com for the restaurant scene. I’m sure someone over there will have a local restaurant… if there is one.
@gomez: Errr, why can’t she be serious?
Since my girlfriend is a Cealiac we are in the search for Gluten Free Mac and Cheese. unfortunately the powdered box kind is mostly vegan and completely inedible and the frozen Amy’s gluten free Mac and Cheese is usually out of stock for that nasty vegan crap.
Basically as someone living with real food alergies I am pissed off to see shelf space wasted on hippies with food hangups.
Eating a non Vegan box of mac and Cheese will not send you to the hospital. eating a Gluten containing box of mac and cheese will send my girlfriend to the hospital with projectile vomiting and intense pain that will not end with out drugs.
Having stores give shelf preference to hippies with food hangups over folks with serious medical food allergies is the equivalent of having them park in our damn food handicap space. Vegan voluntary food hangups are making things harder for people with actual medical problems.
If Gomez has had some of the vegan food I have had I totally understand his comment. I’m certainly not planning on eating any vegan mac’n'cheese, I was just curious if there was any out there and if anyone liked it.
It’s Jake’s raving that doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, as someone who has a severe life-threatening allergy to sulfa drugs I suppose I could go raving loony mad that there is any shelf space given to drugs containing sulfa but that wouldn’t make any more sense than his rant here. There are people with allergies to milk. There are people with allergies to eggs. There are people with allergies to shellfish. There are people with allergies to just about anything you can imagine. Should stores remove all those products (to which the majority of people are NOT allergic) because a minority of the populace is allergic to them?
My point is Zee is that a vast majority of Vegans are doing it because it is optional and the popularity of their food minority trend is eating up the shelf space for the allergen free frozen food that my girlfriend and I shop for because she medically needs it. I am ticked off by my local stores stopped carrying some Gluten Free food items in favor of “Vegan” items.
I assumed that it was because you are looking for vegan mac and cheese. I mean, if you’re gonna be vegan, be a vegan, don’t be all up in the world searching for vegan versions of stuff.
I kind of agree with Gomez (although possibly for different reasons). Don’t get me wrong - my son has a milk allergy and I am very into vegan foods.
IMHO cheese is one of those things that can’t really be done well as a vegan food. I’ve tried all the vegan cheese substitutes. Nasty.
So why bother with vegan cheese when there are so many great vegan food options that are NOT nasty?
My 2 cents.
We have no problem with cheese and milk products but the wheat flour in the noodles can kill my girlfriend. All the supermarket in my town have replaced the Amy’s Rice Mac & Cheese with Amy’s Macaroni & Soy “Cheeze”.
Basically the popularity of the vegan trend is coming at the expense of the limited shelf space of other allergen sensitive products.
When I find a store that actually has the Rice Mac & Cheese in stock I have to buy it all up since there is no guarantee when they are going to get it back in. Since just about every single resteraunt in town will make her sick to eat at. (even the hippie Vegan place)
Jake, your point is still completely illogical.
Zee: Indeed. Vegan food has made strides but has a ways to go… especially with things like substitute mac & cheese. yeech.
Jake. Celiac is not the only life-threatening allergy. My son has a life-threatening milk allergy.
Eating a box of non-vegan mac and cheese WILL send him to the hospital with life-threatening anaphylaxis. I’m a little surprised that you scold others for allergy-ignorance and than proceed to ignore allergies other than the one you’re familiar with.
Nevertheless, I agree with you specifically on the mac and cheese. I think that vegan cheese is nasty and I think that shelf space should be saved for vegan foods that actually taste good. :)
Eh, it’s not the stores’ fault, they’re just responding to market demands. If more people developed allergies to gluten then there’d be more selection!
But Jake, if it makes you feel better, you can order Annie’s stuff online either directly from their website or through Amazon Grocery. Usually it’s cheaper than buying in-store anyway, especially if you buy by the case (there’s a 15% discount at annies.com).
To clarify even further my previous point. As my son has a milk allergy, we need to completely avoid any milk ingredient.
However, not that many products are marketed as “milk-free”.
Therefore, VEGAN becomes a terrific proxy for milk-free.
Thus, in our case VEGAN is not just a hippy food hangup. It’s a very easy way for us to quickly tell that the food has no milk ingredients at all.
My point, Jake, is just that not all consumers of vegan products are people with hippy food hangups. Anybody with any allergy to any animal proteins (milk, eggs, shellfish, fish) can easily also use vegan as an “animal protein free” proxy.
Amys does not mail frozen food items like Mac and Cheese and their Pizzas. For use we can only get them in the rare occasions that they actually have them in stock. But 90% of the time there is Vegan stuff in it’s place.
It’s a harsh reality of the darwinian nature of the marketplace. But the market demand of Vegan products is eating what little shelf-space was for Gluten allergen free products. For us we have to buy them out whenever they are in stock because we can’t guarantee that they will be restocked. Again the Vegan stuff is always in it’s place.
I wish I could walk into a food market and find both Gluten Free products along side Vegan products but it is usually one or the other.
I am talking about Amy’s Frozen Food line up. not Annie completely inedible paste like “Chreze”.
http://www.amys.com/products/search_results.php?form_noglutenadded=1
Okay, if you think Annie’s mac & cheese (which is neither vegan nor milk-free, but does have a gluten-free rice version) is gross, then I can’t help you. That’s just downright offensive!
(Kidding, clearly. But I do love that Annie’s mac & cheese!)
Jake,
I don’t know if your mom failed to teach you this when you were a kid or what, but things don’t become true just because you keep repeating them over and over again. (It’s a shame no one taught this lesson to our current President, either.) What *evidence* do you have that the stocking of vegan items limits the stocking of gluten free items? (Note: “your opinion” is not evidence.) How is having Field Roast in stock more likely to limit the number of gluten-free products than, say, ALL THOSE PRODUCTS WITH GLUTEN IN THEM?
Your argument doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense the first time you stated it and it continues to fail to make sense. I have a hard time believing that your girlfriend’s gluten-intolerance is as much the issue here as your bizarre axe-grinding against “hippies”. I hate to be the one to break it to you but as Pfft pointed out, plenty of people have plenty of reason to consume vegan foods besides being a hippie (not that anyone should ever have to rationalize their food choices, particularly to someone who doesn’t seem to be rational). Furthermore, GOSH, HAVING CELIAC DISEASE SUCKS, I know, I know people who have it and, boy, does it suck. Then again so does Pfft’s son’s dairy allergy.
But, hey, never mind those other people. Never mind making the entirely plausible argument that in a grocery store full of products containing gluten, many of them the exact same item simply labeled with different brand names, it would be nice if stores would stock more gluten-free items. Who needs logic and common sense when one can rail about a horrific hippie plot designed to deny your girlfriend her God-and-the US-Constitution granted rights to gluten-free mac’n'cheese? Seriously, dude, this is the dumbest line of argument I’ve seen in long, long, long time.
Hey, I’m a diabetic, can I get in on this?
I’m so pissed about all the stuff with SUGAR and HIGH CARB CONTENT in it on the grocery store shelves moving all the sugar-free, low carb stuff out of the place.
As for gluten-free mac and cheese…
Make it yourself. I’ve seen quite a few gluten-free pastas and I’ve made quite a few mac-and-cheeses and none of them are all that difficult. I’ll be honest, since I’ve started making my own mac-and-cheese, I’ve not even thought about the beecher’s frozen mac-and-cheese sitting in my freezer.
And, ok, I accept that reason for Gomez to say what he said. It came off all non-sequitor-ish and could have been taken in too many different ways. And I can’t wholly disagree with him on that point. I don’t think I’ve had a vegan cheese that was worth whatever sorta stuff they have to use to make it. =)
@Pffft: “not that many products are marketed as “milk-free”.” I disagree. The pareve designation is pretty well marketed… or is once you know to look for it.
Jake: Why don’t you guys just buy rice noodles and make mac & cheese from scratch? It’s not hard, and it’s better than anything frozen you’ll find.
I can’t believe people are arguing over this.
I don’t get veganism. I just don’t.
Food allergies I’m really sorry people have. I feel really lucky I don’t have any.
I have to ditto Wendy, Jake — making mac and cheese from scratch is stupid easy, and you can do it with rice noodles.
All the box stuff is nasty, anyway.
Just chill, people.
Zee I don’t live in Seattle. I live in Bremerton and they only store that occasionally stocks Amy’s Gluten Free frozen food products is Fred Meyers. I’ve talked to the manager of the “Natural” Food section and she flat out told me that there is a bigger market for the “Vegan” item over the gluten free items so they are stocking the vegan stuff over reordering the gluten free stuff. A perfect solution would be for them to stock both but since I live in a smaller town I don’t have a huge selection of places to go to and buy this stuff.
It is a cold hard fact of capitalism that the rising trendy popularity of Vegan food is cutting into the shelf space of specialty allergen free food products. My girlfriend hates her illness and is not dealing with it very well. For her this was a comfort food and she is tempted to eat the bad stuff and end up back in the hospital.
Quite simply put it keeps her out of the hospital and there is probably about two dozen places in King County that you can go and buy a vegan frozen dinner but for us in Kitsap County the pickings are pretty damn slim for gluten free comfort food.
I make a lot of food from scratch but I simply can’t make food from scratch for her every single night while keeping down a full time job. Having a freazer stocked with comfort frozen food for her is a crutch but we really need it right now. When the winter windstorm hit and we were out of power for a week our next door neighbor had their gas powered generator running and I went over and asked them if I could put what precious Amy’s Gluten Free frozen food that I had in their freezer since I had amassed about three hundred bucks worth and it is pretty damn hard to find here.
@jake: “since I had amassed about three hundred bucks worth”
I don’t know how it works out in Kitsap county, but, if I told my supermarket manager that I keep $300 dollars of a product on hand and replenish it regularly, they are very, very likely to make sure to order it and make space for it. And they would respond to ‘I’ve shopped here for X years and spend Y amount of dollars and, because of this shoddy service, I won’t be coming back.’ And if they don’t, well… I don’t know why you’d want to shop there anyways.
“there is probably about two dozen places in King County that you can go and buy a vegan frozen dinner but for us in Kitsap County the pickings are pretty damn slim for gluten free comfort food.”
Well, then, drive into Seattle once a month. Bring a cooler. Stock up. Drive home. Your local grocer might not want your business, we’ll take it instead.
“I simply can’t make food from scratch for her every single night while keeping down a full time job.”
Who said anything about making it every single night? Mac and cheese freezes. Make whatever you need on the weekend. Believe me, lots of people have full time jobs and still manage to make food from scratch. It isn’t just some ‘hippie’ freaks.
Here ya go, Jake. Now quit your bitchin’ and start asking that store manager to replace just a tiny fraction of the THOUSANDS of gluten products with some gluten-free.
And lay off the Vegans. Jerk.
Mamma’s Mac and Cheese (Gluten-Free)
Serving Size : 12
1 pound Tinkyada brown rice pasta shells
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free All Purpose Baking Flour
2 1/2 cups skim milk
1 tablespoon dry mustard — or to taste
Salt and pepper — to taste
2 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1/3 cup gluten-free bread crumbs (Gillians rice crumbs)
paprika
Dutch oven — for cooking pasta
4 qt saucepan — for cheese sauce
12 1-cup foil pans — or 13×9 pan
Cook the macaroni in boiling water until tender but still firm. See package for time. Drain well and set aside.
In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the flour to make a roux and cook, stirring, to remove any lumps. Pour in the milk and cook until the mixture is thick and smooth. Add dry mustard. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in cheese and continue to cook until melted. Add the cooked macaroni and stir.
Spoon the mixture into foil pans, sprinkle with bread crumbs and paprika. Place foil pans on a baking sheet. Bake in a preheated 350-degree F oven for 20 minutes.
this further solidifies my belief that mac ‘n’ cheese makes the world go round. wow.
Tell you what. Tonight I’ll smuggle my camera into my local Fred Meyers and take a picture of the “Natural” food freezer case. If they actually have the Gluten Free Mac and Cheese in stock I’ll buy every pissed off hippie vegan reading this (that don’t actually have food alergies or certified medical food problems) a pack of the frozen Soy Mac and Cheese. But I’ll bet you twenty bucks that the Gluten Free stuff will be replaced with the Vegan (or soy cheese stuff) that would poison my girlfriend.
I forgot my camera but I was right. Vegan was in Stock and in the same place that the Gluten Free stuff used to be. I’ll try again tomorrow.
Again, the Amy’s soy mac and cheeze is still *not* vegan so you can stop hating the vegans for that one.