Sometimes You Have to Regroup

I have hit a bit of a creative wall lately. I have approximately 9,000 things I want to make, write, cook, bind, grow, or otherwise obsess over, and somehow that has translated into…doing very little.

So naturally, I have found myself a new project.

Before I was vegan, there were a lot of foods in New Orleans that I loved. Mostly beignets. I could have eaten beignets all day.

Unfortunately, Café du Monde is not particularly concerned with my vegan beignet needs.

The same goes for pralines. I used to have a favorite praline company, and their entire philosophy appears to be, “What if butter, but more?”

So now I want to see how many of my old favorites I can recreate without making them quite so dependent on dairy.

Gumbo should be easy enough. I used to make a pretty good one, and since I have always hated seafood and shellfish, I was already halfway there.

Beignets are the one I really want to tackle. Vegan donuts exist, of course, but nobody around here is making vegan beignets—and frankly, I am not looking for a donut covered in cereal, bacon, or twelve other things that have absolutely no business being on a donut.

I just want fried dough covered in an irresponsible amount of powdered sugar.

So that’s the next experiment.

Hopefully, in the coming days, I will have some new recipes to share—and, assuming I remember to stop eating long enough to take them, some decent photos of the process.