Saucy life

Most Indian people have the idea that if you are trying to eat healthy and you are going  vegan – the food is going to be boiled, steamed and extremely bland and nothing but dal and vegetables.  If I went with that conventional idea, I wouldn’t have been able sustain a vegan diet for more than a week.  I would have had a mental rebellion against myself and gone back to unhealthy foods as a revolution against myself.  (Viva la pizzas!).

My taste buds are different from most of the people around me: they hail from India, with a little bit of a Middle eastern kick and are surrounded by Canadian influences (whatever that means).  In a nutshell, I like spicy and flavorful food from all over the world.  When I traveled for work, I developed a habit of carrying a Tabasco bottle because not every place I traveled had flavorful food (salt and pepper don’t count as flavor).  I usually added Tabasco in order to make that food somewhat acceptable to my finicky taste buds.   The Tabasco carrying habit became so essential to my life, I started doing it even when I wasn’t travelling.   When I went to restaurants, after ordering my meal my question to the staff would always be ‘What type of sauces do you offer?’ I would get them to deliver my favorites (spicy yogurt, chipotle mayo, sriracha mayo, tzatziki,  yogurt, raita, mint chutney, imli chutney , etc). Those sauces would land on my food one way or another.  If condiment is an option, I would always opt yes!

To this day I have a Tabasco in my purse, and whenever I do travel and approach the security checkpoint at airports, the officers always make me pull out the bottle and make a comment – ‘Oh I love this stuff’ or ‘Why do you have it with you?’.   I’d like to think I’m spreading education to the world and  spreading my idea of carrying Tabasco on the plane.  When I go for long trips, I usually have one bottle in my purse and two in my suitcase.  You never want to run out and go looking for it in a foreign country where you’ve never traveled.  When I pull it out in the plane or even when I get to my destination I feel like it rescues me from suffering the flat food.

When I first started my healthy eating Vegan food plan, I had to let go of most of my sauces.   They all either had non-vegan ingredients (dairy, eggs, or honey) or they were calorie rich.  I did a lot of experiments by watching YouTube vegan recipes with fancy ingredients.  I tried it for a little while and then quickly realized that:

• I’m lazy (going out to buy fancy ingredients is not sustainable for me),
• My taste buds are different (the simple salt and pepper and occasional garlic powder doesn’t work) and
• Fancy vegan processed sauces had a lot of rich ingredients that wasn’t going to help me lose weight easily.

To meet my objectives of having food I can eat long-term and lose weight, I had to find a way to fool my taste buds into thinking that I’m still eating all the tastiest foods that I used to eat, but in a healthier way.

After much experimentation, I have fooled my taste buds and kept up with eating healthy with these sauces:

1. Avocado chutney– this is a simple recipe with 6 ingredients – Avocado, lime, garlic, cilantro, salt and pepper.  For someone like me who loved my yogurt with Indian food, this was the best replacement ever!  There are plenty of recipes online with many modifications of this, but I find this to be the simplest and easiest to make on a regular basis.
2. Hummus – there are many recipes for this everywhere. Any hummus would do for the purpose to drizzle over your food if you are trying to give the vegetables or tofu a taste kick.  I use all types – garlic, plain, roasted red pepper, jalapenos hummus.  If it’s got chick peas it works!
3. Sriracha – I used to work with this one lady who was a body builder of sorts and I saw her add this to all her food.  Because I saw her do it, it should be okay for weight loss.  She was super healthy and had lots of muscles, so I can do it and be healthy too.  So I started doing that too. No regrets!
4. Tobasco – I will never let it go…..

Now it would have been good to have those sauces separately, of course thats what everyone with normal taste buds would do.  I, however was not satisfied with them separately.  I had to create something that would give my taste buds satisfaction by having all of them at the same time.  So, I did what I thought was quite natural – I combined them all!

• Combination of it all   –  So what I mean is – combine sauce 1 to 4 and you get something that will excite you and keep you full.  For those who don’t like spicy foods, it is not for you; but those of you who love taste richness, spice and a tangy taste, definitely try the combination method once in your life!

When I started doing the combination sauce, I actually started looked forward to dinner and vegetables were no longer bland.  I had color back in my life.  And it was the happy color of my sauces.   I’m not a nutritionist by any means so I really don’t know how dairy would have affected my body previously, but since I’ve gone vegan I find I do have more energy.  It would have been hard to sustain given there is no one around me who is vegan had I not discovered these sauces.   I can’t take full credit of creating them but I take credit for combining them.

I don’t think I would have stuck to it, had I not created my combination of it all sauce.  My taste buds rejoice every time I have dinner.  Okay, now I’m hungry!

Bonus sauce:

• Peanut sauce – This is a simple sauce with peanut butter, maple syrup, soya sauce, Sriracha, and lime.  When I pour this on my sweet potato and it lands in my mouth, I kid you not, I usually need a moment of appreciation.