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I guess it depends on what you call "mainstream". I do almost all my grocery shopping at a local health food store and Whole Foods. WF has a very good variety and they carry some "unusual" items... but even our regular grocery stores around here are expanding their selections to include rice milks, meat substitutes. Our local health food store has a great selection in bulk spices, much cheaper than buying them at the supermarket and more "green" too, since you can reuse spice jars, rather than purchasing new ones each time. I'd say 98% of the time I use ingredients that are widely available. I do love indian chutneys and pickles, that is something a little harder to find (although our WF carries them, also).
A good source for recipes that use widely available ingredients is Vegweb.com. I have found many great easy recipes there.
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. ~Henry David Thoreau
I guess I'm a fairly "mainstream" kind of person, but an advantage of living in a large, multi-cultural, city is that I can find almost any type of food product that I want without having to go too far.
I tried to start a thread like this a couple months ago. I do find that many of my recipes call for things my mother's don't. These include Bragg's Amino Acid, tamari, miso, umbushi plum paste (which I still can't find), wheat germ, nutritional yeast... There are also the meat "substitutes" like you mentioned: tofu and all its forms, seitan, and tempeh. I also use a much wider variety of vegetables and grains than my mother.
I really don't know how I would be cooking if I wasn't a vegetarian. I became a vegetarian at 19 and began to really cook around age 25. I joke that I couldn't start eating meat again, even if I wanted to--I don't have a clue on how to prepare it!
It seems like vegetarian cooking has some pretty odd ingredients. - Like what, for instance? Things like tofu and soy are almost a stereotypical type of thing.
Do you use ingredients that some might consider unusual for the American table? I don't think so. I use very common ingredients, just without all the additives like animal-derived ingredients (proteins, rennet, gelatin), artificial flavorings & fillers like corn, sugars, etc. I try to buy food which is as fresh and unprocessed as I can find.
Do you have difficulty locating ingredients? No, but then I am fortunate to live in a city that has a variety of stores and farmers' market-type co-ops where one can find unprocessed and 'pristine' foods in their natural states, so to speak.
Do you use only "mainstream" and by that I mean typical or traditional American fare for your recipes and menus? If you're asking if most of the foods I eat can be found at stores like Safeway or Alberston's, the answer is no. But only because of the additives which are used in their packaged foods.
Fred Meyer is a Northwest based store chain ala Walmart. They have very large "ethnic" food sections. If one of their stores was closer to where I live, I'd shop there as well.
It seems like vegetarian cooking has some pretty odd ingredients. Things like tofu and soy are almost a stereotypical type of thing.
Do you use ingredients that some might consider unusual for the American table?
Do you have difficulty locating ingredients?
Do you use only "mainstream" and by that I mean typical or traditional American fare for your recipes and menus?
I'm in large enough cities to find stores for most things. I usually use ethnic type food items in addition to American ingredients. Soy and tofu are by and large eaten by non-vegetarians (I would guess 90%+), just not in the US. Since vegetarianism is more common among India and Asian culture, it's more common that these foods are found in ethnic grocery stores.
Whole Foods also carries umbushi plum paste, is there one near you?
I actually just went to my first one last week--but I couldn't find it! I didn't ask, because I was in there early morning while everyone was stocking the shelves...perhaps that would have been an excellent time. Oh well. I still can't get use to the idea of ordering food online. Don't know why...but I'm about to do it for maple syrup. My free-source recently dried up and I'm finding that it is quite expensive, especially in the desert!
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- Like what, for instance? Things like tofu and soy are almost a stereotypical type of thing.
