Sequestration Meal #131

I found a recipe for "Whole Meal Potato Salad" in Claire's Classic American Vegetarian Cooking (1999), which has a surprisingly large number of fully-vegan recipes. This is one of those recipes, a potato salad with baby peas, tempeh, red onions, and cucumber in a creamy curry dressing. Should the planets align such that I have all these things at once again, I would definitely be making this again! It was so good and such a good use for the tempeh I had left over from the stuffed sweet potatoes you saw earlier.

I don't think I've cooked out of Claire's Classic American Vegetarian Cooking before this. It was one of those used-books-at-the-public-library pickups. It was also written in an era with a different range of standard ingredients available to the average cook--it is a startling reminder of how far we've come, with constant directions to find things at a health food store (here I was told I could find dairy-free mayo and tempeh at a health food store). It brought back memories of going to our tiny local health food store to pick up mysterious things like soy ice cream and TVP when I was growing up. When I had to give up dairy for nearly all of the year I was 20, it was the only place I could buy non-dairy milk of any kind. People who were vegan back then really have my admiration. I don't think I ever met a vegan before somewhere around 2007. My local grocery stores only really started carrying things like tempeh a few years ago, but I just take it for granted now, as if it is a normal thing for them to have.

Because it was written in another era, oddly enough, some of the recipes have ingredients it would be pretty tough to find these days. But this one had nothing truly lost to time, so I made it as written. I questioned how "classic American" it could really be said to be--nothing about this combination seemed at all classic or familiar to me--but that doesn't matter. It was good!