The tasty and the profane

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This article was published 30/12/2015 (3600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THUG Kitchen started out in 2012 as a popular vegan food blog, with an in-your-face, profanitycrammed prose style and a cheerfully aggressive attitude to plant-based cuisine. With the motto “Eat Like You Give a F—,” the initially anonymous bloggers captured 550,000 Facebook fans.

The inevitable book deal ensued, with Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook debuting in 2014, followed by this year’s Thug Kitchen: Party Grub (Harper Collins Canada, 240 pages, $29.99). An expletive-peppered approach to “good s— worth sharing,” this recent entry includes vegan dishes for brunches and potlucks, along with recipes for snacks, desserts and drinks.

Thug Kitchen’s exaggerated “street” approach to tofu-based sriracha aioli or egg-free coconut Bundt cake might seem like ridiculous parody. But a storm of blogosphere controversy boiled up when Epicurious revealed in 2014 that the foodies behind all this vegan gangsta talk were Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, two nice white kids from California.

The duo was charged with insensitive cultural appropriation and the use of offensive racial stereotypes, particularly the loaded word “thug.” Vice Media called it “digital blackface.”

On the other side, Haitian-American writer and Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay tweeted: “Thug and black should not be synonymous! And if they are in your mind… ummm introspection is in order.”

Despite the online hullabaloo, Thug Kitchen’s debut cookbook became a New York Times bestseller. That success might come down to the bloggers’ surprisingly solid, common-sense take on vegan cooking. Once you get beyond the faux bad-assery and constant Fbombs, Davis and Holloway’s approach favours accessible, affordable ingredients, simple methods and big, bold flavours.

The pair’s hyper-spoofy writing is partly a reaction to a lot of vegan blogging, which can be preachy and solemn, with all those soulful photographs of gardens and goats and girls in linen dresses holding up lumpy pottery bowls filled with heirloom tomatoes.

Holloway and Davis like to focus on the food and not get too hung up on “styling.” You don’t need “hand-turned artisanal paper straws and reclaimed wooden cake stands,” they counsel in Party Grub.

Thug Kitchen also partakes in the post-boomer tendency to want to talk about doing grown-up-type things like cooking and cleaning and mending without feeling oppressively adult.

(Take the recent millennial cleaning manual, My Boyfriend Barfed in my Handbag, and Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha. That’s not exactly Hints From Heloise.)

But mostly Thug Kitchen’s recipes are meant as a reproach to bad food.

Holloway and Davis were inspired to write Party Grub because they didn’t want to go to “another flavourless family function or some work party where all they’ve got for health-conscious folks are wet baby carrots and limp celery sticks,” they write.

Of course, as with any cookbook, the proof of the pudding is, ultimately, in the eating. (Or, in this case, the shaved asparagus pizza or roasted beet hummus or buffalo lettuce bites or blackberry-lemon buckle or fudgy-as-f— brownies.) For Thug Kitchen, good recipes remain the best way to spread the vegan message: “No preaching or soapbox required, just DOPE FOOD and a GOOD ATTITUDE.”

So whether you’re a committed vegan or just vegan-curious, you might want to try out a couple of dishes, like a creamy pesto dip made with basil, almonds and white beans, or some wintery spiced cider, described as “straight-up, rightafter- some-carolling-and-sleigh-riding sh– right here.” (Needless to say, all the bad language in the instructions comes courtesy of those potty-mouths at Thug Kitchen.)

Creamy Pesto Dip

60 ml (¼ cup) sliced or slivered almonds

80 ml (1/3 cup) chopped fresh basil

3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 ml (½ tsp) grated lemon zest

45 ml (3 tbsp) lemon juice

30 ml (2 tbsp) olive oil

30 ml (2 tbsp) water

1 ml (¼ tsp) salt

375 ml (1½ cups) white or cannellini beans (or a 540-ml can, drained and rinsed)

Place the almonds in a food processor or blender and pulse those nutty bitches around until they start getting kinda broken up. Add the basil, garlic, lemon zest, lemon juice, oil, water, and salt, and pulse for another 15 seconds.

Add the beans and let that f—er run until it looks nice and smooth. If you’re having trouble getting that s–t to blend, add another tablespoonful of water.

Serve right away with some bread or veggies or let it chill into the fridge until cold.

Tester’s notes: This fast, easy, tasty recipe shows you how to get creamy taste and texture without dairy. At our place, we used it first as a dip and then slathered it on sandwiches later in the week.

 

Mulled Spiked Cider

1.25 l (5 cups) apple cider or apple juice

1 orange, cut into slices

5 quarter-sized slices fresh ginger

3 cinnamon sticks

1 ml (¼ tsp) ground allspice

250 ml (1 cup) rum or bourbon

In a large pot, combine the cider, orange slices, ginger, cinnamon sticks, and allspice and bring to simmer over medium heat. Simmer for 4 minutes, add the rum, then turn off the heat.

Let this sweet winter bastard cool for a few minutes, then fish out the orange and ginger slices and cinnamon sticks.

Serve hot.

Tester’s notes: Very warming with added rum, but also nice and spicy in non-alcoholic form. Holloway and Davis suggest using unfiltered apple juice, sometimes called cider, but not hard alcoholic cider, which is something “way different.”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca