A recent study revealed that during the period of sustained gluttony, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, the average weight gain for an American adult is 8 pounds. Which, frankly, seems to err on the low side; I believe that’s the weight gain during Thanksgiving dinner all by itself!
Add to that the unrestrained gluttony of all the cookies and candy of the holiday season, and a mere 8 pounds is long lost in the rearview mirror.
And, goodness knows, the notion that we step away from the trough on New Year’s Day seems madly naïve. As Americans, we come by our burgeoning girth the old fashioned way — with conspicuous culinary consumption.
Yet, come every Jan. 1, the top resolution is to lose weight. And good luck with that. We may persevere — perhaps for days, perhaps for weeks, perhaps until the boxes of See’s candy are opened on Valentine’s Day. But, if we ever hope to return to the jean size of our callow youth, or even the size we wore a few years ago, it may mean a forced-march diet into the realm of rabbit food — salads for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Vegetables über alles.
There’s no denying that a diet packed with vegetables can help you lose weight. Vegetables have lots of fiber. They’ve got plenty of water. As a rule, they’re fat-free. They can be low in carbs — or not, as in the case of potatoes. As Americans, we like to believe that eating more veggies, and fewer candies, cookies, cakes and certainly meat products, will reduce us to the svelte form of our dreams. Even without exercise. Eat more broccoli — and the pounds will melt away! As if.
We have a rare and wondrous talent for turning even the healthiest dishes into a caloric dumpster fire. Over the holidays, I consumed salads heavy with croutons and mayo-based dressings. I knocked back veggies drowning in hollandaise. I inhaled twice my body weight in potatoes fried every which way. I used vegetables as a vehicle for caloric terrorism. No wonder my bathroom scale recoils in horror every time I draw near.
When it comes to gaining those 8 pounds, I’ve certainly done my patriotic best. And then some. I’ve run out of belts that will expand, so it’s time to get serious about my vegetables. Which is easy thanks to an abundance of tasty meatless options around town.
Consider this a vegetarian detox. With any luck, it will last at least to the middle of February, when the chocolate monster rises again. But until then, here are my go-tos:
Follow Your Heart Natural Foods Market & Café
21825 Sherman Way, Canoga Park; 818-348-3240, www.followyourheart.com
The roots of Follow Your Heart, which may well be the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Southern California, go back to 1970. And this being Southern California, those roots are, of course, wonderfully colorful.
In the beginning, what evolved into Follow Your Heart was called Johnny Weissmuller’s American Natural Foods. It was a market and food stand opened by the most famous of the movie Tarzans, just a couple of blocks from the current Follow Your Heart. There’s a wonderful photo of the original team, who acquired ownership of the business and moved it to the current location, on the menu. (They look a bit like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — or a vegetarian incarnation of the cast of “Duck Dynasty.”)
And Follow Your Heart has been a destination for vegetarians, vegans and those who crave the occasional meatless meal ever since. The menu still speaks of “good food and good vibes,” and wishes us all “Peace.”
And going back here, after being away for a spell, is a bit like returning to your high school after a prolonged absence. Nothing seems quite the same, and yet everything seems quite the same. This is a Proustian madeleine for vegetarians. And a pleasure to be in.
To get to the restaurant in the back, you have to walk through the store, which is filled with the sort of old school, deeply vegan items that don’t seem to exist anywhere else. (According to the menu, Follow Your Heart gave the world Vegenaise, which certainly is most everywhere else, a replacement for mayo that does its job with style and taste.)
And once you’ve meandered down the aisles, perhaps doing a little shopping in the process, you’ll come upon a modest café, with a comfortable counter — part of which is from the original restaurant. (There’s an outdoor patio in the front as well, though you have to go to the back to be seated in the front.)
The menu is extensive, bordering on exhaustive, with a sizable section of breakfast dishes, and plenty of soups, chiles, salads (of course), burgers, sandwiches, pizzas, many entrées — and even a menu section dedicated to the humble potato.
Though they do make some really good veggie burgers at Follow Your Heart, about as good as veggie burgers can be, including an exceptional brown rice, barley and mushroom burger, I tend to lean away from wannabe meat products like tempeh and wheatmeat, and toward vegetarian dishes in which the vegetables are more or less discernible as what they are.
Which is why I’m so fond of the Mediterranean Plate appetizer of hummus, tabouli, falafel, cucumber, warm pita bread and more. The avocado, tomato and sprouts sandwich, described on the menu as “a vegetarian standard,” certainly is — especially on nice crusty toasted whole wheat bread spread with the house Veganaise.
veSTATION
14435 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 818-784-8388, www.vestation.com
At veSTATION, the intensity of Thai seasonings is strong enough to make you forget that your chicken satay is made with soy chicken, which can be made to taste more or less like chicken, though the texture is always that of a soy product.
What intrigued me instead was the satay alternative, made with shiitake mushrooms. I like shiitake mushrooms a lot. And neither the texture nor the taste pretended to be that of chicken. This was a dish made of mushrooms, that were clearly mushrooms, flavored with a lot of onion, garlic, lemongrass and herbs.
As is often the case for me, the dishes I liked best were those that didn’t pretend to be made of meat. Like the Buddha Wrap, a tasty roll packed with salad, buckwheat noodles and lemongrass flavored tofu, with a very good dipping sauce. Or the Japanese gyoza, which was dumplings packed with chopped vegetables, steamed to just the right texture.
And the fact that the papaya salad — a Thai restaurant standard — is made without the usual dried shrimp, doesn’t take away from the innate goodness of the shredded raw papaya, cherry tomatoes, green beans, carrots, cashews, peanuts, sunflower seeds and grilled mushrooms in a fine chili sauce.
I’ve long been a great fan of the salads served in Thai restaurants; it’s the most salad-intensive of all the Asian cuisines. And as a vegan eatery, veSTATION has plenty: a raw kale salad (with a sesame-squash dressing!), a zaru salad (with buckwheat noodles, kimchi and seaweed), a “100 miles” salad (with curried almonds, in a mint-ginger vinaigrette), and a superfoods salad (lots of kale, in a pomegranate and sunflower dressing).
That there’s a different dressing on every salad speaks volumes about the care taken in the kitchen here. There are far fancier restaurants that don’t go to half the effort.
There are five curries on the menu, with a choice of five protein equivalents to add to them, and a lot of stir-fries as well, built around eggplant, ginger, basil and so forth.
But the most popular dishes, not surprisingly, are the grain and noodle dishes — four fried rice dishes, and very good they are too, and five noodle dishes, including a pad Thai that compares well with this most iconic of local Thai dishes. The rice and noodles are big plates, very big, easily enough for two people. And they taste just fine the next day as well.
And yes, there’s dessert, too — dairy-free, and not too sugary either. The mango sorbet is a treat, as is the coconut gelato. There’s mango sticky rice, and a dessert made using quinoa and banana. Better still is the crispy banana and coconut ice cream.
I’m not about to give up the pleasure of a lovely slice of ahi toro at any of the nearby sushi bars. But you do leave veSTATION feeling as if you’ve done something good for your body. And in the process, for your soul.
Woodlands Vegetarian Indian Cuisine
9840 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Chatsworth; 818-998-3031, www.woodlandsinla.com
A page in the Woodlands menu tells us this is the cooking of “the southern coastal town of Udipi, India” (where) “the land is rich and fertile and is therefore ideally suitable for farming.”
I do wonder if there’s a culinary tradition of buffet dining in Udipi. For there certainly is at Woodlands, where the daily buffet stretches from one end of the restaurant to the other, offering enough chafing dish options to keep pretty much anyone and everyone well fed.
Indeed, if anything, there’s a penchant to fill your plate to overflowing with an abundance of curries, and to lose track of what dish exactly you’re eating, as the peas kurma blends into the eggplant kara kulamb into the potato varuval into the dhal palak.
A white sign board in front of the restaurant informs us of that day’s buffet appetizers, soups, breads, chutneys, curries and specials. Dosa bread is served hot at the table. As ever, vegetables are our friends — and vegetables in Indian vegetarian restaurants are our very special friends. The spices and flavors are so intense, chances are good you won’t notice the lack of chicken or lamb.
And a big thank you for not offering faux meat dishes, no vegan tandoori chicken or anything like that. At Woodlands, vegetables are vegetables, proudly served as vegetables. They don’t hide behind weasel words like “krab.” The very tasty garbanzo beans in the channa masala are garbanzo beans.
Not surprisingly, for a cuisine built around a bestiary of beast-free dishes, a perfectly good meal can be assembled from nothing but the appetizers. (It can be said that most of the menu is built on appetizers, if you add on the uthappam and dosa pancakes.)
To simplify the process, there’s an Assorted Appetizer Sampler of vada (a lentil “doughnut”), Mysore bonda (a fried lentil dumpling), vegetable samosa, vegetable cutlet, vegetable pakoras and the deep-fried cheese sticks called paneer pakoras.
Expect plenty of spice, and hot spice at that. The gobi Manchurian, for instance, is fried cauliflower flavored with soy, garlic and chiles, with the chiles the most notable of the flavors. There’s a middling fiery sour-and-spicy soup called rasam. And about half the uthappam pancakes, and several of the dosas, come with some sort of fiery spread/dip/sauce.
Even ordering à la carte, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re eating. This is, like Cantonese seafood, a food that leads to feeding frenzies, with a table of good eaters grabbing one dish after another, without a lot of culinary mindfulness. But still, in the end, no matter how much you’ve overeaten, it’s hard not to get a sense that you’ve done something good for your body. Because, you know, vegetables and all that.
O’Cado
14568 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 818-380-0005, www.ocadola.com
Despite how it sounds, O’Cado is not a venerable Irish name. As was explained to me, it’s short for “avocado,” turned Irish by the Gaelic owner. Which is memorable, if a bit curious — probably more curious than the cuisine served at O’Cado, which is what we’ve come to recognize as classic vegan cooking (meatless dishes, built mostly around veggies, but with a smattering of faux meat creations tossed in for those in need).
I had a nice chat with the bartender about the sundry merits of the Impossible Burger listed under “Tacos & Sandwiches.” She thought it was a remarkable, and delicious creation. I said it’s certainly tasty enough. But it’s also kind of creepy, because the Impossible Burger looks like beef, and tastes like beef (as long as it’s disguised with lots of toppings and such).
Aside from the burger, the menu offers many vegan alternatives for those in need. Vegan house bacon. Vegan smoked gouda. Vegan blue cheese dressing. Vegan parmesan. Vegan cashew queso. Vegan pork (made from jackfruit). Vegan aioli. Vegan ice cream.
The menu is easy to negotiate, with lots of tasty options — tasty for both vegans, and non-vegans alike … as long as you don’t have a jones for animal protein. Among the appetizers, the Buffalo cauliflower is crispy, as it should be. And honestly, cauliflower works quite as well as chicken wings, maybe even better, when it comes to Buffalo seasoning.
The chimichurri fries are snappy, with a sauce that’s not so much spicy as it is tangy. Spicy falafel bites are a clever notion — in essence mini-falafel, deep-fried to serious crunch, served with a hummus flecked with jalapeños. It’s a dish that goes very well with the handful of cold draft beers on the menu, and the second handful of bottled beers as well.
That said, if you start knocking back too many high-octane beers, you may never get around to the rest of the menu. Or, alternately, you’ll order everything on the rest of the menu. Beer can be like that.
There’s a section of toasts, four of them, topped variously by butternut squash and vegan ricotta, avocado with za’atar, white beans and beets, and the Middle Eastern hot pepper dip called muhammara, along with walnuts and pomegranates. Which may well be unique to O’Cado.
There are no actual entrées served at O’Cado. Instead, there are sumptuous salads, sundry tacos and a bunch o’ sandwiches. The quinoa tabouli continues the underlying Mediterranean leaning of the dishes here. (It’s also a reminder that Israel has the highest percentage of vegans of any nation. In a land of falafel, tabouli and hummus, why not?)
There’s an unorthodox Caesar, made with kale and romaine, and avocado — which helps with the creamy quality of Caesar dressing, and strikes me as being a very fine notion. I’ve got no problem at all with the terrific falafel burger, or the perfect avocado tacos, served with an onion and poppy seed flavored slaw, and a cilantro and lime “crema.”
There’s vegan ice cream for dessert — carob chip and O’Cherry. The great irony, of course, is that Ireland, along with the British Isles, are famed for how minor vegetables are in their cuisines. In this case, an Irish owner has decided that veggies are the way to go. And she’s done … O’Good!
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.