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Old 05-08-2004, 10:05 PM   #4 (permalink)
Rodney
Observant Ruminant
 
Location: Rich Wannabe Hippie Town
Not me, personally, but my wife and I used to run a weekly church dinner attended by 10-20 people and 1) one of the regulars was allergic to dairy, 2) one of the regulars couldn't have wheat, and 3) one semi-regular got violent headaches when she ate beans. Made cooking real interesting! Pasta salad was nearly always a winner, because it doesn't need to have dairy and we could always make a smaller separate batch with rice or corn pasta. And we did a lot of vegetable soup, barley soup, pea soup, and so forth.

There were problems with coffee and tea, too, because the caffeine did keep a number of people up and church coffee sucks anyway. So we stuck to water and fruit juices.

We did homeless suppers that were entirely vegan because 1) it's cheaper, 2) a lot of the "homeless" around here are Rainbows, and so eat vegan, and 3) with a bunch of amateur cooks in a dingy church kitchen of doubtful cleanliness, cooking without meat (and dairy, if possible) is the easiest way to avoid food contamination. In stews, I used to use a meat subsitute, textured soy protein, that came in meat-like chunks. It has a nasty aftertaste, but it was dirt cheap; you buy the dried TSP by the pound, then reconsistitute it with hot water. I found that throwing a lot of A-1 sauce and cider vinegar into the water was a good way to kill the aftertaste. So good that on more than one occasion I was confronted by angry vegan vagabonds who thought I'd put meat in their stew under false pretences.
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