Tanya Barnard & Sarah Kramer: Vegans with a Cool Cookbook - Vegetarian Cooking -- Vegetarian Lifestyle

VeggieHeadOnline: The intro of the book talks about how you "vegan" your veggie adventure in the early 90s as "lazy vegetarians." What's a lazy vegetarian? Where there particular events that occurred to help make the decision to go vegan?

SARAH: Well... it's just that. You want to be healthy, you want to eat better, make more conscious choices... but you're lazy, or you don't have enough time in the day to get everything done. We wrote the book in part because we had a lot of friends who were vegan, but they were kinda sickly. Mostly because they didn't have time to cook, or didn't know how to cook. So we wrote a book with easy to make recipes, with easy to find ingredients. I don't enjoy spending a lot of time cooking. I do enjoy eating.

TANYA: Up until I was 18, I had eaten meat everyday of my life, no joke. My family loves the stuff. I still cant go to a family dinner without some member of my family making a wise crack about veganism. "Meat Tanya?", they ask and give me a funny look and try to pass me a plate full of pig or cow. My family didn't (and probably still don't) really understand my reasons for choosing a vegan diet. I decided in 1990 to go vegetarian, then I went vegan 5 years after that. Turning vegan just seemed like the most natural progression after being a vegetarian for so long. My decision to go vegan was a political one. I was/am concerned about animal rights and the environment.

VHO: What made you decide to put the effort into creating a vegan cookbook in 96? How long did it take get a collection together? Did you enjoy the process?

SARAH: It was Tanya's idea. I had just got a new computer, and was learning how to create things on it. Tanya thought making a cookbook for our friends and family would be a fun way to share our recipes and to have fun being creative together. Little did we know it would end up to be a real bona fide published book! *laugh*

TANYA: Five years back, my hobby was making cookbooks for friends. Sarah got a computer and the idea that we could store the recipes on her computer and not have to re-write them for every book, seemed liked heaven. We released a small 50 page bounded version in 1996, then a light bulb went off. Let's expand the book and shop for a publisher. When we got a publishing deal it took about a year to get the whole thing together. It was an exhausting but enjoyable process. It consumed my whole life for almost a year. I'd do it again in a second.

VHO: How, in your opinion, did vegan cuisine get such a bad rap in the first place?

VHO: A culinary question, because I'm curious: Your book says not to cook with flax oil. Why not?

SARAH: Cooking with most oils makes them toxic, some to a slight degree... others like Flax Oil become rancid. Olive oil is one of the best to cook with. Flax gets rancid quickly when it's cooked.

VHO: I noticed that many recipes are named after other people that you collected from. Did you invent some of them as well? How do you get your ideas for recipes?

SARAH: Did we invent our friends? *laugh* All the recipes that have names are named after real people. Some of them Tanya and I made up on the spot, some of them were conventional recipes that we found that we wanted to try to make Vegan.

SARAH: I love the Humus, and the Maple Apple Dip and the Chili, and the Tortilla Chip Soup and the... oh geez. I could go on forever.

SARAH: It's a great time to go Vegan. I mean when I see an article in InStyle Magazine about Vegan cooking, or restaurants or I see all the new Vegan restaurants popping up. I think it's fantastic. About freaking time! Vegan food is good, it's yummy, it's not complicated and it can satisfy any palate.

As for outspoken Vegan celebrities like Alexandra Paul and Alicia Silverstone, good for them. They're making it a part of pop culture. They bring it out front, so it's not so weird or confusing.

VHO: Besides the recipes, I really appreciated the additional material in the book, like 45 ways to use vinegar. I didn't know you could kill weeds with it, or a little bit in a pet's water could keep fleas away. I've already tried both and it works great. Did you guys think of that?

SARAH: We wanted the book to be an all purpose book. Not just food, because Veganism is a lifestyle.

VHO: Are you working on another book or writing project?

SARAH: Right now Tanya and I have our fingers in a lot of pies right now. You'll have to wait and see! *wink*

TANYA: We hope to have another cookbook out sometime soon. I'm just moved back to my home town, that's were Sarah lives, and we are going to work on the sequel here.