"Your Vegan Burger Costs HOW MUCH?"

Folks are often amazed — hell I feel the same way as well — how much a vegan dish typically costs. I mean, really, a vegan dish mostly has some combo of veggies, rice, beans, tofu, a few perhaps funky spices. What could be so god damned expensive? OK, I’m taking a bit of an ironic tone here, but the question is a serious one for our soul food kitchen, because, among other things, we want our food to be affordable.

I thought about this issue yet again as I made up a batch of Tex-Mex enchiladas, one of our more popular vegan dishes. The accompanying picture captures a partial list of the ingredients: black beans (soaked for 6 hours first then cooked separately); sweet potatoes (peeled and cooked separately before adding to the mix), a melange of diced sweet peppers, red onions, and garlic, and a big bunch of fresh spinach. The melange is sauteed in olive oil, then seasoned with a lime/cumin mix, then blended with the beans and sweet potatoes, then topped with the fresh spinach until the leaves begin to wilt. And there you have it, more or less, the filling for our Tex-Mex enchiladas.

Of course, I forgot to mention the homemade smoky chipotle sauce then gets added in. Or the bed of classic Savannah red rice that is made separately and which serves as the “bed” for the enchiladas. The dish is finished with a colorful array of peppers and red onions roasted on our comal. Oh yeah, there’s also a side sauce of avocado/lime/cilantro. As dish prep goes in our soul food kitchen, it’s pretty standard: layers of technique assembled over a goodly amount of time.

Could I prepare this with a bit more economy? Sure. I don’t really need to include the Savannah red rice. In fact it’s not even on the menu description. Same is trued with the finishing touches of roasted peppers and onions. But to me, such corner-cutting turns a true southern square meal, vegan style, into a chop-chop fast food aluminum-foil wrapped abstraction that belongs in a hall of shame. In short, not going there.