‘Shroom Carnitas

Okay, so I know these aren’t the prettiest things ever, even cleaned up with a little Photoshop magic. I’ve realized that if I’m going to do this Vegan Month of Food thing properly, I’ll have to actually attempt to make food during the daylight hours to get proper, sharp photos. But here you go, tacos with mushroom mock-carnitas.

It’s weird to me that even though I was pretty much the only anglo kid on the block growing up, I still grew up with the strange idea that proper tacos involved prepackaged hard shells, ground beef seasoned with packets of mysterious “taco spice,” and heaps of shredded cheddar.

My first experience with authentic tacos was in my late teens at a little taco stand in Mexicali, during a church excursion to convert the heathen foreigners to happy-clappy megachurchianity. Despite the fact that I’m now a heathen myself, I did take away a lot from those trips. One, my first realization of the ridiculous extent of American affluence. And second, an idea of what real tacos were like.

I attempted to replicate those the other night with a fair bit of success. I got the idea from this blog entry about vegan pozole to use shredded mushroom stems to replicate the texture of shredded pork.

I used fresh chanterelles since they’re actually cheaper up here at the moment than shiitakes, but either works. You basically just crush the stems into shreds between your fingers, marinate them with a bit of oil, liquid smoke, cumin, chili powder, paprika, you get the idea. And then lightly pan fry them.

It wasn’t too shabby, definitely something I’m going to experiment with again, perhaps with cheaper crimini mushrooms. Another option for replicating the texture of carnitas, if you haven’t tried it already, is using jackfruit, as Melisser explains over on The Urban Housewife. Anywho, see you tomorrow, MoFo fans…