Vegan Getaway
A weekend in the countryside
This weekend I traveled home to visit my family in the countryside. We live on a farm in the Veneto region, surrounded by fields, vineyards, and orchards. Being vegan at home is much easier than Milan, at least for me. Local fruit and vegetables are available both at the market or directly from the vegetable garden next to my house and my grandmas know quite a lot of interesting vegetarian recipes that can be adapted to a vegan diet. Moreover, my father likes to cook and to experiment with different and innovative dishes.
As soon as I got home on Saturday morning my father prepared pasta with tomatoes from our vegetable garden: an easy and tasty dish that we shared during lunchtime. In the afternoon we went outside to collect the pumpkins in order to prepare a special dish suggested by my grandma: pumpkin gnocchi with oil and sage. After collecting the pumpkins we had to cut them into smaller pieces and cook them in boiling water until they become soft. Once the pumpkins were boiled we had to knead them with flour and create many gnocchi adding a bit of salt and soy spreadable cheese. After the gnocchi were made we cooked them for a few minutes and then seasoned them with olive oil and sage leaves. This dish was quite easy to prepare and it was great since it used local seasonal products: the taste was quite unique since the pumpkin is sweet and the sage leaves enhance this particular flavor.
On Sunday my father went to the mountains to seek for mushrooms in the woods. He came back in the afternoon with quite a few honey mushrooms and we started to prepare them together in order to cook risotto in the evening. To make them ready you need to select the good parts and cut them up in order to cook them better. In the pot, they are usually mixed with garlic and parsley in order to enhance their flavor. To make risotto we used veggie broth.
Even if the countryside seems an ideal place where to pursue a vegan diet there are also some disadvantages. First of all local restaurants pay less attention to this topic and it is pretty hard to find more than one option in the menus. Secondly, also in supermarkets, the corner for vegan products has a more restricted range of ready-made options. To summarize a huge pro of living in the countryside is having the possibility to grow your own food and cook with the products that you buy from local producers. If you aren’t such a great cook it’s probably preferable to live in a city like Milan that has more to offer for vegans in terms of ready meals (restaurants and supermarkets). Another point that makes the difference in terms of sustainability is the absence of packaging for products bought directly from a local farmer or grown by yourself; in these days at home, I noticed that the amount of waste concerning my food was way fewer than the one produced during the week in Milan.
