just an American man 🇺🇸 🤷‍♂️ doing American things

Things like watching the NFL and eating a garbage plate.

But watching football is more about nerding out to fantasy and to gamblinggg, and the plate is vegan.

So things aren't always what they seem, don't judge me 😠

If you don't know what a garbage plate is, that's pretty normal. But if you know, then you know they're legendary.

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On Friday I started a mission to make my own plate! and of course to veganize it.

It started by secretly going to Hannaford's, and not blogging about it, to gather my ingredients.

Yesterday I made the mac salad and the "hot sauce", so that it would be a little easier today.

I learned that the garbage plate mac salad is meant to be deliberately simple. A base to absorb all the other flavors, rather than trying to be special or have all the flavors itself. So the recipe I followed was basically just mayo, salt, and some shredded carrot.

(Overnight it sucked up some of the mayo, and I needed to re-apply.)

Standard.

And no I don't have nice, tiled countertops. That's the floor.

Then the home fries.

I googled for a recipe, but I wasn't satisfied with the photo of it, so I decided I'm just gonna cut them up and fry them in oil. Worked.

For the burger, I used a Beyond Burger patty, split in half to form two smaller patties.

And then topped them with Field Roast chao cheese.

Lay them on the home fries and mac salad.

And then topped with the iconic "hot sauce".

And to make it completely authentic, covered with raw onions and mustard.

On the side (not pictured), you should have white bread or Italian bread with butter, and dunk it in the excess grease and drippings on your plate, as you eat thru it.

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Tweaking this to be vegan was surprisingly simple, for what's thought of more for being not anything close to vegan.

Beyond Burger for the burgers, a vegan mayo in the mac salad, and Gardein beefless crumbles in the hot sauce. Simple.

The hot sauce is sort of the magic that ties it all together and makes it a plate, and making it was the part I was most curious about.

I followed a meat recipe and switched ground beef for the crumbles. (And I skipped the part about using the blender.) Worked great.

I think the flavors and spice mellowed out a bit by day 2, because I added more water when I re-heated. Obviously, don't do the "night before" thing, or season extra, or don't add so much water on day 2 is the lesson.

Was delicious either way. Had the iconic taste.