About — VegStreet

Welcome to my vegan and vegetarian world.

Being a scientist is all about accuracy, following protocols, and anticipating results; sort of like cooking for me. I like creating dishes in the kitchen, almost like a protocol. In this case, I create new recipes or tweak existing protocols to make them sans meat, healthy, and most times vegan.

I have been my vegetarian all my life and every country I have lived or traveled, I taken the time and made sincere effort to learn about the local vegetarian options. I am of an Indian descent and grew up in the middle-east. Besides Omani friends, we had neighbors and friends of different nationalities, and this encouraged me to try different cuisines. My mom almost always made the staple northwest-Indian (Gujarati) food for lunch and occasional non-Indian entrees for dinner. Occasionally, our neighbors shared the home cooked hummus, tabbouleh, pita ('khubaaz'), Omani halawa (dessert), freshly plucked dates, farm walnuts, and a wide range of cultural infusions that I would never have been exposed to, if it were not for Oman.

Then I moved to India, where I witnessed some of the most natural chemical free cooking by my grandmother. One thing that I particularly remember is, how she had barrels and barrels of wheat and other grains in her 'store room' (pantries). She preserved them with harmless preservatives and made her fresh 'chapatis' with self-ground wheat. She would recruit my aunts and my mom to sit down in her big yard every time we visited to help her grind the grains and, we kids would watch or help out once in a while. A skinny man on his bicycle delivered freshly milked cow milk to her place every morning at 6 am and she would boil it right away. She also made her own "Ghee" (Indian butter) at home from the milk. It couldn't get any better. While in India, I managed to explore a lot of south Indian and Punjabi food, including the famous Indian street food that has received many accolades from Anthony Bourdain.

Next I moved to the United Kingdom and the only way for me refresh memories from home was the smell of homemade food for which I depended heavily on cooking. In between exams, classes and lab work, I duplicated some recipes from my mom, grandma, and friends in my kitchen. Other than the local staple food: jacket potatoes with beans, chips and cheese and burgers as options for vegetarians on the University campus, I managed to travel around UK to try some of world's most popular international food. Here I sampled Eritean, Moroccan, Lebanese, Thai, Singaporean, Indian-Fusion, Mexican and the list goes on. I still have a memory of eating at Wagamama and heading straight to the Japanese grocery store to buy ingredients for the following day. Now, here I am in the United States, cooking away.

Let's roll our sleeves up, pick our food journals, and start some serious healthy vegetarian cooking.

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