The Best Kind of Vegan Accident

I love vegan accidents. I'm not talking about finding out a certain snack chip or packaged cookie is vegan-(although that's pretty cool), I'm talking when people get together to do something rad and the meal is vegan. It happens! Here's an example:

I belong to a chalice circle at church, or as my son likes to call it, "Turch." It's a committed group of people who get together twice a month to discuss a subject and have two service projects to complete, one to the church and one to the local community. We all agreed to cook a meal for one of the night shelters in town. Since most shelters are overcrowded, this traveling night shelter is a Godsend to people to get in from the cold, eat a hot meal, and go to bed for a good night's rest.
Y'all know there's nothing more warming than soup! So I made the barley chili from 500 Vegan Recipes as well as the cornbread. One of the other members made a yellow lentil and potato soup. Guess what? All vegan. That's right. Without us even trying we cooked a nice vegan meal for 60 people! We were given a budget and only had to spend half the money allowed because we were so smart about what to serve. So when people tell you veganism is expensive, they're WRONG!
Here I am blending my wet ingredients for the corn bread. My favorite egg replacer in baked goods is the good ol' fashioned flax seed meal. Celine is a big fan of sucanat and she has made me a bonafide convert. I have found it at the local Sahara Mart for .99 a #. For real! Prepackaged 1# containers are usually $5 or more. I added a little molasses and creamed corn to the mix to amp the corn flavor. The recipe is called Skillet Corn Bread, but we made two large cafeteria pans, for a total of 8 batches of cornbread!


Here's a shot of the chili. We had a really good time coming together and doing something we all loved, laughed, shared some cookies-(I made the Butterscotch Pecan Cookies s, and I taught a few people how easy it is to make something vegan.