Chef is a vegan Betty Crocker with the heart of a punk rocker

[Guest guest]

By Julia Moskin the New York Times Posted February 22 2007 NEW YORK -- Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a vegan chef, does not particularly like to talk about tofu. Ditto seitan, tempeh and nutritional yeast."I think vegan cooks need to learn to cook vegetables first," she says. "Then maybe they can be allowed to move on to meat substitutes."Moskowitz, 34, was born in Coney Island Hospital, lives in

Brooklyn, and is a typically impatient and opinionated New Yorker. She can't stand how slowly most cooks peel garlic, makes relentless fun of Rachael Ray and rolls her eyes at the mention of California hippies.But as a vegan and a follower of punk music since age 14, she is also part of a culinary movement that helped turn the chaotic energy of punk culture of the 1970s and 1980s into a progressive political force."Punk taught me to question everything," Moskowitz says. "Of course, in my case that means questioning how to make a Hostess cupcake without eggs, butter or cream."The charm of Moskowitz -- in person, in her cookbooks and on her public-access television cooking show, the Post-Punk Kitchen (theppk.com/shows/) -- is that she makes even the deprivations of veganism and the rage of punk seem like fun. Moskowitz's veganism embraces chocolate, white flour, confectioners' sugar and food coloring.Wearing a black "Made Out of Babies"

T-shirt (it's a friend's band) above a red-and-white checked apron, she bends maternally over a batch of strawberry cupcakes. "Don't you just want to pinch their little cupcake cheeks," she says.But can a cupcake be cute and punk at the same time? In the early days of punk, bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were notorious for nihilism, anarchism and epic consumption of drugs and alcohol -- none of which would seem to lead to tofu and chamomile tea.But as punk became more political (and as bands self-destructed) in the 1990s, many punks adopted a more profoundly rebellious stance: against drugs, against alcohol and against the whole habit of mindless consumption."It was about purifying the movement, about being poison-free," says Ted Leo, of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, who led the band Chisel in the 1990s. He became vegetarian in 1988 and has been vegan since 1998.Many punks became vegetarian to protest corporate and government

control of the food supply. Veganism takes vegetarianism farther into cruelty-free territory by avoiding anything produced by animals: milk, cheese, eggs, honey, etc."I would love to live in a world where I knew the eggs came from happy chickens," Moskowitz says. "But in Brooklyn? That's not going to happen. Besides, eggs are the big lie in baking. All the books say they provide structure, but that's kind of crap."At 16, Moskowitz dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York to follow bands, live in squats in the East Village and cook for social justice."I learned knife skills by cooking for Food not Bombs," she says, referring to the activist group that protests corporate and government food policy. "But I also learned to love Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Vegan food can and must be pretty," she says.Moskowitz's kitchen, like punk music itself, has a strong do-it-yourself aesthetic. Her husband, a carpenter, builds more

shelves when the ingredients threaten to take over, the oven needs frequent coaxing to get up to temperature, and if Fizzle the cat wants to sit on top of the refrigerator, the cupcakes must move over and make room."Here is the hideous curdled face of vegan baking," Moskowitz says, gesturing to a bowl of soy milk mixed with vegetable oil and cider vinegar. Baking, she says, has long been the final frontier for vegan cooks.Her second cookbook, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, was published by Marlowe & Co. the fall of 2006. Her first, Vegan With a Vengeance (Marlowe, 2005), has sold more than 50,000 copies."Omnivores" -- that's meat-and-dairy eaters -- "can't imagine baking without eggs and butter," she says. "But we use cider vinegar instead of buttermilk for tenderizing, and really good shortening for the fat, and the rest just happens."Nonhydrogenated shortening from Earth Balance and margarine and soy milk from Silk

are her baking staples.From them, instead of lumpy, penitential scones and muffins (the usual vegan baked goods), Moskowitz and her co-author Terry Hope Romero produce insanely fetching cupcakes with mousse fillings, butter cream frostings, chocolate ganache icings and sprinkles galore.Moskowitz says that she has received passionate e-mail messages not only from vegans but also from parents of children allergic to eggs or dairy products, who are thrilled to find vegan baked goods that are not made with whole-wheat flour and egg substitutes and that actually taste good.The next book by the two women, to be published in the fall, will be "the long-awaited vegan Joy of Cooking," Moskowitz says.In the recipes here, North African spices lighten a rich vegetable stew with a peanut base; sweet butternut squash stands in for the sweet shrimp in a Vietnamese spring roll and, of corse, there are cupcakes.Moskowitz and Romero both have been

vegetarian since age 16, and vegan for almost that long. "It's kind of like being gay, in that vegans tend to remember an `a-ha' moment in adolescence or childhood," Moskowitz says. "It happens when you realize that the lambs or chickens on your plate are the same as the ones at the petting zoo."Peter H

 

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