Jalapeño Popper Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
Total time:15 mins
Servings:2
Total time:15 mins
Servings:2
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When she first adopted a vegan diet in 2011, Kim-Julie Hansen says, “I didn’t know any vegans, so I thought all vegans ate were nuts and seeds and rice crackers.”
As someone who became vegan out of a concern for animal welfare, she was committed to a new way of eating that didn’t harm them, but she found herself facing what she calls the two most common misconceptions about it: “The number one would be that vegan food is boring,” she tells me in an interview from Belgium, where she lives part of the time. “The other would be that veganism means healthy. Healthy is good, but people think if you’re vegan you eat salads, you’re super skinny, and that’s the main goal of it.”
Through her popular Instagram account, Best of Vegan, and the new book of the same name, Hansen has made it her mission to prove both ideas wrong. In the book, she features some recipes that she developed and others that she worked on with collaborators, including such tempting concoctions as Hawaiian tofu musubi, Sri Lankan pumpkin curry, Baja-style “fish” tacos, and the one I’m sharing here, Jalapeño Popper Grilled Cheese Sandwiches.
She also takes aim at critics who react to so many vegan recipes with the same ill-informed (or malicious, depending on how you want to look at it) questions: “Why create vegan versions of non-vegan dishes?” and “Why not just call them something else?” For the first, she writes, “Because veganism, at its core, has nothing to do with not wanting to eat animal products and everything to do with not wanting to harm animals. Many of us grew up eating and loving animal products and made the switch only for ethical reasons. That doesn’t erase a lifetime of memories associated with eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy.”
The second question? It’s one I often find myself answering, too, and Hansen’s response…
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