Food Pairing 101: What Goes Well With Vegan Mushroom Stroganoff?

After my essay, entitled To Egg or Not To Egg: Attempting Veganism While Living Amongst Sponge Dock Workers, won first prize in the coveted Extra Wide No Egg Pasta Ribbons Write Off competition I walked away with a cool million. Dollars? Hell no, a cool million bags of Extra Wide No Egg Pasta Ribbons. I needed some ideas about what to do with all these packages. I brainstormed a hundred and one different ways I could incorporate these ribbons into my diet (don't worry, I also plan to turn that list into an award winning essay) and tried about eighty-five before I burnt out on Extra Wide No Egg Pasta Ribbons. Take it from me, the first eighty-four bags go down pretty easy. After that, not so much. But I still had three pantries and a storage unit filled with these Pasta Ribbons and I needed some additional motivation. So, I took to the internet to see what kind of things other people have been doing. Somewhere amongst all the children's yoga mats made from pasta ribbons and tempeh ragu, I found an excellent answer. One Green Planet suggested I try out some mushroom stroganoff.

Now I wasn't sure what I was going to get. I hadn't eaten stroganoff since the days of my mom whipping it out of a box and onto a plate. It was never one of my favorite meals. But I was utterly excited when lunch rolled around for three straight days (that's how long the leftovers lasted) because I liked their version that much. I did make a few slight mods. First, I'm not into the cream thing so I removed the sour cream (traditionalists, avert your eyes!). I also took out the lemon juice because everything I've been putting lemon juice in lately has not been hitting the spot. Because there was no lemon juice to counteract the vinegar, I also removed that too. Three ingredients removed? Nothing substituted? You know what, it sounds a lot worse than it actually is. This dish was fabulous even without those three ingredients.

I'd pair this dish with a coming of age story. One in which the main character comes to recognize that there is no gold in the dirt. Others may tell you that where you are living is a paradise but when you are being tempted and exploited and torn down, it is hard to believe them. This is the type of scenario that plays out in MIAMIGO's new track "Come of Age".