Get ready to be inspired by the latest episode of The Glen Merzer Show Podcast featuring the incredible Tracy Childs of Tracy's Real Food. In this delightful rendezvous, Glen and Tracy engage in a lively chat while Tracy spills the beans—or should I say, potatoes—about her journey and tantalizing creations.
Tracy's star dish for the day? The mouthwatering Colorful Potato Pancakes from her cookbook, "America Goes Vegan!." Ideal for holiday potlucks or any festive celebration, these pancakes are a game-changer for anyone looking to impress friends and family with a delicious plant-based treat.
During the interview, Tracy shares her thoughts on being an author, radiating enthusiasm with every word. "Oh yeah, it's great. It's awesome. I love it," Tracy gushes. Based in the sunny vibes of San Diego, she recounts the joy of interacting with people who have tried her recipes, whether at vegan events or local stores. Tracy's eyes light up as she describes the satisfaction of hearing from fans on social media, sharing their love for her delectable creations.
What sets Tracy's Real Food apart? Tracy spills the beans on her focus: "It's their whole food plant-based, but we're specializing in the comfort food area and also focusing on the holidays." She acknowledges the challenges that come with transitioning to a plant-based diet, especially during festive seasons. Tracy's mission is to make those moments shine, providing delectable options that will "wow" even the toughest critics.
So, whether you're a seasoned plant-based pro or just dipping your toes into the veggie-filled waters, Tracy's Colorful Potato Pancakes are a must-try. Tune in to The Glen Merzer Show Podcast for the full scoop on Tracy's journey, her delectable recipes, and tips on navigating the holiday season with plant-based flair. Tracy is here to prove that plant-based living is not just a choice; it's a celebration!
Listen to the episode here: TRACY CHILDS MAKES COLORFUL POTATO PANCAKES!
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Podcast Transcript:
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Hello and welcome to the Glenn Merzer show. You can find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. Find us on YouTube as well. Please remember to subscribe. My guest today is my friend and co-author, Tracy Child. She is the recipe author of America Goes Vegan. Tracy, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Glenn.
How are you enjoying being an author? Do you find that when you walk down the street, everyone's asking you for your autograph? Oh yeah, it's great. It's awesome. I love it. I live here in San Diego. I'm selling the books at a few locations. So it's great to talk to people that I see at vegan events or wherever in those stores and stuff that say, hey, I made that recipe and I love it. And also just online on social media, I'm always sharing the recipes and then I hear back from people and they are loving the recipes. And so that's what I love. Yeah, because it's like, it's their whole food plant-based but we're specializing in the comfort food area of, and a lot of, and also focusing on the holidays because a lot of people when they're adopting this type of diet, they have difficulty.
with that, you know, with how to how am I going to serve my friends who aren't my family that's not really on this journey yet with me. So you just want to wow them. Right. Well, you have experience with that. Right. How many years have you been a vegan? Since 1990, that's 33 years, just a few just and then 79 for that vegetarian.
I'll bet there were a few family gatherings along the way where not everybody was vegan and you had to deal with that. Right. Yeah. And I've developed into just having hosting Thanksgiving at my house every year because I've developed so many great recipes for Thanksgiving. And and then, you know, so my nephews, my brother, my family, my parents come over and of course my own children. And
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Honestly, it's really cool because they have, even though they're, well, my family, my immediate family is all plant-based vegan, but the rest of them aren't. But they've all grown to enjoy so much and look forward to the recipes and the foods. So it just, you know, may take a while because, you know, it's not full of grease. They're used to lots of stuff like mashed potatoes full of butter. And
You know, greasy turkey, whatever. But, you know, they've gotten used to a more cleaner Thanksgiving. So they know not to bring any dishes that are in compliance. Right. Yeah, we got some issues. Oh, there have been issues. You roll with it. Yeah. And Sylvia shows up with a turkey or something and you have to deal with that. No, not a whole turkey. Thank goodness. But, you know, we have.
Thanksgiving one time when the kids were little with a turkey. That was cool. With the San Diego with a real turkey walking around. A real turkey. Yes. At the Vegetarian Society. And it was a guest of honor. Right. In fact, I moved to Los Angeles in think it was nineteen eighty six. And it was around Thanksgiving. And I had been in town about two or three days when I went to a restaurant for.
vegetarian restaurant that was having a Thanksgiving. And there was a turkey walking around and there was press. And I was on the six o'clock news with the, you know, dealing with the turkey on my lap or something, you know. And I thought, man, I've been in Los Angeles just two or three days and I'm already getting famous. Yeah. And I stayed there 32 more years. I was never on TV again.
So that was it. Just that first Thanksgiving stardom. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Tougher than I thought. Well, I think it's great because just to have for people to experience the fact that these are sentient animals, they enjoy being enjoy existing and being alive. And that's the key to show. And they like vegans. I think they like us more than the other people.
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Well, who can blame them, right? It seems to me the case. So you are going to cook for us today a holiday recipe from America Goes Vegan. Is that right? By the way, in the show notes, folks, you'll find a link to America Goes Vegan and you could find it on Amazon. So what is the holiday recipe for today? And it makes an amazing gift, a totally caring gift for your family or friends, just showing that you really care for them and care for the planet.
If it to all your non-vegan friends, too. Right. And you can actually go to Tracy's Real Foods dot com and order a signed copy if you'd like. So that is true. So those will be worth more money in the future. So what are we cooking today? We are making colorful pancakes, colorful potato pancakes. They're on page two seven.
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It's a wonderful recipe. So my husband is Jewish. So we raised our kids Jewish in the faith. And so, of course, we always had to make potato pancakes every year on Hanukkah. And at first I didn't know another way. So I made them, I fried them. I did make them vegan.
I looked up recipes, I found out, you know, you need to add. So instead of eggs, so usually they have eggs in them to hold them together. So we all know you don't need eggs to hold stuff together. We make our burgers and there's tons of great recipes for burgers that don't have eggs in them, hold them together. So what is it? You use some kind of starch. So that also, you know...
Think about your oatmeal when you make your morning oatmeal. What does it do? It's close together, right? So that's what you want to do with your pancakes and your potatoes. So even though they do have some starch, they're still gonna need something to hold them together because they also have a lot of water in them and then we're adding some great vegetables to it. So yeah, so I also learned that you can bake them so you don't need to fry them.
And you know what? It's so much easier, cleaner. You're not making a mess standing over this skillet for, I don't know, like hours, right? Making like tons and tons of pancakes or inspiring a lot of yourself. And plus your heart is, you're doing your heart a good service and they're just as good. But I also wanted to show how you can add some color to them. You can add other vegetables to make them prettier.
You can add some flavor to them, you know, other flavors and things like that. So, so let's get going with it. So, all right. I'm wondering how you're going to add the color. I hope it's not going to involve sprinkles. Well, sprinkles like carrots. OK, those are good. So this is what we have. Look at this red onion, red onion. We have a zucchini. OK.
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We have some yams. So these can be amazing for adding color, more flavor. Potatoes by themselves don't really have a lot of flavor. And we're gonna add some lemon to it. And we're gonna add some mustard. Oh, and another thing that we add is flax. So flax is a great egg replacer. This is just ground up flax seeds. You can also use chia seeds, but grind them up.
or wait for a little bit for them to absorb into the water. But, you know, and what I like about this recipe too is it's kind of a loose recipe. You can add your favorite veggies. If you wanna just keep it just with potatoes, that's okay too. So we're using some potatoes too, but these are just your hash browns that you can buy. This is a great convenience.
is to add some of the frozen hash browns. And these are thawed out. So you can use, I'm doing like half the recipe because I made some to show you guys. So this is about half a package. Trader Joe's has them, the grocery stores have them. And you know what? You think that they're gonna have oil on them, but a lot of them don't. So we're gonna use our handy-dandy food processor.
Now you can cut these up, you can grate them by hand. You know, that shows real love, you know, to spend all day grating. But, and of course you can grate up potatoes too, but they end up being much more watery than those ones, the ones that are from hash browns. I don't know why exactly, but they're more watery. So let's see here. So I wanted to show you guys.
This seems like a tricky thing to do, but, so this is the tool. This is gonna be the greater area for your food processor. Normally I use my S blade. I hardly use this. I use this probably like once a year, but I just wanna show you, you know, you just take your thumb and pull this thing back and slide it in. And there you are, voila. Okay, so now here's our food processor.
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There we go. A little bit of a cord in the way, but what can we do? Let's plug it in. We need the electricity. Okay, so now you just kind of put that on here. Then you're gonna take your lip.
you're gonna lock it on. Okay, so now this you're gonna just leave it like this. You can turn it on. Let me see what we have for our vegetables. So I already had grated up carrots. So I'm gonna do some sweet potato. So just get it started. And I'm just gonna move right through all these guys just to show you how fast and quick. Make sure you have this on hand. This is the pusher to push it down. And it's actually not very noisy.
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So what I did was I just washed these and scrubbed them. Beautiful tail.
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I'm not hearing any sound at all from that processor. Do you have a silencer on it? Is that it?
Oh, zoom filters it out. Oh, OK. Zoom filters out the sound. Yeah, I'm learning about this platform. OK, so this is not shaped like the top. What's nice about those vegetables, they're all shaped like this. They're all shaped, you know, to easily fit in this tube. But no, not an onion. So what you'll do is you'll just cut it into those shapes.
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Cut it into wedges.
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Okay.
Where are we? All right. So lost my little guy.
Is the onion going in the food process? The onion is going to go in. I just lost my pusher thing. I lost your pusher. Hiding behind the bowl.
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Yeah, you can just grate your onion up this way too. They kind of just happen naturally.
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And then you might end up with some pieces. You can either cut those up or you can just not use them or just put them in there and have a few chunks. Doesn't really matter. So here's, just gonna go ahead, take what's on the top, put it in my bowl.
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Okay, now that I have my veggies done, I'm going to go ahead and make the egg replacer. So I've got our flax, and I'm gonna add, two tablespoons of flax, but the recipe calls for a quarter cup, but I'm doing half, so two tablespoons. And like a quarter cup of water.
And then I'm gonna grab a fork.
Ah, here it is. Somewhere, okay. So now you just go ahead and that's your A.
much healthier than an egg from a chicken. Definitely, there's no cholesterol here and it does have a little bit of protein. It has omega-3 fatty acids, it has fiber, all these things. So eggs have protein and fat and that's about it in cholesterol. So what's great about plant foods is they're just a great mixture of all kinds of things. Animal products just basically just have protein and fat. So those are things we don't actually need extra of.
We got plenty of those, so Americans do anyway. So here you go. So now I'm gonna add some lemon juice to this.
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So our lemon, I'm gonna show, I'm gonna cut this. Let's see here, put this off to the side for a second. Cut this. I like to make it easier on myself and cut the ends off the lemon to make it easier to squeeze. Then I cut it in half.
So lemon is just adding flavor to our dish. Just lemon is an amazing flavor. Now, if you're really industrious, you should zest it. Zest that lemon in here and then you'll get a lot more lemon flavor. So I wasn't today. So, but you know, I love to give options for people because some people have more time and energy to do those kinds of things and others just enough to follow a recipe.
And the lemon adds not only flavor, but health benefits. Vitamin C. Exactly. Yeah. And of course, yeah, you get more color if you use the zest. OK, so now some. Some mustard, that also is just adding flavor.
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So I'm gonna add that to our kind of liquid thing here that's gonna bind things together.
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It's our liquid mix.
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Okay, so you can see that it's starting to get gelatinous and see how it's gonna help bind all those veggies together.
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Okay, so now we can just take out our grader.
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that off. Shake any excess.
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Bitter Bull?
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Okay, so what we have is our braided potatoes. These are the hash browns that are.
from the store. Taking a little shortcut here. Now, if you do grate your own for whatever reason, then you should probably, you can see that they're dry. Potatoes have a lot of water. So you might take these and thread them out into a dish towel and then kind of just twist it over the sink.
and twist it over the sink to get out that excess water.
Because these are, you're adding a lot of water here too. And if you want, you can actually dry these out too. But you know, the key is getting the right amount of liquid in your dish. Not, you don't want it to be, you know, super dry. You don't want it to be like watery either. So.
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So look at all that color. We got our nice yams in here. You could use purple sweet potatoes. I know that's Glyde's favorite. For the purple that we use in the purple plant burger in the book.
It's also a favorite on Okinawa. That's right. The purple sweet potato. The blue zones, one of the blue zones. Yes, very, very healthy. And then we're going to add our carrot here, too.
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And all of this is going to become pancakes. Right, pancakes. It doesn't look like a pancake yet. So these are going to be savory pancakes. Okay. Not saying you can't put syrup on them. You can if you want, but I'm going to show some great toppings after this to show you how you can make.
a nice dish. So I'm making these into mini ones just to show you could use these as an appetizer. Of course, if you want to use them as a main meal, you can make them full size and serve them with the traditional way to serve them for the Hanukkah holiday is to serve them with sour cream. Of course, we have a recipe for that in the book, plant-based sour cream. That's tofu and cashew based.
or you can serve with applesauce or you can serve with both. But I'm gonna show this as more of like an appetizer type idea and make it really super colorful. Okay, so.
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grab my bowl here. So now we can go ahead and add our mix here. This is the egg mix that has some mustard in it.
Black seats.
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And now we're gonna add some oat flour. You can add any flour. You can add, I think you could probably add quick oats also, but I like to add a flour. And what I originally would do is add corn starch. So you can just add some kind of corn starch or a tapioca starch or arrowroot, whatever you'd like.
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Add that in. So that's also gonna help bind them together and hold them together. And you can add some pepper.
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You can add garlic powder. You can add fresh garlic also if you wanted to.
So one thing I do in the book is for the recipes is we're trying to, if we're really working to, you know, heal our disease, especially if you have heart disease or something like that, you want to cut down on sodium. You want to, you know, try to have as healthy a diet as possible. So I have spice mixes in there, basic spice mixes, because you're going to end up, if you want to add more flavor, you're going to end up adding more spices.
And I really recommend that you, so you can tell that I've reused this container a lot because I buy them in bulk. I buy like pound packages of garlic powder, onion powder, Italian seasoning, and you know, those kinds of, whatever you use the most of, if it's cumin, if you like Mexican food, buy a lot of it, buy it in bulk. Just order it from one of the companies online.
because you're probably not gonna find them that way. Maybe at Costco. And just go ahead and invest in yourself and flavor. And of course, adding more of these things is beneficial because when you're adding garlic powder, you're still adding dried garlic to your dish. Onion powder, you're adding onion, more onion. Some people think it's foreign or weird to add.
You've already added onion and you want to add onion powder, but I say go for it. More flavor, the better. So what we want to do now is we want to see, okay, I've got my ingredients here and is it going to hold together? If you think that, okay, it's still a little dry, what you can do is you can add a little bit more of your water.
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and you can also
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Get in there with your hands, just like you do when you're making veggie burgers.
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And you kind of break things down a little bit, because that will help everything stick together into more of a pancake form. You're still going to be a lot of texture from all these veggies that are grated, not ground up.
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Okay, now look, so you can see that it's more of a potato shape or pancake shape.
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I have my handy dandy scooper. I love these. So I have these in all the different sizes. This is a small one. It's kind of like a cookie scoop, or it's a little bigger than a regular cookie scoop. And I'm going to go ahead and use that to.
for my burgers. Okay. And what you want to do, your, no, sorry, pancakes. What you want to do to form your pancakes, your potato pancakes. This is very similar to making burgers, actually. And if you want to, you can take burger or burger recipes and make mini burgers also. So what I do is push it down. You want to push it into your scoop.
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Now is that is that parchment paper? Yes, so you got to line your sheet with parchment paper. You're going to have your oven at 425.
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So, and then, you know, so you just do go ahead and do them all. It's about, so this recipe makes about 14 large, full-size pancakes. And then when you're making these mini ones, guess what? It's about double that. So you can serve 48 little guys, little pieces.
Totally guilt free. This is really fun to share with your guests and just say, you know what? You're enjoying a really guilt free appetizer here that's normally gonna be fried, full of oil.
So these do not look like they're very flat pancakes. Yeah. So when you get the whole thing full, you're going to just go ahead and use your hand. So I keep some water nearby to rinse it. And they can just keep shaping your little guys.
The wet hand helps to keep it from sticking to your hand.
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So yeah, you just keep doing all of them, which would be kind of boring for me to do all of them. So I want to show you the end result. All right, we'll take a quick commercial break and we'll be right back with the end result of the colorful potato pancakes.
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So, Tracy, we left off with the potato pancakes, the colorful potato pancakes formed, ready to go into the oven, and now you have some that are done already? Yeah. So the magic of TV, we have some pancakes. Yeah, some ready to go potato pancakes. And the technology here is amazing. Yes.
So here we go. That looks beautiful. And you serve it on a colorful platter. Is that required? No, but it's nice. Extra points. Extra points when you have your veggies. Yeah. So let's go ahead and show you what you can do with this. Now, I went ahead and I made the pesto. This is the Get Your Greens pesto. So
What are the ingredients? What are the main ingredients in that? So the main ingredients are some greens, of course. You can use basil, spinach, arugula, kale, just some bright greens. And you're just grinding them up in your food processor with some. I use tahini, some rice vinegar. You can also use lemon juice, some miso.
So I made this last night. Look, it's still holding its color really nicely. And I believe it's the rice vinegar and the miso preserving the color. It's no brown. Usually a lot of the pesto will get brown on top. And the tahini is in place of pine nuts. That's the traditional. You can use those, but I like using tahini. It's cheaper for sure. Very convenient. It's in my fridge. So it adds a nice whole food fat.
and so, and also has some plant-based calcium. And what I did with this one is I used a lot of arugula. So I didn't have any basil. It's not really right in season. So I used, you know, just a bag of organic arugula from Trader Joe's and ground that up with some parboiled kale that I had in the fridge too. So I always like to keep the, there's a,
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cheesy, cheesy kale recipe in the book, too. And that shows how you can parboil kale and keep it on hand. And you can add the little the nut Parmesan recipe to it or you can just eat it plain. So I've just developed a taste for it. And I just grab it out of the fridge and eat some. It's really good for your heart health. And so you would recommend parboiled kale over hard boiled eggs, right? Absolutely. OK. Yeah.
And I also put some nutritional yeast to add some flavor and some cheesiness to it. All right. So of course it's very festive on its own. Very pretty. So you could just add a little spoonful on top.
of some of your...
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Actually, I'm going to do every other. So let's switch.
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I've got another topping I want to show you. All right. What color is the other topic? It's a it's a white. So there you go for Christmas or just colorfulness. So now I might want to add some red to this just to really finish off the more color and what I'm doing in green for the holiday. Exactly. So what I've done is
So here's some tomatoes. These are just cherry tomatoes. And what I did was I cut one in half. So you could use a slice like this, or if you wanted to make a nice little pattern, you could cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, or use the seeds if you're just doing like a slice, but anyways, just scoop out the seeds. And if you wanna make these little stars, and then you can just kind of add
some nice color that way.
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So, and obviously you could use red bell peppers too. So with those, what I did with the bell peppers is, you know, you could buy roasted bell peppers, you know, in a jar, but I like to make it myself. So I just take a bell pepper, clean it, cut it into some chunks, and then put it in a pan with a little bit of water, put the lid on it.
Steam them basically with about a quarter, one pepper and about a quarter cup of water in a skillet. Steam them on, you get them on high, get them boiling, put them down to low, let them cook, steam up, lift up the lid and start, as the water starts to evaporate, you push them around and they'll gather up the roasted flavor. So that to me is like the easiest way you could do this.
And I don't care about taking the peel off, but that's one way that people do that is they roast it over the stove or in the oven and take the peel off. So when you wanna do these, you can just, of course, just make little pieces and use those for your... Now, could you use those to make a smiley face on the potato pancake? Let's see.
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So much fun. Fun with food!
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I'm gonna go to bed.
Oh yeah, this one's a nose for sure. Okay.
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There's our nose. Here we go. Let's let's hold that up to the camera there. There you go, a potato pancake with a smiley face. You don't get to see that every day. And the other idea I'm not going to show, I'm not going to do much with these because they're just marinating here. But my we have a recipe for this marinated red onions or pickled red onions is another name and they actually turn pink over time. I just did these. But it's
It's one of my favorite ways to have onions on hand, cut up, ready to go as a condiment for anything. They taste amazing. So for me, like raw onions, I don't like the aftertaste of them, but if you bathe them in apple cider vinegar and water, so what I do is, and Glenn was like, you need to have a recipe. I'm like, okay, this is, I don't usually know. Sometimes you follow, sometimes you don't, but then this, I just do half and half. So it's like,
I put them in a container, I fill up the about halfway with vinegar and then I the rest of the way with water. So yeah, so then you just got these nice, colorful, beautiful pieces of onion that just tastes like crunchy goodness. And it's my it's my I'm solving my onion problem right here. All right. So I put them on my burgers. I put on my tacos. Just have them put them on my food.
So I'm consuming raw onions that way. And I know that they're really good for your digestive system. They're really good for cancer fighting. So yeah, that's a good way if you don't enjoy raw onions. And also you don't want to keep cutting them up. And also when you put this topping on it, guess what happens? No more tears. No tears. No more tears. So there you go. All right. So another topping.
is let's see do you have the book handy oh i do i have the book right here uh so honey mustard dressing honey mustard i'll come back honey mustard dressing and dip
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is page 131.
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So you can see it right there. And guess what? The pesto is right there next to it. It's like right before it.
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Alright, so what we're using is another one of my favorite, favorite recipes that's in the book is the mayo. Now I said you could use sour cream on here, but you can also make a nice dip with your mayo. And this mayo is just made with tofu, cashews, miso, mustard, and apple cider vinegar. And you just blend it all up. And it's mostly tofu. So it's definitely low in fat.
And just looking at, you know, in the in the book itself, I have the ratio and the calories and the fat content so much lower than traditional mayo or vegan mayo. People think they're being healthy by eating vegan mayo, but it is definitely not healthy. Well, what is what is commercial vegan mayo usually made from? Oil, right? It's just not good.
Yeah, it's not healthy oil, you know, really super processed oil usually. And then it's and it is almost 100 percent oil. There are so many flavor, so many processed vegan foods in the grocery store made with coconut oil, I have a theory that it's the meat industry trying to kill us, so.
Because that's saturated fat, right? That's just everybody needs to boycott foods made with coconut oil. Just boycott them and palm oil and palm oil boycott them. Don't eat. Yeah, the vegan butters normally have either coconut oil or palm oil. So any vegan butters you're using, I'm not going to name any brands, but that's what they are. So you got to look at your ingredients. You got to see what you're eating.
And then you can just get around it. Like I don't use any of those in my products. I use, so Tracy's Real Foods. I don't know oils added at all. And they're made with almond flour or sunflower seed flour. So that's a whole food fat that keeps it nice and moist, adds a lot of flavor. And what is oil doing? It's a preservative. It's just keeping things on the shelf too long.
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And of course, not good for your heart adding all these calories. So so these are my carrot cake spice cookies. Tracy and I can attest to their deliciousness. Tracy's Real Foods.com with the best and healthiest cookies and refined. So, you know, we have great recipes for making your own burgers, but these are great to keep in the freezer for those times when you don't have time to make your own burgers. These are oil free. My son and a lot of my customers.
just put these in the toaster, not the toaster oven. If you have a toaster, you could actually toast these. They hold together really well. We have a principle of how we make burgers in our book and it's adding a lot of oats, right? And things that hold together and flax seeds. So that's the same principle with these. Most commercial burgers are gonna be, are vegan burgers, are protein and fat, again.
just like animal products. They're not giving you any, doing you any favors nutritionally. They're doing the animals a favor, which I appreciate, but they're not really doing your heart a favor or your health a favor. So they're a good transition food, but these can be a good, better. A lot of the commercial ones are made with these, pea protein, these concentrated proteins that I'm a little suspicious of.
So, you know, soy protein isolate, things like that. I say go with potatoes and beans. Exactly. Because, you know, that's the thing is that concentrated foods, if you're concentrating and there's happens to be any, well, toxins or, you know, who knows what in that food to begin with, so especially if it's not organic. OK, you're eating a concentrated form
isolating one part of the food out. So when you find out, okay, so there's soy protein, there's rice protein, hemp protein. Guess what? Those foods have protein. So just eat the foods. Yeah, and as far as rice goes, I have a great recipe in the book for cleaner cooked rice. And it's the way I habitually make rice now.
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Because if you do your research, some rice may be contaminated with arsenic, not our fault, not the rice's fault, but the soil's fault or who knows? Civilization's fault. Exactly. So, so don't need to give up rice. Just what I do is I boil it like pasta and, you know, a lot of water, boil it for like five minutes, drain it, put it back.
more water and cook it like regular, just steam it. So it's uh and the rice turns out so nice. It's really, really uh it's a foolproof way to cook rice. Oh okay, so let's go ahead back to our dip and our sauce. So here's about half a cup of the mayo.
We have some mustard. So this is again, the stone ground mustard.
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Now, of course, you want to sweeten it. It's it's a honey mustard. Of course, it's great this way without sweetening it. But I have some date sugar here. What is date sugar? Date sugar is just ground up. Dates, right? Now, date sugar, because it's sweet, is particularly good to use on the smiley face pancake, isn't it? Oh, yeah, very good. Yeah.
So do you see, okay, there we go. So now I'm just gonna add some water and go ahead and make it into like a date syrup. So it's like a fast way to make date syrup. You can use maple syrup. So there's good, better, best as far as sweeteners, of course. And one of the best is dates and raisins and whole fruit. And then you got your date sugar or your date syrup. So we want to get
that going. And then what's the worst corn syrup? And just white sugar is pretty bad sugar. White sugar is pretty much addictive and doesn't do any favors. So can you see this? So let's go ahead and add that.
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It's one of my favorite combinations. Oh, I wanna just show you though, this mayo, look at it. So it's not greasy. Most mayo is greasy. You could add this, use this mayo and use it as sour cream on your tacos. Would you put mayonnaise on your tacos? No, but if you have this on hand, you can put this in instead of sour cream if you don't wanna make both. So I always have this mayo on hand.
Or you can have it on your potato pancakes, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it's great plain. It has so much more flavor than a regular mayo, but it's just getting that. I could put it on your sandwiches, of course, you know, there's, and I, I just put it as a topping on rice dishes. Um, anything I just want to add a little flavor and moisture to.
And then of course, there's tons of recipes of things that you can make with this mayo.
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Okay.
back with our potato pancakes here. And the same thing goes here. You could decorate these with...
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Smiley faces.
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or I like a little bit of the onion.
Well, the onion you could use for a frowning face. Yes.
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to be a little smaller. How about just a straight face like an annoyed face? Like I didn't get
what I wanted for Christmas. Here we go. There's the, I like that little hair.
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little bit more.
There's our nose.
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Here's our annoyed guy.
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All right. Well, that's a little hard to interpret, but we'll go. We're not sure how he feels. To me, it looks like a Japanese tree, but we'll see. Yeah. So just have fun with it. That's the thing. Now, also decorating your plate. Just get some rosemary or add some rosemary to it. Just around here. Just make it nice and festive.
So pretty, right? Just on everywhere on your plate. Some arugula might look nice on here too.
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So there you go. You've got your holiday appetizers. This is great for, of course, Hanukkah, for Christmas, for New Year's.
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And when it comes to New Year's Day, in the book, we have a recipe with black-eyed peas.
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And the lore that goes with it. Good luck for the new year. Yeah. And that is a perfect holiday brunch or appetizer. Yep. Let me show.
So like I said, it's got all the healthy stuff on it. People aren't gonna know that they're eating something super healthy. These are really great little finger snacks that people can just grab and eat. And you could put maybe a little less, maybe not so messy, but so much goodness. And yeah, let people know they're having something that is low in fat and you wouldn't know it because you're getting a really
beautiful and delicious, saucy, fun recipe, and then also on top of the crispy pancakes. So for these small ones, by the way, I wanna say, you could cook them less time. I cooked them, I think the recipe says to cook for like 20, 25 minutes, then flip them. And I cooked them for about 15 minutes. You wanna make sure that they're starting to hold together.
And then you can just carefully flip them over because when they're hot, they're a little delicate. So just flip them over, put them back in the oven. If you really want to crisp them up, you can also broil the top after. So cook them again for about 15 minutes. So 15, after flip 15. And then if you're still not thinking they're crispy enough, you can broil the top for five minutes or so. And you're cooking them at what heat? 425.
Yeah, so pretty high. That's usually what you would do for things like roasting or 400. But with this 425 because we want to get them nice and toasty and brown and just have fun with it. So like I said, there's no excuses. You can totally have a lot of fun on the holidays. You don't need to murder an animal or eat unhealthily.
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And just, you know, and we keep doing these and we, the message is going to spread. America is going to go vegan. It's going to be so much easier for everyone. So just keep working hard and making your foods and making all your recipes count. So just make all the foods count. This recipe in about what, 100, how many more, 120? 100.
24 more or well, there's two recipes I did or three, but yes, so it's 120 plus more are in America Goes Vegan. If you purchase the books and proof of purchase to veganbonus at yahoo.com and we'll send you some extra recipe files and a PDF of my book Food is Climate. Yes. Tracy, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for the- Thank you, Glenn.
colorful potato pancakes. Yeah, have fun with it. Have a great holiday season. And of course, these are great all year long. Oh, so you don't have to eat them during the holidays? No. OK, you can eat them any time. Potatoes are good food. People don't people think that they're too high in starch or carbs or whatever. Potatoes are healthy. It's the coconut oil that's not healthy. The potatoes are healthy. Exactly.
Thanks Tracy. Everyone please subscribe and we'll see you next time. All right. Follow us on social media too. Bye.