Winged Snail Eats: MoFo Edition

Food zine, Sarah E. Hofman, vol. 1,  [email protected]

Vegan MoFo (Vegan Month of Food)  is the month-long vegan cooking and  food-writing binge undertaken by  bloggers near and far each October.  Taking cues from the Post Punk Kitchen  site (which launched the whole idea)  participants dive right in to all things  vegan, writing about it from any angle  they choose. One of the predominant  takes on Vegan MoFo, however, is the  recipe review: take a recipe, try it out,  and then share it (or your variation of it)  with a little story about how the whole  experience went down. Sarah Hofman  has taken the Vegan MoFo plunge two  years in a row on her Winged Snail blog,  but for 2012, she also whipped up a zine  assembling several recipes she put to  the test during the 2011 MoFo, plus two  short essays. I’m not a vegan, but Sarah’s recipes  made me hungry. They range from very  basic (mashed plantains) to bold (whisky  tofu tacos), creating a good introduction  to the options available for someone just  trying out veganism. Her recipes and  instructions are formatted clearly and  are easy to follow, which is nice for the  foodies, but her reviews are sometimes  too short, just a few sentences long.  That’s long enough for some nice,  practical advice, but not enough for  much personality to shine through.  Plus, for some recipes, she includes  extended quotes from other peoples’  blogs. These make for good additional  info, but distract from Sarah’s own MoFo  experience, which is what I was really  interested in. This is why my favorite  entry was her Ukrainian cabbage roll  recipe, simply because it leads of with  her discovery of a Ukrainian cookbook  at a thrift store. A little personal context  goes a long way. (Joshua Barton)

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