Feelin' Saucy

People take their barbecue very seriously.  I'm not talking about grilling on the barbecue, I mean the sauce.  There are BBQ festivals and competitions, rivalries between states, and even associations dedicated to this wonderful condiment.  I'm not sure you can say the same thing about ketchup or mustard.

I love bbq sauce.  Love it.  One of my favorite foods as a carnivore was bbq pulled pork.  Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Syracuse, New York was probably one of the best I've ever had.  Lucky for me, I grew up in that area.  In retrospect, I should have taken advantage of it more when I was a meat eater.  But maybe pulled pork is just like a french fry-- both foods that are mostly good because they're smothered in sauce. So maybe now, I don't miss the pork, as much as I miss the barbecue.  The problem with being a vegetarian is that there's not really much you can put it on.

French Meadow Cafe in Minneapolis found a way around that.  They have a fantastic barbecue tempeh wrap on their lunch menu that I just had to make on my own.  I cut up the tempeh into 1/3 inch slices, put it in a skillet with some extra virgin olive oil (which gets soaked up quickly by the tempeh, so be prepared to add more while it's cooking), and cooked that on medium until the edges browned and were sort of crispy.  Then I added in a generous amount of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que that I had my mother ship to me from NY, and somewhat evenly coated the pieces of tempeh.  I threw that on a warm Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Wheat Tortilla with crisp spinach and a few red onions.  Word of advice: don't heat the wrap too long or you will have major problems trying to roll it and it will break.  Trust me, I made that mistake the first time!

Of course my wrap wasn't as tasty as French Meadow's BBQ Temeph Wrap-- the food we cook for ourselves is rarely as good as restaurants-- but it is my new fix for bbq.