Tomato and White Bean Soup and Vegan Biscuits

My backup dancers and I adore biscuits. I usually make them with butter and plain Greek yogurt. But in the name of taking whatever actions I can to fight climate change, I'm looking for ways to reduce my dairy consumption (meat, too, of course) - hence "Vegan Vednesdays." 

I procured some vegan butter, and dove into "Vegan Quick Biscuits" (NYT Cooking; subscription required).

How much do we love biscuits? So much that I used a cookie cutter and shaped them like hearts, and it wasn't even Valentine's Day!

Raw dough

Baked

I used oat milk for the liquid. I wish I could say that they turned out as good as my usual biscuits, but their texture wasn't as good - it was less flakey. Still, it was not a bad texture. Really not bad at all. And they tasted delicious. (I skipped the maple butter topping, but that sounds amazing, doesn't it?)

I served them with NYT Cooking's "Tomato and White Bean Soup With Lots of Garlic." That was too intensely tomato-y for my taste, but it was splendidly easy and the texture was nice. If you like intense tomato, just skip the cream and it'll do the trick on Vegan Vednesday. When I made it - not on a Vednesday - I topped it with sour cream, but I feel in retrospect that was the wrong flavor choice.

Smashing the garlic was pretty satisfying:

But be warned that when the recipe says "medium saucepan," what it really means is "fairly large saucepan", or you'll end up with a situation like this:

A friend pointed me to an interesting interview with Bill Gates, who suggested that high-income countries should move toward 100% fake beef. I like Impossible Burgers (I wish I could find them in more places), but knowing that we're not going to solve climate change with food changes alone, I feel there is room for some small amount of real beef. 

Mr. Gates is pursuing all sorts of large-scale projects in various sectors with the potential to slow climate change, which I find very encouraging and exciting. I don't have billions of dollars to do the same, but I do have the power to reduce my meat and dairy consumption, air-dry some of my laundry, run my dishwasher at night when the electrical grid is less stressed, compost my food scraps, walk rather than drive to nearby destinations, put on more layers rather than turning up the heat, minimize food waste, buy used rather than new items, mow my lawn with a reel mower (and for pity's sake, just say no to leaf blowers), repair and reuse things instead of buying news ones, choose products that have minimal packaging and don't have to travel far to get to me, unplug my small appliances when I'm not using them, and....encourage all of you to do these things too, and to encourage everyone you know to do them.