Passing Daisies: Vegan MoFo #15: Spork-Fed with the Sporkie Sisters!

Have you ever dreamed of being a Sporkie?

(P.S. - have you entered my Manna Bread giveaway yet?!

What about my Fair Trade Chocolate Giveaway?!)

I was recently able to ask the ladies of Spork Foods a few questions. I was really excited to hear about their new cookbook, Spork-Fed, released October1! (Mine came in the mail today, by the way - I love it! Can't wait to start baking!)

P.S. - It's totally a dream of mine to meet these ladies. Such an inspiration to my dreams of becoming a professional vegan baker/opening my own vegan bakery!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Jenny Engel and Heather Goldberg are the entrepreneurial sisters behind Spork Foods, the most popular vegan cooking school in California. They offer people all over the world the opportunity to take their innovative and fun cooking classes through their membership-based website, Sporkonline.com. Quickly becoming the go-to girls on the future of vegan cuisine, Jenny and Heather are regular contributors to VegNews Magazine and the recipients of a prestigious “Veggie Award.” The Spork sisters have been featured in The Los Angeles Times and other leading print publications, and have appeared on television as cooking instructors to the stars. Jenny and Heather feel like twins, separated by three years. They both became committed vegans while studying Environmental Studies in college. Jenny also trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Culinary Arts in New York City and has over five years of professional cooking experience. Heather has a decade of business management experience in the environmental non-profit world. They reside in Los Angeles, and take a sister trip every year for inspiration.

How do you begin to develop a recipe?

That's a great question! It really comes down to thinking about a veganized version of something that we want to eat that maybe we haven't had in awhile, if at all. We figure, if we want to eat it, surely someone else does too. We are very focused on seasonality/time of year/holidays so we tend to focus our creations on those for that particular time. For instance, we have been really inspired by Thanksgiving and the Holidays coming up so we will be creating a vegan version of Chicken Cordon Bleu!

What inspired you to choose the recipes that you did for the new cookbook, Spork-Fed?

Our main goal with this book is to get it out to the mainstream. If vegan food tastes good, people will eat it, plain and simple. These are our time tested recipes that we have been refining for years, so we chose the recipes that we heard appeal to everyone. Things like Creamy Baked Macaroni and Cheese with a Spelt Bread Crumb Topping and our Seitan Pot Pies with an Herb Biscuit Topping have been converting people for years!

You were both environmental studies majors in colleges. What did you want to do with those degrees before you started Spork Foods?

We wanted to put them to use! So we worked for an environmental non-profit organization called TreePeople! Jenny was there for about 2 years and Heather was there for 8.5 years. During that time we dreamt of having our own sissy biz, and here we are!

Jenny – Congrats on your recent marriage!! Can you tell us about how you kept your wedding vegan, in regards to food, cake, your dress, etc?

There was no question that my wedding- from the cake to the dress to the shoes even down to HIS shoes would be totally cruelty-free. We gave the caterer our recipes that they recreated, we made a four layer white cake with peanut butter frosting and we searched high and low for a vegan wedding dress that had no silk in it! Brides, check this out! http://www.dollycouture.com/