Let’s get one thing straight. Lex and Steve love themselves some meat. Lex started the day doing her happy dance after discovering that Mastro’s Steakhouse will be opening in CityCenter in less than a month. And Steve, well, he’s hunted moose. And he’s not apologizing for it.

Nonetheless, we signed up for a vegan cooking class through our new yoga studio. Last week’s post-yoga class vegan brownie morsels were too good not to throw down $50 and see what the fuss was all about.

We learned a lot today. Vegans love to make the cooking experience sensual. Our instructor kicked off the class shimmying to some cheesy violin music, encouraging us to imagine eggplants, avocados, and pears for they not only look like the cervix and womb of the female but apparently also target the function and health of the female reproductive organs. Steve was not the only male in the class. There were three others. So our instructor made sure not to leave them out. She reminded us that bananas, cucumbers, and zucchini target the size and strength of the male sexual organ and that peanuts are the original Viagra. In fact, peanuts were actually banned by the church in the middle ages for their profound effect on the libido.

We also learned that in some cooking classes you don’t cook. Or leave with recipes. At least more than a couple of them. While we showed up for the brownie recipe and spent quite a bit of time chowing down on some AMAZING sweet potato chilli, we only learned how to make capellini with rosemary and vegan spaghetti sauce. Fortunately, the participants in our vegan cooking class sans the cooking asked heaps of questions about the amazing tastes they were encountering, helping us to figure out many of the ingredients in the mystery dishes. Like our instructor, you’ll have to pay for us to reveal what we surmised (or just leave us a nice comment and we can work something out). We did, however, walk away recognizing we want to incorporate the following ingredients into more of our meals-

1. Nutritional yeast
2. Smoked paprika
3. Strawberry Creek Vinegar (If you are in Vegas, you can pick it up at Whole Foods)
4. Vegan Wine (BEWARE of the Red-40 and Yellow-5 dyes in wines and in an assortment of other products. We make sure Plato has animal byproduct free food, but we haven’t been extending the same courtesy to ourselves. Eeks!)
5. Avocados (Our instructor said that food allergies and counting calories are self-imposed limitations to enjoying our food). So apparently Lex just believes she’s going to upchuck when she eats them and therefore she does.

We drive a Prius. We recycle. But we need to be more vigilant about the social, economic, and environmental impact of our eating. We look forward to finding many of our new ingredients at our favorite local supermarket, Sunflower, rocking out while we cook, and sharing many future meals with friends and family.