The Joy Of Cooking Vegan?!?

Menu

Starters
Edamame Hummus with Toasted Nan Bread
Seared Tofu & Shitake Mushroom “sandwiches” with a Teriyaki Sauce & Black Bean Glaze

Entrees
Roasted Tomato and Bell Pepper soup with Filoni bread topped with roasted pine nut and garlic “butter”

We had one of Diana’s cousins and her husband over for dinner the other night. They are both vegan. These means that they do not eat any kind of meat but they also don't eat any dairy products including milk, cheese and butter.

When Diana asked last week, if we could have them over for dinner it seemed like a great opportunity to catch up with them and take on the challenge of cooking a vegan meal. I didn’t think about it a couple days and then I started trying to conceptualize what we could make for them.

Let’s, what kind of meat-less dishes do I make. Stir-fry vegetables, well no, I use chicken broth for that. I could do a curry, well there’s the broth again as well as that dollop of sour cream at the end that really pulls everything together. Salads, I could make a salad with lettuce and napa cabbage, with some garbanzo beans, topped with bacon and uh. . . hard boiled egg. Pasta, that’s easy, just roast some red pepper flacks, add some garlic and shallots, then toss in some nice penne and top with um. . . cheese. Well, I can do a tomato soup, without the milk which will go great with some garlic bread, that I CAN'T MAKE because it uses butter . . . SIGH.

Ok so I’m hitting a lot of road blocks.

I like to think of myself as an opened minded cook. Growing up at home cooking with my mom in the kitchen I learned how to cook mostly Asian orientated dishes, which is why it wasn’t until last month that I cooked a burger for the first time ever (it was great, we mixed in some shitake mushrooms and sweet onions). I can’t think of anything that I cook that is vegan, even when I’m eating celery sticks I dip them in Ranch dressing. So why am I bothering try to hard to figure out a vegan dinner? Well, like many things in my life, it goes back to my parents.

My sister-in-law is vegetarian and she has some vegan friends and when my mom has cooked for them and they have said that it’s the best vegan food they have ever eaten. I’m not competitive with my mom. I don’t have any no need to outdo her but whenever I’ve faced challenges in my life one of the things that keeps me going to knowing that my parents has faced similar ones and come out successful. When I was lonely in college my freshmen year across the country from friends and family I think of how my mom and dad came to America from Taiwan. If they could get through moving to a different country than I could survive college, and if my mom can cook vegan, well so can I.

After talking to my mom, wife and sister-in-law and doing some research I came up with a menu. The idea for the starters I got from my mom. The edamame hummus, is just ground edamame beans, some vegetable stock and instead of Tahini (ground sesame seed pasted used in hummus) I used sesame seed oil. The tofu dish is an argument that tofu can be full of flavor and have a pleasing texture. I stir-fried some chopped shitake mushroms with some olive oil, and finished it with some soy sauce. I put that aside while I made 2 inch by 1 inch squares out of tofu and got the moisture out of the tofu by pressing the pieces between two plates (this helps the tofu brown easier).

With two pieces of tofu like sandwich bread and the shitake as the filling, I seared one side of the of the sandwich in a pan with some canola oil until the tofu had a nice crispy crust, flipped the sandwich over, basted the top of it with a mixture of Teriyaki Sauce, black bean and garlic paste and hot sauce and stuck the pan in the oven to finish.

Roasted tomato soup is a recipe Diana got online. Basically instead of cooking tomatoes in the pot to reduce to get flavor, you roughly chop tomatoes and a bell better, top with olive oil and let the vegetables roast in the oven. While you do this, cook down some onions, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic in a pot. After about 40 minutes of roasting and the onions have caramelized, throw everything in a blender and you got soup.

The Filoni bread topped with pine nuts and roasted garlic “butter” was not so successful. I wanted to do make something like garlic bread so I roasted some pine nuts ground them and mixed them with olive oil and garlic and then put it on bread and toasted it. It tasted kind of like pesto but looked kind of baby spit-up.

Even with the Filoni bread, the meal was a success and our vegan guest really enjoyed the meal. I put a lot of time into making this meal. I went to three different grocery stores (one twice because I forgot my wallet the first time) and probably spent about 3 or 4 hours cooking. Diana didn’t ask me to and in no ways did Diana’s cousin and her husband make me feel obligated to make that kind of effort. This was all my choice.

Sharing a meal with friends and family is an intimate and powerful experience. It feels amazing when you are the one that provides the food that is central to the experience that can make any ordinary night, special.

So mom, I did it. It was one of the more challenging meals I’ve put together and it turned our great. I know that I don’t need to prove that I’m you son, but it’s always nice when the little successes in life confirm that fact.