You are here: Home / Archives for recipes

Vegan Ramen at Home

by // Leave a Comment

#vegan ramen for dinner. Homemade bc it's so hard to get vegan ramen anywhere.

It’s difficult to find good vegan ramen in LA.  It’s easy to find vegetarian ramen, but usually since the noodles have egg in them, it’s hard to find vegan one. There’s Shojin, which has vegan ramen, but it’s expensive for what it is and not that delicious given the price.

Because of this, I made vegan ramen the other night. I received a lot of requests for a recipe after posting a picture of it.  As you know, I’m not so good about measuring things or writing down recipes, but here’s some hand-wavey instructions.  The tofu-like thing was store-bought. I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent in American super markets, but it’s called tofu bao in Chinese super markets and it’s basically tofu skin folded into layers and then deep fried so that the outer layer is nice and crispy.  You can sub in fried tofu, baked tofu, or inari.

Broth:

  1. Cut the whites of 3-4 scallions into 2 inch pieces.
  2. Cut the stems off 6-7 fresh shiitake mushrooms. (save caps for later)
  3. Cut up a daikon radish into 1 inch rounds.
  4. Heat up a soup pot with a few glugs of neutral oil. I used canola. When the oil is hot, throw in the scallion whites and shiitake mushrooms and sautee until both are browned.
  5. Add in the daikon radish, 5 cups of water, a pieces of kombu, and bring to a boil.
  6. As soon as the water is boiled, take out the kombu (save for later), cover, lower to a simmer, and boil for 30 minutes or however long it takes you to get the other ingredients ready.
  7. When the broth is ready to be ladled over the noodle, it’s time to season. Turn off the heat.
  8. Add in 1 tablespoon white miso paste (dilute this in a few tablespoons of hot water to make it easy to stir)
  9. A few glugs of high quality soy sauce
  10. A glug of mirin
  11. Salt to taste

Soy glazed shiitake mushrooms:

  1. Slice the saved caps of the mushrooms into thin, quarter-inch slices.
  2. Heat a glug of oil in a pan and when the oil is hot, throw in the mushrooms.
  3. Leave the mushrooms on the pan until browned on one side, and then toss to the other side. You want to get these mushrooms pretty dry and brown. It takes about 10 minutes.
  4. While the mushrooms are cooking, mix 1 teaspoons soy sauce and 1/2 teaspoon mirin.
  5. When the mushrooms are done, turn off the heat but leave the mushrooms in the hot pan. Push them together into a heap and slowly drizzle the soy sauce mirin mixture on, stirring slightly to evenly distribute.
  6. Set aside for noodle topping

Kombu strip topping:

  1. Take the saved kombu and slice it into thin strips.
  2. Toss with a dash of soy sauce, a glug of toasted sesame oil, and a dash of rice vinegar.
  3. Set aside for noodle topping

To assemble:

  1. Cook the noodle in boiling water according to package instructions.
  2. Drain the noodles and put in a large noodle bowl.
  3. Add in the fried tofu skin
  4. Ladle the broth over the fried tofu skin to warm it
  5. Top with the shiitake mushrooms, kombu strips, and sliced scallion greens

 

Kale and crispy quinoa salad with apricots

by // Leave a Comment

Crispy quinoa salad with kale and apricots was a success. #vegan #vscocam

People are often impressed (or pretend to be impressed) when they see our garden. They think it’s because we are serious about hyper-local organic vegetables but the real reason I keep a garden is because I’m often too lazy to go to the supermarket and like the convenience of foraging for veggies in the backyard when I need to cook dinner.

Our apricot tree is just starting to bloom.  In the usual race to pick ripe apricots before the birds and squirrels get to them, I wanted a way to use not quite perfect apricots as well as a way to use the bountiful kale that’s in the garden.  I had some leftover cooked quinoa in the fridge I also wanted to use up.

As with all my dishes, I free-styled this one, so there’s not so much a precise recipe — more like a suggestion of how to throw things together.

Ingredients:

  • lacinato kale
  • 4-5 ripe but not too soft apricots
  • 1.5 cup cooked quinoa
  • almonds
  • a few sprigs holy basil
  • 1 shallot
  • orange marmelade
  • sherry vinegar
  • olive oil
  • aleppo pepper
  • ground cumin
  • ground ginger
  • salt and pepper

Instructions:

De-stem the kale, wash, and thoroughly dry. I use a salad spinner for this, but swinging it around in some kitchen towels also works.  Chop the kale roughly so the pieces are smaller than a dime. Put the kale in a large salad bowl and throw in a pinch of salt and a couple glugs of olive oil.  Now use your hands and massage the kale, making sure to distribute the oil and salt.  Don’t be afraid to squeeze the kale. After a minute of massage, set it aside. The kale will tenderize while you prepare the other ingredients.

Put a tablespoon of oil on a skillet and spread about half the amount of cooked quinoa out on the bottom of the skillet.  Sprinkle on some aleppo pepper. The quinoa should be in one layer.  The heat on the pan should be high enough that there’s a slight sizzling sound.  Keep an eye on the quinoa and toss and re-spread every couple of minutes to prevent burning.  In the meantime, in another pan, toast the almonds, tossing every few minutes to prevent burning.

Remove the pits from the apricot and chop roughly to the size of M&M’s.  Put the apricots in the bowl with the kale.

Now for the dressing. Get out a glass jar with lid to mix the salad dressing in.  Mince the shallots and put in the jar. Top with a few tablespoons of oil and 1/3 as much vinegar.  Throw in a pinch of salt and a pepper.  Put in half a teaspoon of orange marmalade, or more if you like your salad sweeter.  Put in a small pinch of cumin and a small pinch of ground ginger. Cap the jar and give it a good couple of shakes to mix everything up.

Finely chop the holy basil.

When the quinoa is toasted (took me 10 mins) the almonds should be done too. Chop up the almonds and add them to the kale.  Add the rest of the (untoasted) quinoa to the kale, and then add everything else (toasted quinoa, holy basil, toasted almonds) to the bowl. Top with the salad dressing and mix, mix, mix.  Taste the salad and add more salt if needed.  Serve and eat immediately.

I thought I had made enough to eat the leftovers for lunch tomorrow, which would also give me a chance to see how well this salad kept, but we ended up eating everything for dinner, so I have no idea if the quinoa would stay crispy or not, sorry.

Vegan/Vegetarian Version of Lemonade’s Chicken Basque

by // Leave a Comment

vegan_basque_stew
I had Lemonade’s chicken basque for the first time a few weeks ago and thought it was tasty.  My fears of dry chunks of chicken were blown away by how tender and flavorful the stew was.  Putting olives in a stew? Brilliant!  Of course, as soon as I downed the bowl, I thought, “Hey, I bet I can make a pretty decent vegan rendition of this.”

I went online and looked up the recipe for the original dish and knocked out all of the non-vegetarian ingredients. I wanted something to take the place of the chunks of chicken. Cauliflower was out because while I love the brassica, I was afraid the stew would taste like sulfur. Faux meat was out because I don’t really like using it if I can avoid it. Tofu was out because I couldn’t picture it in the stew. Jackfruit? Maybe.

My ingredient list ended up being (in case you can’t read my handwriting):

  • green olives
  • purple olives
  • chickpeas (for protein)
  • fresh thyme
  • 4 roma tomatoes
  • flat leaf parsley
  • artichoke hearts (I used canned)
  • green jackfruit (Optional! comes in cans from the Asian market)
  • onion
  • smoked paprika
  • red bell pepper
  • a quarter of a preserved lemon
  • a dab of tomato paste
  • fancy olive oil to finish
  • vegetable stock
  • 2 cloves garlic

Dice the onion and bell pepper and sautee it in the pan for a few minutes. When they’re soft, add in a dab of tomato paste, a healthy sprinkle of smoked paprika and stir. You want the paste to take on some color.  Add in a large sprig of thyme. I leave the leaves on the sprig so it’s easy to fish out whole later.  Seed and chop the tomatoes and put them in the pot. Generously salt and give it a stir. While all that is cooking, pit and roughly chop the olives. You don’t want to chop the olives up too much. I’d leave it so that the olives are only quartered.  Add those and them pour in 1 part stock and 1 part water.

While the stock is coming to a boil, rinse the artichoke and jackfruit pieces. Halve the hearts and hand shred the jackfruit pieces. Add them to the pot.  Rinse the canned chickpeas and add that into the stock too.  At this point, cover the pot and let it simmer on low for an hour. Conversely, you can do I what I did and cook it all in the pressure cooker under low pressure for 10 minutes.

In the meantime, chop up a bunch of parsley and the quarter of the preserved lemon.  I didn’t add the lemon into the stock because I wanted it to still taste fresh and I find that cooking preserved lemon makes it a little bitter.  When the soup is done, turn off the heat. Stir in the in the parsley and lemon and a good glug of the olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste.

I served this over plain cooked bulgur wheat, but I imagine it’d be good over any type of nutty starch — farro, brown rice, quinoa even.

In hindsight, I could have left the jackfruit out. I wanted something that had the texture of shredded chicken, but the jackfruit ended up having the same texture as the artichoke hearts.  I could have just left it out and used chickpeas for protein, but I didn’t want the soup to be too ‘beany’ in texture.