Sometimes things do not work out well with meticulous planning, and other times things go perfectly well with little preparation.
This dish is a good example of the latter.
The idea came to me last night when I realized that I might have all the right ingredients to make eggs benedict.
Well, I just found a couple of sourdough English muffins and a half log of seitan meat in the back of the freezer, and I knew I still had homemade mayo (I could use as the base to make “Hollandaise sauce.”).
So all I needed was soft tofu, which I got on our way back home from a drive to a park last night.
I used an ice cream scooper to gently scoop up silken tofu.
It resembles a poached egg, doesn’t it?
Toasted homemade sourdough English muffin, fried Canadian “bacon” (homemade seitan), silken tofu, and vegan Hollandaise sauce (homemade vegan mayo, lemon juice, turmeric, salt, sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, nutritional yeast), and a sprinkle of Hungarian paprika.
The Eggs benedict was served with sautéed asparagus.
We found beautiful asparagus at the local farmers market.
It was an easy choice, as asparagus was pretty much the only vegetable (other than herbs) sold at the market at this time.
All the vendors were selling asparagus (for the same price), and it was hard to decide from whom we should buy.
But I think we picked the right one.
The ones we got looked AND tasted great.
I also added salad.
Using olive salad (from a jar) is one of my favorite ways to dress my salad.
It works because it has the saltiness and the oil that you want, AND you can add additional veggie chunks.
I was super happy with the result, but apparently this dish impressed my hubby as well.
He said it was one of the top five breakfast all time (including the period of time when he was not on the plant-based diet)!
(And he did all the dishes and kitchen clean-up while I was taking pictures. He really is the best.)
It’s not everywhere, but the Asian store I typically get my rice from has a shortage of Asian white rice.
I can get white rice from the other Asian store I go to (for other things), but I have some weird suspicion that their rice may be old (it’s really hard to know how old or fresh rice is because the number they print on the bags does not seem to make any sense to me).
But anyway, because of this and the recent discovery that my husband really likes wild rice, I decided to cook wild rice more often.
Unfortunately the picture doesn’t do it justice.
But this risotto (I did not use the cooking method of risotto, but the term probably describes this dish the best) was delicious!
Intense mushroom flavor, overall creamy texture, the wild rice texture accent, and the tanginess from the homemade vegan feta cheese came together so nicely.
It’s a comfort food but not heavy.
After finishing the “photo shoot,” I realized that the yellow bowl made the risotto look better.
I was in a mood for some kind of pancake for breakfast, but since it’s still hard to find flour, I wanted to use something other than flour to make my pancakes.
So I decided to go with cornmeal.
When I was doing some research, I found something called cornmeal griddle cakes, which I learned are a popular southern dish.
So I decided to try them.
I actually did not follow any recipes I found, because some of them used flour in addition to cornmeal.
And the ones that do not use flour still needed to be modified quite a bit to be created as a plant-based dish.
So here are the ingredients I used: 1 cup cornmeal, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt, 1 tablespoon flax meal, garbanzo flour, sugar, soy milk.
The cakes turned out delicious!
I absolutely loved them.
They are not soft and smooth like the regular pancakes, but you can really enjoy the taste and the texture of the cornmeal.
They are more rustic, both the look and the taste.
I drenched the sliced vegan meat in my homemade BBQ sauce.
