When I was in elementary school, they served Wakame rice for lunch once in a while, and it was one of my favorites.
(Interestingly, we had bread 80% of the time instead of rice for school lunch in Japan, the country that has always been so proud to be one of the best rice producers. I never understood that…)
A dish that combines two of my favorite things, tofu (soft) and natto.
Plus Japanese mustard, soy sauce, and Shiso leaves.
I placed the tofu and natto along with the sauce and condiments over rice.
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.)
When I was casually looking at pictures, something like this caught my eye.
I did some research and found out that this is a Vietnamese dish called “Banh Trang Lui” (I’m missing commas here and there), and I loved how they look.
This was my first time using rice paper.
I eat them all the time.
I was always intimidated by the delicate look.
Well, I don’t know why I waited so long.
Rice paper is so much easier to handle than I anticipated.
And these were fun to make.
I couldn’t find an English recipe, but I did find a recipe written in Vietnamese with pictures.
I got a rough idea from the pictures, but I basically did my own thing.
Inside are garlic, onion, orange peppers, mushrooms, and tofu, all cooked.
These were served with sweet and spicy garlic chili sauce.
YUM!!
These were so good!!
I could have eaten a dozen more skewers.
By the way this is what the rice paper looks like before soaked in water and softened.
This plate turned out to be so colorful, and I loved it.
My homemade vegan bratwurst was pan-sautéed, along with potatoes.
In case you were wondering, those adorable-looking potatoes were from a can.
I was first introduced to canned potatoes when a fabulous dinner with these potatoes was presented by friends who were professional cooks visiting from France.
They look good, don’t they?
The key is to brown them well to create crust on the surface.
Purple cabbage sauerkraut was cooked with apples and flavored with a little sugar and vinegar.
