Vegan Replica Hack: Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Soup

I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since anything was posted here!  We’re never going to get a book deal or TV show on the Food Network at this rate!

My kid is sick today, and I just made him one of his favourite lunches – 'tofu noodle soup’ - perfect for a sick kid, but great for any time you want a warm, quick, easy lunch.  L claims he doesn’t like soup, but he makes an exception for this one.  In fact, when I told him today that’s what I was making, he said “awesome, I love that soup!”  L is not one to exclaim about his food, so that is high, high praise.

I started making this soup about a year ago one day when I had a craving for Lipton’s Chicken Noodle soup – you know, the one that comes in the little pouch that you empty into some boiling water and simmer for 5 minutes?  I think it’s pretty much the first thing I ever ‘cooked’ on my own (if you can call that cooking).  This version is just as easy, and as long as you always have some tofu in the fridge, it’s simple to have all the ingredients on hand to whip this up any time.

Not-Lipton’s Not-Chicken Noodle Soup in a Flash

Ingredients:

• 5c water
• 2 veggie ‘chicken’-flavoured bouillon cubes (or plain veggie, if you can’t find a vegan chicken cube)
• 1/2c xtra firm tofu, cut into 1/2cm cubes
• 1/2c extra thin noodles (or more, if you like your soup extra noodly, which I do)

Directions:

• Bring the water to a boil over high heat.
• Add the remaining ingredients, return to the boil, then turn the heat down to low and simmer for about 5m, until the noodles are soft.

That’s it!  Serve to your sick kid (with a couple of ice cubes in it to cool it down quickly).  Yum.

Vegan Replica Hack: Pad Thai

One of the major deficiencies of the city where I live is a relative dearth of Thai and Vietnamese cuisine. We do have a couple of places, but one of them is somewhat overpriced and I find the food mediocre, and the other one doesn’t have much veggie stuff on the menu at all. For the most part, I prefer to make my own Thai and Vietnamese food at home and go out for those cuisines when I’m visiting other cities.

Pad thai is the quintessential Thai dish that most people are familiar with in North America. Typically it has at least 2 ingredients in it that are not vegetarian, and an additional 1 unsuitable for vegans: meat (often shrimp or chicken), fish sauce, and eggs.

I’ve come across tons of recipes for vegetarian or vegan pad thai, but they’ve usually had a list of ingredients as long as my arm, a number of which are tough to find in this city. And even in those few instances where I was motivated to try to make them, I found the results disappointing.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who is a long-time vegan brought his version of pad thai for dinner one night, and not only was it incredibly tasty (I stuffed myself at dinner, and ate leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day), the ingredients are simple and it goes together quickly. Said friend and said recipe later went on to inspire the famous maxim “you can break her heart, but you can’t take back your pad thai recipe” – you may have heard all the hip kids in the neighbourhood saying that lately. No? Well I’m sure you will hear it in regular parlance soon enough, it’s catching on around the globe.

Heartbreakingly Simple and Delicious Vegan Pad Thai

Ingredients

• 6oz package rice noodles (flat, linguini style)
• 1/3c ketchup
• 1/2c soy sauce
• 1/4c lime juice
• 3T fresh ginger, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3T canola oil
• 1/2 - 1t red pepper flakes (to taste)
• 375g extra-firm tofu, crumbled
• 2c carrots, grated
• 28oz can bean sprouts, drained and rinsed
• 6 green onions, sliced
• 2/3c chopped peanuts
• Sriracha sauce or other hot sauce

Instructions

• Cook the noodles according to package instructions. Drain and reserve.
• Make the sauce by whisking together the ketchup, soy sauce, and lime juice.
• In a large pot or saute pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the ginger, garlic, and red pepper flakes and saute for 2-3 minutes. Then add the crumbled tofu and fry for an additional 3 minutes. Add the carrots and about half of the sauce mixture, and stir to combine well. Cover and let cook for about 5 minutes, until the carrots are softened.
• If the reserved noodles are stuck together a bit, rinse them well with hot water. Add the noodles to the pot along with the bean sprouts, green onions, peanuts, and remaining sauce. Toss to mix thoroughly.
• Serve with Sriracha sauce on the side so that each person can adjust the spiciness to their own taste.

This reheats beautifully in the microwave, and makes a terrific contribution to a potluck, provided none of the other guests are allergic to peanuts! You can have the recipe and I promise to do my best to *not* break your heart. That’s just the kind of gal I am.

Gear I love – The Star Peeler

Okay, you probably already know about this thing but if not, prepare to see something unexpectedly awesome.  The Star Peeler is (after a good chef’s knife) possibly the kitchen tool that saves me the most time.  But first, to the heart of the problem… Vegetables, especially tasty gourds and roots often have some kind of unpleasant outer covering that keeps the veggie innards tasty by being a pain in the ass to any creature looking to eat said vegetable. The Star Peeler excels at solving that problem but is also so much more.

So… here it is… check out the video of the peeler being sold in NYC by its most famous (and now deceased) salesperson:

The thing is awesome in so many ways.  You really can go as fast as the guy’s demo illustrates with almost no practice (and I’ve flayed a finger or two in an over-zealous peeling rage).

The Veggie Hacks (for now)

Although watching the demo video will give you a couple of awesome hacks (the carrot “starring” and slicing is cool to watch), vegetarians can apply it to so much more, such as:

• ULTRA-Thin Tofu – Take a block of EXTRA FIRM tofu squeeze out all the fluid that you can (his works poorly on anything less firm than “extra firm” because of the thickness you’re working with here).  Lay the block of tofu so that the long and narrow side is down on a chopping board.  “Peel” the tofu brick into strips.  These pick up marinade in ways that hand-cut tofu cannot because there’s almost no thickness.  Marinades permeate the whole piece (not just the outside).  They also hold up to frying and baking (see the “Dreaded Tofu Rice Bowl” recipe to be posted shortly). (Anybody else thinking of using this technique in connection with the Vegan Gyros posted earlier?)
• Cucumber “Wrappers” – Take an English-style cucumber and then slice the whole length of the cucumber with the peeler.  The first few strips are pretty much all skin but after a few strips, you get a really nice thin cucumber wrapper that can be rolled around rice or other grain and easily pinned with a toothpick I’ve seen these used as a wrapper in “vegan sushi”.
• Butternut Squash Peeling – Not really a trick but a life-saver nonetheless.  Butternut squash is sometimes a pain to cook with because (a) when it’s diced by hand the curvy shape leads to a ton of wasted tasty squash; (b) it takes forever to prepare.  Just peel the whole thing with the star peeler first and then you get nearly 0% waste when you cook with it.

Anyway, you can buy these things all over the place.  Get one and never look back.

Vegan Replica Hack: Bread & Roses Macaroons

Friends of mine live in Bloor West Village in Toronto, and I love to go and visit them, not only for their excellent company, but also because there are a lot of shops and restaurants in their neighbourhood that I love to go to. These include a nifty paper shop, a place to get a great variety of vegetarian burgers (try the “Big Apple Deli”, which has apples, treacle, and coleslaw; sounds completely bizarre, but it’s very good), my favourite place to get a smoothie (my choice: pomegranate passion), and Bread & Roses, a bakery-cafe-coffee shop.

Bread & Roses has a small patio on Bloor Street, which can make for some great people-watching in the summer, and a cozy interior that’s a nice place to bring a book and curl up with a book, a coffee, and a snack for a little while. Among the many nice things on offer, the coconut macaroons are a standout: chewy, caramelized exterior, tender moist interior, and dipped in bittersweet chocolate.

During my most recent visit I ate more than a few of them, and decided to see if I could make a satisfactory vegan version at home. After some research on the internets, I decided to go with an approach involving sweetened condensed milk (SCM), which obviously presents a bit of a problem if I wanted to make them vegan; thus I did some experimenting and came up with the recipe for a non-dairy SCM that I posted the other day.

I’ve been using that vegan SCM to play around at macaroons, and I’m quite pleased with how they’ve come out. The recipe is ridiculously fast and easy – you can get a batch of these in the oven in under 10 minutes.

Vegan Coconut Macaroons

Ingredients

• 1c sweetened condensed un-milk
• 1/4c flour
• 2&1/2c sweetened coconut (works best with the finely shredded “macaroon” style, but even the long shreds will work fine)
• 3T soy milk
• 1/2c vegan chocolate chips

Instructions

• Combine the sweetened condensed un-milk, flour, and coconut in a bowl and mix well. The resulting dough should be fairly sticky, but hold its shape pretty well when formed into a ball. Add more coconut to get a stiffer dough if necessary, or more milk if it’s not sticky enough.
• Form into rough balls the size of a golf ball, and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
• Bake in a 350F oven for about 15 or 20 minutes, until the bottoms are crisp and dark golden-brown, and the tops are golden-brown.
• Cool on the pan for about 5 minutes, and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
• Heat the soy milk in a bowl in the microwave for about 30s, until it begins to boil. Stir in the chocolate chips and whisk until they are melted and very smooth. Adjust the thickness by adding more soy milk or more chocolate chips to get a consistency that is just thin enough to pour nicely off a spoon.
• Dip the tops of the macaroons into the chocolate, and return to the wire rack to allow the chocolate to harden.

I seriously need to get a new camera. These photos taken with my phone are entirely unsatisfactory.

Quick “Poutine”

Often when I want something “bad for me” when preparation time for dinner is short, I suggest this Quick “Poutine”.  It’s not completely authentic but it’s ridiculously fast and efficient to prepare.  I’m a big fan of meals where parts can be prepared in parallel and generate minimal dishes. This one is no exception.  It takes about 20 minutes to cook and uses off-the-shelf materials (that keep for a long time).

Ingredients

• About 350g Mozzarella Cheese (adjust amount of cheese to taste)
• 1 package of Frozen French Fries (I prefer the low-fat McCain fries but any of the thicker frozen fries that you bake in the oven will do).
• 1 packet of “just-add-water-and-boil” mushroom gravy (or sometimes specialty “Poutine” gravy is available which is vegetarian too).

Instructions

• Start the french fries first as per the cooking directions.  They will take between 15 and 20 minutes in a standard oven.
• While the fries are cooking, combine the gravy and prepare it according to the package.  This will usually take about 5 minutes.
• While the fries and the gravy are cooking, shred ALL of the mozzarella cheese.  I use a food processor to shred it into very fine bits.  The finer you shred it the more it melts.
• When the gravy is done, remove from heat and let thicken for 2-3 minutes.
• When the fries are done, combine in the following layers (repeating until you’re out of materials usually once or twice)
  • Fries
  • Cheese
  • Little bit of Gravy

This recipe will serve 2-4 people and clean-up should be minimal (all dishwasher-friendly!).