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.

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.

Vegan Replica Hack: Gyros

One of the few meaty things I occasionally miss as a vegetarian is gyros (the correct Greek pronunciation sounds like “yee-rohs”, not “gee-rohs” or “jai-rohs”). The other big one is corned beef sandwiches, but that has been mitigated to a large extent since I discovered Montreal Smoked Wheat.

Satisfactory vegetarian gyros have been somewhat more elusive, however. For awhile, Yves Veggie Cuisine made a souvlaki-style skewered fake meat, and it made for passable gyros, but it was difficult to find consistently in the stores, and I don’t think they make it at all anymore. And a couple of years ago Harvey’s had a pita sandwich on their menu that they made with chicken or with vegetarian burger patties in them, and the ranch dressing they used as a sauce in those strongly evoked ‘gyros’ for me. But the Veggie Ranch Pita has gone the way of the dodo as well, sadly.

Then in the most recent Food & Drink magazine from the LCBO, there was a recipe for gyros ‘burgers’ that got me thinking: if I took the seasonings from the burger recipe, and added them to the recipe for seitan that I’ve been using, I might be able to make gyros for myself at home!

I’ve tried a number of seitan recipes over the years, but everything I tried was either insanely labour-intensive (involving literally hours of kneading dough under water) or resulted in an unappetizing tough texture. Then I tried the seitan recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz in Vegan With A Vengeance, and it was an unqualified success; I haven’t looked back since.

So I adapted Isa’s seitan recipe with the spices from the LCBO recipe, and voila: vegan gyros “meat” was born. My final product was actually vegetarian rather than vegan because I was feeling lazy and cheap, and opted to buy a container of the ready-made President’s Choice Tzatziki for $2.99 rather than spend $6 on vegan sour cream or yogurt and make my own.

Seitan Gyros

Ingredients

Seitan:

• 2c gluten flour*
• ¼c nutritional yeast flakes*
• 2T flour
• 1c cold water
• ½c soy sauce
• 1T tomato paste
• 1T olive oil
• 2t ground cumin
• 1T dried parsley
• 2t dried oregano
• 2T lemon juice
• 2t ground pepper
• 3 veggie bouillon cubes

Sandwich ingredients:

• 4 greek-style (pocketless) pitas
• 1 tomato, diced or sliced
• ½ small onion, diced or sliced
• tzatziki sauce (store-bought or homemade)

Directions

• Mix the gluten, yeast, and flour together in a large bowl. In a measuring cup, whisk together the water, soy sauce, tomato paste, oil, spices, and lemon juice. Add to the dry ingredients, and stir with a wooden spoon until everything is incorporated into a stiff dough.
• Knead the dough for about 5 minutes until it is spongy and elastic. Then allow it to rest for about 10 minutes while you prepare the broth.
• Fill a large soup pot about ½ full of cold water and add the bouillon cubes.
• Roll the dough out into a log, and cut it into about 6 equal pieces. Place the pieces into the cold water, and bring to the boil. As soon as a boil is reached, turn the heat to low and keep the liquid at a low simmer - if you allow it to boil too much it will get a funny texture on the outside. Simmer, partly covered, for an hour, turning the pieces occasionally.
• Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Once the seitan is cool enough to handle, remove 3 of the pieces from the broth, place in a sealable container, and add enough of the cooking liquid to cover; freeze this portion for future gyros. Cut the other 3 pieces into strips, and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Sprinkle with a little extra pepper if desired.
• Bake at 350F for about 15 minutes, turning once, to lightly brown the strips.
• While the strips are baking, lightly steam the pitas by sprinkling them with a very small amount of water and microwaving them, covered, for about 2 minutes.
• When the strips are out of the oven, place them in a microwave-safe dish, add a sprinkle of water, cover, and microwave for about 2 minutes to steam. This extra step really improves the texture of the seitan to make it juicy like gyros.
• To serve, spread a generous layer of tzatziki on a pita, add the seitan strips, some onion, and tomato. Nom nom nom.

I didn’t think to take a picture of them at the time, sadly, but next time I make them (with the 3 pieces of seitan in my freezer!) I’ll photograph them and add it here!

* Both of these ingredients can be found at health food stores or bulk food stores.