Archive for the 'Vegan' Category

Nasu dengaku (grilled eggplant with sweet miso sauce)

Published
by
marc
on May 7, 2008
in Asian, BBQ, Japanese, Vegan, Vegetable and vegetarian
. 13 Comments

Here’s part 2 of last night’s light Japanese dinner. But first I have to tell you about this left over stew I made tonight.

After eating Tacos Al Pastor for 2 nights, I was getting bored with them, but I still had almost half of the roast left. I felt like something a little saucier tonight, so I fried up some garlic and onions, cut the roast into big hunks and added it to the onions with some remaining marinade, cumin, half a can of diced tomatoes and some water. Twenty minutes later I had a delightful “Mexican” stew with big chunks of moist tender meat and an unctuous sauce redolent of chiles and garlic with a mild sweetness coming from the pineapple in the marinade. I served it with some sliced sweet onion, cilantro, limes for squeezing and warm tortillas.

I didn’t take any photos because I was thinking “how good could leftover stew be”, but honestly I enjoyed the stew more than I did the tacos. I don’t think I’d ever make a roast just to make a stew, but the next time I make the taco’s I’ll be sure to make extra to make this stew. Not only did the roast meat add an incredible flavour to the stew, it was also much more moist and tender than a typical braised dish.

Okay back to the eggplant from last night. This is a fairly typical Japanese dish you’d get at an Izakaya (Japanese tapas bar). The eggplant is grilled to bring out its smokey flavour and the miso sauce enrobes the eggplant adding a well balanced sweet earthy flavour of its own. Putting it back under a broiler for a minute caramelizes the miso sauce adding even more depth. It’s great as an appetizer with some beer or as a main with some hot white rice.

This recipe makes way more sauce than you need, but it keeps well in the fridge and can be used on all kinds of veggies or even firm tofu. If you want to put it on meat, make sure you start the meat on the grill first as the sugar in the miso will burn if you put it on too soon.

for sauce
1 C dashi
2 Tbs sugar
2 Tbs mirin
1/2 C miso (I used 1/4 C red miso and 1/4 C white miso)
2 tsp corn starch
1/4 tsp yuzu kosho (yuzu pepper) optional

for grilled eggplant
4 small Japanese eggplants cut in half lengthwise (or 2 Chinese or Italian eggplants)
vegetable oil for brushing
sesame seeds

For the sauce, whisk the dashi, sugar, mirin, miso and corn starch together. Heat over medium heat stirring until the sauce thickens. Take it off the heat and add the yuzu whisking it in to the sauce.

For the eggplant, slice them in half lengthwise and score a criss-cross pattern into them to help retain the sauce. Brush with oil and grill on a BBQ or under a broiler until the tops are a dark brown and the eggplant is cooked. Give the sliced sides a good coating of sauce, sprinkle with sesame seeds then put under a broiler to get a little caramelization (be careful, this sauce will burn quickly).

Serve immediately with some rice.

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Choi sum goma-ae (chinese greens with sesame sauce)

Published
by
admin
on May 6, 2008
in Asian, Japanese, Vegan, Vegetable and vegetarian
. 10 Comments

After the meat bomb the past 2 nights, I was feeling a need for some cleansing today and decided to do a nice light Japanese veggie (well almost) dinner. By the time I got home from work, I was starving, so I cut up some lebanese cucumbers into bite size sticks and wrapped them in ramp kimchi. I figured it’s not really worthy of its own post, but they were tasty little things.

For dinner, I steamed up some choi sum (chinese greens) and made one of my favourite accompaniments for any steamed greens: goma-ae (pronounced go-ma-ah-ay). It’s like a dressing without the oil or vinegar and has a deep earthy flavor from the ground sesame seeds and dashi. I like to brighten it up a little with just a spash of yuzu juice. Not enough to make it tangy, but enough to give it that unmistakably sunny flavor of yuzu. If you can’t find yuzu, you can use a little lemon or lime zest instead.

I also made a nasu dengaku (grilled eggplant with sweet miso paste), but you’ll have to stay tuned for my next post for that.

Totally unrelated, but I got to work this morning, turned on my laptop and saw the news headline “21,000 Killed in Myanmar”, a storm that happened somewhere on the other side of the world (that last I heard had tragically taken 200 lives), suddenly got orders of magnitude more real. If you feel the need to help out in some way, I found a few organizations collecting money for relief efforts.

Global Giving is a cool organization that uses the power of the web to collect small donations from lots of people then figures out the most effective way to get it in the hands of the people doing the relief work (cutting out some of the administrative fat of giving to a bigger organizations where a chunk of your donation doesn’t actually go to the relief efforts). They also give you updates on what your money is doing which I thought is pretty cool.

If you’re weary about giving to a small unknown organization, AmeriCares International has been around for 25 years and actually has volunteers on the ground in Myanmar.

1/2 bunch of choi sum

2 Tbs toasted sesame seeds ground with a mortar and pestle
1 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbs dashi
splash of yuzu juice

Steam or boil the choi sum until bright green (about 1-2 minutes). Rinse under cold water and squeeze out any excess water.

While you could cheat and use instant dashi since you only need a little, I was making something else so I made my dashi with niboshi (dried baby sardines) and shitake mushrooms. If you want to make a veggie dashi, use extra shitake with some onions.

For the sauce, just mix the last 5 ingredients together and pour over the steamed veggies.

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Ramp kimchi & Ramp confit

Published
by
marc
on April 29, 2008
in Spring, Vegan, Vegetable, pickle and vegetarian
. 12 Comments

So this weekend we made another trip north to pick ramps. This time we brought home a grocery bag brimming with these delightful members of the onion family (they’re sweet and have a flavor somewhere between leeks and garlic). The reason for this large harvest is that L had the brilliant idea of making ramp kimchi, and I wanted to make a ramp confit.

Kimchi, for those unfamiliar, is a fiery Korean side-dish that’s pickled in a potent mix of chili powder and garlic. The specifics and vegetables vary by region and season, but Korean families take pride in the number of urns of kimchi they prepare per year. Prior to winter, families would gather to pickle the last of fall’s vegetables to last them through the cold months until spring.

Confit on the other hand traces its roots to France before refrigeration where meats like duck and goose were cooked in their own fat to preserve them. The word is derived from the verb “confire” which quite literally means “to preserve” and can refer to fruits or vegetables as well as meat.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the common thread here is 2 ways to preserve these perishable gems so they last more than a few days. I figured it would be fun to employ methods coming from 2 continents, and the results were fantastic!

While ramps are a vegetable that aren’t available in Korea, they work perfectly for kimchi because of their strong (though not overpowering) garlic flavor. The long leaves are well suited for wrapping around a slice of steamed pork, or a bit of rice and the flavors just burst with spicy goodness in your mouth.

The confit on the other hand roasts the ramps in an ample amount of olive oil, rounding out the flavor and intensifying the sweetness. The olive oil it’s cooked in is redolent with ramp’s leeky garlicy aroma and is marvelous on pizza dough or bread.
Continue for full recipe

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Chilled cucumber with sesame miso broth over rice (Hiyashijiru)

Published
by
marc
on April 27, 2008
in Japanese, Salad, Summer, Vegan, Vegetable, breakfast and vegetarian
. 12 Comments

The summers of my youth were often spent on the southern island of Kyushu Japan visiting my maternal grandparents. They live in what used to be a small, rural fishing/farming village about 2 hours from the nearest small airport (which for an island about the size of South Carolina is a long way).

For those of you that haven’t been to Asia in the summer, it’s hot and humid. The kind of “hot and humid” where you step outside and are met by a curtain of sticky, sweat-inducing heat that makes you want to turn right around to go take a shower. The only tolerable times of the day are sunrise and sunset, but due to the mosquitoes that come out at dusk, you really only want to be out at dawn.

Dawn was one of my favourite times in Japan, not just because of the temperatures, but because this was the time my ojiichan (grandpa) would take me fishing off a stone outcropping, and the time that my o-obaachan (great-grandmother) would take me out into the fields to pick cucumbers, daikon, shiso, and other bounties of the summer.

As the day heated up, we’d go back to the shelter of home for breakfast. Here is a recipe for one of my favorite breakfasts from those summers in Japan. Hiyashi-jiru (lit. chilled broth) is a regional specialty of the Miyazaki region of eastern Kyushu. The chilled crunchy cucumbers with the cold miso sesame broth are poured over hot rice which makes for a delightful appetite enhancing breakfast that’s both nutritious and filling.

While traditionally this is made with a fish based dashi, this can easily be made vegetarian by using a kombu (kelp) and shiitake (mushroom) based dashi. If you can’t find fresh Japanese or Lebanese cucumbers where you live, you can substitute a small hothouse cucumber with seeds removed, or other thin-skinned variety of cucumber. The shichimi is entirely optional, but the shiso really does add something if you’re able to find it (try Japanese markets or local sushi restaurants).
Continue for full recipe

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Chickpeas with spring greens (vegan)

Published
by
marc
on April 23, 2008
in Soups & Stews, Spring, Vegan, Vegetable and vegetarian
. 4 Comments

If I were ever to become a vegetarian, I’d have to move to the south of India. In an area that’s primarily vegetarian, the people have adapted the use of spices and aromatics to infuse even the most humble vegetables with loads of umami.

This is something I came up with last night based on a 5 year old memory of a dish I had at a Keralan restaurant once. If you’re looking for an authentic Chana Masala, you’ll have to look elsewhere. However if you want something light and fresh while savory and deeply satisfying, this is your dish. On one side, ingredients like the chickpeas, onions and spices add some savory heft to it, while the curry leaves, spring greens and lemon juice pull it back in the other direction.

Simple to cook and easy to clean up, the only problem you’ll have making this is that you’ll want to eat all of it!

2 tsp oil
10 curry leaves chopped
1 Tbs ginger minced
1 large clove of garlic minced
1 serrano or jalepeno pepper minced
1/4 onion diced
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp ground coriander seed
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp turmeric
14 oz can whole tomatoes in juice
15 oz can of chickpeas drained and rinsed
2 medium swiss chard leaves roughly chopped
5-6 ramps roughly chopped

Lemon wedges for serving

Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat until very hot. Add the curry leaves and ginger, frying until fragrant. Add the garlic, peppers, onions and spices and saute until the onions are tender.

Add the tomatoes by crushing them through your fingers along with the juice. If this is too messy for you, you can chop them, but i like the chunky texture of hand crushed tomatoes. Add the chickpeas then turn down the heat to simmer for about 15-20 minutes.

When most of the liquid is gone and what remains creates a nice thick sauce, add the chopped swiss chard, cover and cook for a few minutes until the chard is bright green and wilted. Add the ramps and cook for another minute or two.

Serve immediately with lemon wedges for squishing and some quinoa or Chapatis.

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