Lentil soup, Okazu sauce and dim sum
Hello, and welcome to new subscribers! I hope everyone has been eating well this week.
The letters section
Adrienne replied to last week's roasted cauliflower suggestion with this meal idea:
I also love to roast cauliflower with golden beets and drizzle with balsamic vinegar and serve on quinoa or in a wrap with cashew sour cream and pickled red onions. Sooooo good!
I had ambitions of making this but I didn't get the ingredients together in time so instead I quick-pickled some red pearl onions that had been in my fridge forever and tossed them together with leftover pinto beans, a little cheese, some pepitas and a lime vinaigrette. Also good.
The kale salad
My go-to, quick-to-make kale salad is just a drizzle each of olive oil, lemon juice and maple syrup, all massaged in with your hands. IMO it's worth slicing the kale into strips instead of just tearing it.
But if you have a little extra time on your hands, I really enjoyed this Winter Crunch Salad from Bon Appétit. It is not sweet at all, which is a change from a lot of kale salads.
The lentil soup
This Red Lentil Soup with Lemon from the New York Times (paywall) is a standby for me. One thing I like about it is that you blend only half the soup, so you get the creaminess of the purée with some texture from the unblended ingredients.
But I had sweet potatoes and carrots piling up in the fridge, so I decided to make this Green Kitchen Stories red lentil soup recipe instead. Except I didn't make the topping, and I wasn't super enthused about using dried thyme, so I stirred in some Curry Okazu (see below) instead, and I only blended half the soup, and then I added a squeeze of lime. So I guess it's not really the same recipe anymore?
The endorsement
I first discovered Abokichi when they had a little lunch spot up at Dupont and Spadina. It's not there anymore, but they still make some Japanese-inspired products, including Okazu, a condiment made with miso, sesame oil and spice.
The Chili Miso is my favourite – it's the easiest way I know to turn a bunch of rice and tofu and vegetables into an actual dish. But the Curry version is good too.
They have a lot of nice-looking recipes on their site as well, like the Black Bean, Corn and Edamame Quesadillas pictured above.
The off-topic endorsement
I really like this lip balm, made in small-town Ontario and packaged in a paper tube.
The to-make list in honour of Valentine's Day
Chocolate is a plant food. 🍫 And I'm sure you could make these with coconut oil instead of butter, though replacing the eggs might be tough.
And if chocolate isn't your thing, Trish says that this Pineapple Sheet Cake is "the best and easiest cake ever".
The articles to read
“If a culture's intact,” another Greenlandic researcher told me, “food isn't politicized. But if a culture's been fully torn apart, it really is.”
From GQ via Ann Friedman, a food-focused look at how climate change is changing Greenland, with relevant-to-Canada info on the fact that while a plant-heavy diet is the most sustainable choice for most of us, it doesn't make sense for everyone.
The cheese for the Simplicity Burger could have been a simple vegan cheese: it might not have tasted of much, but it would have melted and provided a familiar texture. Instead, Rankin decided to extract the liquid from vegan cheese and replace it with fermented tomato water, fried onion oil and pickle juice. The result is quite mind-bending: it’s cheese that tastes not of cheese, but faintly of a cheeseburger.
I've added several restaurants in London to my to-visit list in Google Maps after reading this Guardian piece on the plant-based meat trend in the UK. The veggie burgers at Simplicity Burger – they're made with real-food ingredients – sound amazing.
The brunch date
I wanted to use this space this week to support Asialicious, a food festival running from February 14 to 28 to promote Asian restaurants in the GTA in the wake of the illogical coronavirus-related avoidance (and worse) they've been facing. But, I'm not familiar with any of the restaurants on the site right now (probably a lot of them are in Markham) and the photos are veeeerrry meat-heavy.
So instead I'll give a shout-out to Rol San in Chinatown and Kwan at Yonge and St. Clair, my two go-tos for veggie-friendly dim sum in Toronto.
At Rol San, we always order the salt and pepper tofu and a plate of garlic-ginger gai lan off the main menu; for dim sum, I love the steamed veggie dumplings, the bean curd rolls and the sesame balls.
At Kwan, get the deep-fried taro rolls (they're not commonly found as a veg option), the steamed mushroom dumplings (don't @ me if you're not into truffle oil) and the steamed vegetable dumplings. What can I say, I love a good dumpling. 🥟
The footer
Eat More Plants is a weekly newsletter by Kat Tancock, sharing recipes and inspiration for vegetarian and vegan dishes, restaurants, products and more. Please reply with your own tips so I can include them in a future issue, and send this newsletter to your friends.
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