Veganuary Day 6 and 7

Day 6 – more of them quality leftovers (not the Bolognese – leftovers of that are in the bin). All good.

Day 7 (Saturday) was brilliant. I ate like a King (and ways I wouldn’t have done were I not doing Veganuary), used some great new products and discovered a wonderful vegan chef. So a longish celebratory post for this end-of-first-week day

Lunch was a vegan pesto, the secret of which is…

Unlike some other vegan products where I had high expectations that were dashed on eating, this went the other way. Sounds weird – is great. Cheese is a big problem with this diet. Vegan cheese is (from what I’ve tried so far) not great – so to go vegan you have to put up with not being able to have a cheeseboard, cheese sandwich or cheese on toast. Problem. But cheese of course also gives cheesy rich umaminess to many other things – including, say, pesto. Even more of a problem – but wait. Nutritional yeast replaces it brilliantly – in pesto at least (more experiments incoming).

This really was a very nice lunch. During which I also used another product I was put onto by the brilliant ‘Avant Garde Vegan (https://www.avantgardevegan.com): agave nectar.

This is lovely stuff – very honey-like and perfect in salad dressing as above (perhaps better here than honey as more runny and milder in flavour).

But the real fun started with dinner – which was a great learning experience and then zingy deliciousness, courtesy of the Avant Garde vegan, whose Vietnamese meatballs are a truly stunning dish. Let’s do this one backwards – here is the final plateful:

This is as pleased as I’ve ever been with a plate of food I’ve cooked. Fiery, sweet and sour, lovely texture to the meatballs – crunch on outside, soft inside – packed with flavour. Soothing rice noodles. A wonderful umami hot sauce. Crunchy pak choi. Also very interesting as suggests possibilities for tofu. Use extra firm. Crumble it up. Add in loads of flavour then remake as a burger/meatball/sausage.

Tofu – this is the first time I’ve cooked it in years – what a revelation.

This recipe required many ingredients, some quite hard to get (I had to go to 2 Chinese supermarkets and 3 big supermarkets before I had everything) – but that was part of the fun. The cooking was reasonably involved but also fun.