Laptop Lunches #299

Steamed broccoli, vegan "honey" mustard sauce, a new experiment I tried with frying tofu "chicken" nuggets, the eggy potato salad from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Super Fun Times Vegan Holiday Cookbook, and strawberries.

This is one of those meals that would have made me go all teary-eyed with relief when I first went vegan (that happened more than once when I found that I hadn't truly given up everything I ever knew and loved). It was so good. When I fried the tofu and tasted it I wished I had someone I could ask to eat it with me right then, fresh from the fryer, with the smell lingering in the air. I will settle for sharing it with my virtual audience. (If you were ever to move next door to me, though, I would totally be running over to your place to feed you the most successful of my experiments.)

It all started when I read a recipe for gluten free vegan fried chicken over at Mary's Test Kitchen. I didn't want to buy gluten free flour just yet, or the crisped rice cereal, because I'd be unlikely to use it in other things, but I was intrigued by the twice-frozen tofu method, so I just used that, and marinating the twice-frozen tofu in double-strength chicken-style veggie broth, with my usual method for frying tofu chicken nuggets using a Bisquick batter. (It's a version of this breading at Southern Kissed, but I have tweaked it for my purposes. Also be warned: That blog post has some disturbing images of abused chickens in it.)

Twice-freezing the medium tofu definitely gave it a much meatier texture than the pressed firm tofu I'm more experienced using. It also made it a sponge for flavors (it absorbed pretty well all of the double-strength broth I made), so I was glad I didn't try this with straight pickle juice, although when I make this again I will try to incorporate some pickle juice. You'll get the recipe if it turns out well. This turned out great but still needed a sauce. I think if I get it just right you won't need anything to add flavor to the nuggets after they're fried.

But sauce is good, too, of course. The honey mustard sauce, which will go well with many, many things, is a recipe you can find on 40 Aprons. I have eaten it as a salad dressing and veggie dip, too. It's one of my absolute favorite things.

The eggy potato salad was, true to its name, very eggy, like the kind I used to make. I have contented myself thus far with leaving eggs out of my potato salads and not trying to replace them. And potato salad is generally pretty great anyway. But the chopped tofu and kala namak (black salt) that this one had made it an intense sense memory. When I make this again, though, I'll leave out the turmeric, which lends one to believe this is a mustard-y potato salad (it is not), and add chopped dill pickle. Even so, I ended up eating a bowl of this for dinner because it was all I wanted and I figured that because I put tofu in it I could count it as a main dish.