Sequestration Meal #320

 

I had a scallion pancake in my freezer. It was the last of the scallion pancakes and ever so slightly freezer burned, so I knew I needed to cook it. There is a Taiwanese dish of a wrap made of scallion pancakes and ginger beef, so I started heading in that direction and ended up with a kind of Asian nachos, since the scallion pancake was too thick and stiff to be treated like a tortilla.

I used this recipe for my soy curl-based mock ginger beef, only making the "beef" and not the veggie stir fry and rice and whatnot that accompanied it in the recipe Simply Ceecee gave, though I will make rice for the leftovers. It was so good. I am always a little afraid of using gochujang, even though it is delicious, because one does need to endure quite a bit of spice to be able to appreciate all the rest of the flavors in it. This was far spicier than most of what I eat, but it was perfect to accompany this. I ate it by scooping the soy curls up on my scallion pancake "chips" and grabbing a slice of cucumber here and there to cool off. The cucumbers have Everything Bagel seasoning on them, because that is the perfect accompaniment to cucumber.

This was one of those "benefits of planning ahead" kind of meals--it doesn't take terribly long but if I didn't have this already written down as the plan for the day I would have probably just made a sandwich. But it was really straightforward: Hydrate soy curls, bake them in the toaster oven (I halved the recipe so it would fit in mine), cook the pancake in a skillet while the soy curls bake, slice a cucumber, stir up some sauce, set the pancake aside, put the soy curls into the pan, dump in the sauce, stir around until it seems to thicken, put everything on a plate, garnish soy curls with sesame seeds and scallions and cucumbers with Everything Bagel seasoning, and your meal is done--about 20 minutes start to finish, though of course you'll have dishes to wash later (the bane of my existence sometimes, but I was okay with that this time).

Although soy curls are part of the pantry-clearing, I don't think I'll ever just go without soy curls in the future--they're so easy and make so many quick, delicious, cheap meals. But I have enough of them left that contemplating what to do when I run out is kind of a long way off anyway.