Sequestration Meal #397

 

I have never gotten into the "bowl" fad much. Don't get me wrong. I love bowls--the dishes themselves--but dinners that consist of a bunch of stuff in a bowl are usually more Asian-style when I make them, with stuff on top of rice. I don't think that counts as a fad, since that's how a lot of Asian meals are presented anyway. But sometimes, one has to branch out. And so I branched out and tried this peanut butter tofu bowl with mashed potatoes from Vegan Richa.

In the midst of all the new vegan products, there are still these sorts of meals, which I have in my head as the sort of "uber-vegan," but are maybe just more classically vegan, from an era somewhat before my own transition. That's not to say that there isn't more available since my transition--there definitely is so much more available to me than there was five years or so ago--but that I know that before I embarked on this adventure there was a time when the only milk sold at the regular grocery store came from cows, and maybe you'd find a veggie burger in the freezer section if you were lucky. This meal could have come out of that time, assuming you had a health food store where you could buy nutritional yeast and some non-dairy milk (double points if they had that formerly mysterious unsweetened "natural" peanut butter that one must stir).

I kept some peanut sauce back to pour over the top; I highly recommend that, especially since you may end up wasting a lot of it if you just dump it all in the pan over the tofu, rather than being careful to just coat individual pieces. I also had to substitute the very end of my broccoli florets and some baby carrots for the greens the original recipe suggested. I didn't have two tennis-ball-sized potatoes so I used three medium potatoes and I think maybe that wasn't enough because my mash ended up the consistency of soft polenta and the color of it, too, from all the nutritional yeast. But it tasted good. I wouldn't think to put peanut sauce on mashed potatoes but they are two of my favorite things so why not?

Next time I make something like this I'd be likely to prep it differently--I think I'd like the tofu better crisped up a bit in some cornstarch on the stove and then coated in this lovely sauce--but I really enjoyed my meal, anyway. Do you like having "bowls" for dinner? What do you put in yours?