Dinner Plate #21

 

Here's a successful pantry utilization special: RightRice cooked with onions, vegan butter, and chicken-style veggie broth, a couple of hearts of palm cakes (recipe veganized from Savory Experiments) with homemade tartar sauce, broccoli, and carrots.

Of course, now that I finally know how to make RightRice absolutely delicious, I am out and the product no longer exists. However, similar things exist (like Banza rice and Kaizen), so the skills may translate. So for the sake of future me (and anyone else who wants to try it), what I did was to cook a half an onion in a tablespoon of vegan butter until soft, then added 2/3 cup chicken-style veggie broth (made from Better than Bouillon) and brought it to a boil. When that was boiling, I added 2/3 cup RightRice, covered the pot, and took it off the heat. I left it there for 12 minutes and it was perfect.

I made the RightRice to have more protein in the meal, because in order to use my can of hearts of palm, I'd been wanting to try the recipe at Savory Experiments. It did not have chickpeas in it, which felt different and exciting. It was basically just a lot of veggies, seasonings, and panko. I had to buy a can of artichoke hearts to make it, but this is not a low spend adventure (though it has had that effect), it's just an effort to use things up. I was going to use the entire can of artichokes, so it wasn't something that added to my stocks, which was fine. To veganize them, I used JUST Egg. I also had to substitute onion powder for the dried onions, and I think that worked out fine. I didn't want to fry them (laziness, perhaps), so I baked the cakes at 350 for 20 minutes. They didn't really need help to brown because I was using whole wheat panko. That trick worked out amazingly.

They were delicate in a way the chickpea kind never are, and the taste of the vegetables got to come through a lot more. I adored them, especially with the tartar sauce. The only thing I might change in the future would be to add some kelp granules or crumbled nori for more of a flavor of the sea.

Vegetarian recipes like this one intrigue me because, unlike vegan recipes tend to do, most of them aren't trying to be something else. Sure, these are like crab cakes, and the texture is flaky like fish, but they aren't pretending to be crab cakes. They're just hearts of palm cakes. I've been reading up on more vegetarian recipes and looking into veganizing more vegetarian recipes like this.

My broccoli was looking slightly sad but hadn't gone bad, so it was time to eat it. The carrots rounded things out nicely. This was, overall, a lovely meal.