Brian and I tried two new vegan recipes in October, one sweet and one savory. Technically, the savory one doesn't qualify for the Recipe of the Month slot, since it doesn't have a whole lot of veggies in it. But since I grew up with the rule that you have to finish your dinner before you can have dessert, I'm going to tackle it first and set aside the fruit-forward sweet dish for later.
The savory recipe was a variant on one Brian has been making for years: homemade sushi. Normally, he makes this with the fresh sushi-grade salmon they sell at H-Mart. It's very tasty, but also quite pricey—as much as $30 per pound. He always buys the smallest package he can find, but it's still $10 to $15 worth of fish for a single meal. Of course, that's still much less than the cost of going out for a sushi dinner, so we look on it as an affordable luxury. But it's not one we're willing to indulge in very often.
So, when I decided on a whim to spend $2 on a half-pound package of surimi (faux crabmeat) at Lidl, Brian thought he'd try experimenting with it as a cheaper sushi filling. Not surprisingly, it didn't have the same melt-in-the-mouth texture as the salmon, but bundled up into little rolls, it worked well enough to scratch the sushi itch. That got him wondering: if it was the rice and nori that really mattered, did the filling tucked inside them even have to be fish? Could he make reasonable sushi rolls out of tofu?
To find out, he pressed the tofu and cut it into narrow sticks. He marinated these briefly in a vegan fish sauce he'd found a recipe for at the Minimalist Baker. (He found it pretty weak, not nearly as flavorful as real fish sauce, but he thought it could work for this purpose.) Then he browned the tofu sticks in a pan, added thin slices of cucumber and avocado, and rolled them up in nori with sushi rice and sesame seeds on the outside.The resulting "tofushi" was...not bad. I can't say it was as good as the salmon sushi, but it was a damn sight better than the carrot salmon we tried as a vegan alternative in 2020. The tofu, even after its dip in the faux fish sauce, didn't have a lot of flavor, but it had a firm texture with a satisfying chew, and the soy sauce and wasabi supplied the missing taste component. And because the tofu provided protein, it stuck to the ribs much better than the veggie-only carrot rolls. It was satisfying enough that Brian definitely intends to make it again, possibly tweaking the recipe next time to amp up the flavor. (Come to think of it, treating the tofu the same way we did the carrots in the carrot salmon recipe might work well for that purpose.)
The sweet recipe came out of the Happy Healthy Herbivore cookbook we bought at Half Price Books last Christmas. We've already tried a few dishes out of this book and found them rather a mixed bag. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was okay, but not as orangey as we would have liked; the Chickpea Tenders, contrary to their name, were dry, crumbly, and disappointingly bland. We also tried a sweet recipe called Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits, which called for "white whole-wheat flour." After a little research, I found out that this stuff is more commonly called golden wheat flour and managed to track down a bag of it at Shop-Rite for around seven bucks. It was a big investment, but I figured it could be worthwhile if it allowed us to make healthier desserts without compromising on texture. Sadly, the pumpkin biscuits didn't really provide this payoff; while their lightly sweet, spicy flavor was okay, the texture was rather stodgy, not at all what I expect from something described as a biscuit. Hoping that this disappointing result was a one-off, I decided to try another dessert recipe from the same book, the Apple Fritter Cups. This one actually called for whole-wheat pastry flour, but Brian decided to try making it with the golden wheat flour, since we'd already sprung for the bag. He skipped the optional sugar glaze and went with just the basic recipe: a simple, lightly sweetened batter (just a quarter-cup of brown sugar for 14 little muffins) topped with diced apples fried with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar. They smelled good, and Brian thought they tasted pretty good too, but I found them no better than okay. Like the pumpkin muffins, they were dense and doughy, and they didn't have enough sweetness to make up for these defects. The apple part wasn't bad, but it wasn't much better than a plain raw apple, which is healthier and requires no cooking at all.After this experience, I'm feeling a bit disillusioned both with the golden wheat flour and with this cookbook as a whole. I'm willing to give them both one more try, but I think our next selection from Happy Healthy Herbivore should definitely be a savory dish and not a sweet one, such as the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from the "Soups, Stews & Dal" chapter. And next time we try the golden wheat flour in a dessert recipe, it should probably be a real dessert with actual sugar, like the Cinnamon Whole Wheat Scones from the King Arthur website. Or maybe we should forget about desserts and try them in a bread recipe we'd normally make with white flour, like Brian's Granola Bread.