Recipe of the Month: Egg Roll in a Bowl

As I've mentioned before, April has been a pretty full month for us. Weekdays and weekends alike have been crammed with medical appointments, game nights, last weekend's Repair Cafe, a major garden project, a stream cleanup I didn't even mention here, and a trip up to Massachusetts this weekend that combines a dance performance at NEFFA with a visit to my sister. All of which hasn't left us much time for picking and trying new vegan recipes.

So it wasn't until this week, with the end of April drawing near, that Brian asked me if I had any recipes I'd like to try as a Recipe of the Month. And fortunately, I happened to have one I'd been saving for a rainy day: this Vegan Egg Roll in a Bowl from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. Brian ran down the ingredient list and found that we had all the required ingredients except the plum sauce. However, we did have some frozen plums in the freezer. And being Brian, he figured, well, how hard could it be to make our own?

He did a little searching online and eventually settled on this plum sauce recipe from Serious Eats. Since we only needed a little for this recipe (and didn't expect to need it for anything else), he made just a quarter-sized batch, using half a pound of our frozen plums and correspondingly scaled amounts of the other ingredients. He used one small garlic clove in place of the half a clove the sized-down recipe called for, and we just happened to have a quarter-piece of star anise in the spice cupboard, so he didn't need to mess with breaking up a whole one. The whole process took about half an hour, including cooling time.

After that, the rest of the recipe was pretty straightforward. Aside from the extra step of tossing the tofu with the plum sauce, it came together much like any other stir-fry. He served it up over plain white rice with the extra plum sauce on the side, leaving out the other garnishes, and it was pretty good. Not extraordinary, but pretty good. The addition of the plum sauce did not magically transform it from a standard tofu-and-veggie bowl into some kind of higher-level concoction, but we both enjoyed it enough to to go back for seconds and happily polish off the leftovers for lunch.

So, will this become a regular addition to our recipe repertoire? Well, maybe. As I said, it's not necessarily better than a standard stir-fry, so Brian will probably stick to his usual method of tossing together whatever veggies we have on hand, rather than deliberately preparing this specific combination of ingredients. But we do have some of the plum sauce left over, safely stashed in the freezer, so should we ever find ourselves needing to use up some cabbage, carrot, onion, and tofu, we can thaw the sauce, follow this recipe, and be confident it will come out well.