Shushi.

So, I learned how to make sushi about 2 weeks ago and have made it already four or five times. This was the first time I've been able to make inside-out rolls with the rice on the outside. So that was pretty exciting. (small victories these days.) I would say sushi is probably my favourite food and for a vegan it's easy to whip up interesting alternatives to traditional rolls at a fraction of the cost. I'm not going to tell you how to make these because the recipe is posted many places. Here's one such posting if you want to make them yourself. Other than that I'm just here to brag about how good my lunch was. (But if you have questions I'll be happy to attempt to answer them, just let me know!)


The making of...

If you don't believe how good they were take as evidence this photo of Davis clearing his plate as we watch tv on our computer. Just a little glimpse into our life. You're welcome.

Fried Lice.

Ok, so now you know how to make awesome soy balls and you're wondering what you can pair it with. Now, the soy balls were a tricky "recipe" that needed specific ingredients so to make up for it and had to be done "right" or it won't work. Just to be fair I'm now going to teach you how to make a dish that you can just throw together. I really intend this blog to be more "here's how we do it, let me know how you do it." than exact recipes that you have to follow to a t. So I had a couple people ask me about how we make fried rice and I totally get that because it was very recently that we figured out a couple small tricks that make it so much better instead of a second-rate version of take-out. It's pretty hard to screw it up and you don't have to use the exact ingredients I use. In fact, we rarely use the same ingredients anyway. It pretty much depends on what veggies are in the fridge/freezer. So, the list of ingredients is really just a potential list of ingredients but don't worry too much if you're missing one of the ingredients. (Unless it's rice. You pretty much need rice in order to make fried rice. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.)

Ingredients:

Tofu (firm or extra firm is ideal)

Turmeric

Leftover rice

Soy Sauce

Salt

Sugar

Garlic

Onion

Veggies such as:

Celery

Carrot

Mushroom

Bell Pepper

Cauliflower

Broccoli

Frozen Peas

Canned Corn

Green onion

Whatever else you like.

Other options could be tomatoes, water chestnuts, frozen mixed veggies, cashews or whatever else you feel like experimenting with.

Alright...so you may have already noticed that I said leftover rice. I'm embarassed to say how recently I learned that this is the secret to good fried rice so I thought I would tell you guys because you might not know either. This is the one thing that's close to non-negotiable. If you use fresh hot rice your fried rice will be mushy and kind of greasy. If you don't have any rice pre-made the second best option is to make your rice and then fold it and fan it till it cools a bit and put it in the fridge for a couple hours. Ideally though your rice should have sat in the fridge at least overnight. A couple days is even better. I didn't put amounts because it will totally depend on how many people you're cooking for and what you're cooking it in. We make our rice in a little ricemaker so we just use the amount our rice make makes which is about 4'ish cups I think. Your best rice for this is a white long grain but brown works too and is better for you.

Step one: prep your onions, garlic and other veggies. This whole process will be a lot easier if you did this ahead of time instead of trying to chop and add things at the right time while continuing to stir. The vegetables can be chinese cut which means fairly thick and on an angle. They can also be smaller if you're feeling like you want to spend most of your life chopping things. Try to keep things separate in their own bowls because they all have different cooking times. If you're adding a lot of veggies a little of each will do. I've mostly tried to add these to the list in the order that I would add them to the wok.

Next: heat your pan! I bet I know what you usually do. You put your pan (preferably a wok with lots of room) on the stove and throw some oil in it right away. Am I right? Not anymore. Here's the new protocol: wok goes on the stove just above medium heat and no oil goes in until it's hot. Otherwise the oil cools the pan down and your food ends up soaking in oil instead of frying. This gets you that gross greasy food you do not want. If you don't heat your pan up enough your food will also stick and your texture won't be right. If you do heat the wok up then enough adding oil will create a thin film that goes into the pores of the metal, creating a non-stick effect. This way you use less oil to stir-fry and we all win! So now you're like "But Kristy, how do I know if it's hot enough? If I put my hand in the wok I will burn it." Don't be silly! Until you get those new silicone robot hands you asked for for your birthday here's how you do it-- stick your hand under the cold water tap, then walk over to the wok (tee hee.) and sprinkle a couple drops in. Your wok is hot enough when the water sizzles and evaporates pretty quickly. If it just sits there we're not there yet temperature wise. If it evaporates immediately you're ok to start but I would drop your temperature a little bit since we're not working with meat here and don't need it quite that hot.

Alright, yes...you've read a lot and so far you only have a hot wok to show for it but bear with me here. Once you know the outline of how to make this it'll be really easy and another delicious dish to add to your cooking repertoire. Now that your wok is up to the right temperature add enough oil to coat the wok and move the pan around a bit to get a nice coating of the oil. Once it's hot you can cook up your tofu. I use about a quarter of a regular size block and you just crumble it into the walk. Throw a couple shakes of turmeric on it (mostly for colour) and a bit of salt and fry it up till it looks like scrambled eggs. Once this is done remove your tofu from the wok and set it aside.

Ok, a bit more oil in the wok and give it a few seconds to heat up. Then take your wok off the burner while you add onion and garlic. (this is just to prevent it from burning) Then you can throw it back on the burner and get things moving. Now, just keep adding in your veggies and stir frying. If you're using any frozen veggies or canned veggies don't add them quite yet. Likewise, the green onion will go in pretty much last. Alright, once your fresh veggies are nicely sauteed move them to the outside of your wok making a well in the middle to dump in your rice. As you add it it's best if you can kind of crumble it a bit to separate the grains. Now you can add a couple tablespoons of soy sauce and a couple pinches of sugar and some random amount of salt. Now's a good time to give it a taste it and decide whether you want more of any seasonings. Finally, stir in some frozen peas till they're warmed, then I like to add your tofu back in and the green onion last and just stir that through and then eat it and say "Mmm...that's delicious!"

I know that sounds like a lot but this is really a dish that can be made including prep in probably 15 minutes or so once you know what you're doing. The key is to get all your prep out of the way before starting and it will make the actual cooking of the dish quick and easy. Now you know!

And here is a fancy photo I took of one of the last batches we made. Next time we make it I will try to take a better photo and maybe some of the prep along the way to add in.

All about balls.

Ok, so I had to make a new blog just to post about this which will make this my forty-seventh new blog that I will update consistently for three and a half weeks before abandoning like a bag of moldy tangerines. However, it will be worth it if one other person makes these soy balls and enjoys them half as much as we did. For those of you who have never been to Lotus Pond in Victoria it is a killer amazing Buddhist vegan restaurant and they make the most amazing soy balls. I think most omnivores could be easily tricked into thinking they were chicken balls. So after a friend told me her attempt to duplicate them at home had flopped I took this as a challenge and did a little experimenting of my own. To make these you will need:

1 cup all-purpose flour (plus some more for the 'play it by ear' part of making batter)

1 cup cornstarch (plus some more for pre-dipping the balls)

2.5 teaspoons baking powder

2.5 teaspoons baking soda

2.5 teaspoons sugar

1 1/3 cups ice cold water

a ton of vegetable oil

Dehydrated soy ball stuff from Lotus Pond (seitan or tofu would probably also work)

I'm not going to bother posting about the sauce because the one I made the first time wasn't the best and the one I made the second time involved me adding a little of this and a little of that to the point where I wouldn't be able to tell you how to make it. You can also just buy sweet and sour sauce if you're feeling lazy. However, I'll warn you now it's a lot of work and a big mess by the time you're done with the balls so if you're feeling lazy, maybe order in and make these another day.

We ended up making half one day and half the next because I made the mistake of soaking all of the dehydrated inside stuff (yes, that is the technical term.) However this worked out pretty well in our case because we were able to fix our mistakes the next day. I would recommend that you use at most half of the package you buy from Lotus Pond per batch of batter you make up. The bag costs $7.50 and I think probably made about 80 balls but they can be frozen and that's a great way to make it worth the time investment to make these.

Ok, here we go. So...step one: soak your balls. (I am trying not to make too many ball jokes here but c'mon, that one was begging for it.)

The balls should be soaked for at least half an hour in warm'ish water. Once that's done you can get your batter going. So this is the part where I admit that there is more art than science in making these things. If you've ever made pancake batter before it's a similar process of adding more flour until they're working the way you want them to. Typically you'll need more flour than what's listed but just add a bit in at a time until they batter coats the inside filling well and they fluff up nicely in the oil. If you have a deep fryer this will be a lot safer but we used a wok with vegetable oil in it and it worked fine. If you have a thermometer you want the oil somewhere around 140 celcius but the way that worked best for us in figuring out whether the oil was hot enough is just to drop a little batter in it. You'll know it's the right temperature if it floats down to the bottom for just a brief moment and then comes back up. If it sinks and stays down it isn't hot enough yet, if it immediately stays on top and browns your oil is too hot. This is the part where I have to remind you too that water does not put out grease fires and to please have a lid handy in case of emergency. Your soy balls just won't taste as good if you are eating them in the ashes of what used to be your kitchen. (Actually they probably would, they're delicious but I still want you to have a house at the end of this. I'm good like that.)

Alright, so your oils heated, your batter ingredients are mixed. You're ready to make some balls! So here's the trick to get them nice and fluffy. This isn't a dip the ball and let the batter run off of it scenario. We found that the best way to get a nice coating of batter was to scoop the ball up with a lot of batter on a spoon and drop it into the oil with some extra batter. This takes some playing around to get the technique right. The second time we made them we coated them in cornstarch first and that helped but I can't stress enough that if you use a chopstick or something like that you're not going to get that nice fluffy coating of batter. You need to scoop up extra batter each time and make sure a lot of it stays in the oil. This is ideally a two-person job. I was in charge of getting them into the oil, Davis was in charge of getting them out. Other tips? Make sure you don't put too many in at once. This will lower the temperature of your oil and they won't cook right. You'll have to use your best judgement depending on the size of container you're deep frying in but probably 6 at a time is a good starting off point.

Ok, well that's basically it. There's a lot of this recipe that you kind of have to make up as you go along but I did that and it was just fine. Hopefully this will be a good starting off point for you and you'll have balls in your mouth in no time at all! Enjoy.

Bon appetite!

PS At the request of a dear cousin I will be following this post up with an instructional post on how to make delicious fried rice. If I don't have my baby before I get it written. Stay tuned.