Adam Sobel - Street Vegan
10/8/15 20:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI was very excited by this book! It is by the guy who ran the Cinnamon Snail food truck and he has many amusing anecdotes about running a food truck in New York and New Jersey. (His food truck career was rather full of mishaps. I cannot decide whether he ran into the food truck biz without sufficient knowledge and preparation, or whether that's just the life of a NYC food truck owner).
It contains recipes like Ｇinger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams and fried ginger, Bourbon Hazelnut Pancakes, Lemongrass Five-Spice Seitan sandwiches, and other things that sound delicious and look delicious.
But these recipes rate a whole-hearted "Ain't nobody got time for that"!
To make Ginger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams and fried ginger, you must:
- Cook mustard seeds, ginger, garlic, habanero, cilantro, cloves, allspice, tamarind concentrate, tamari, maple syrup, molasses, and lime juice.
- Blend all that into a marinade, which you will use to marinate your tofu.
- Grill your tofu.
- Cook your yams, and drain them.
- Cook ginger, cloves, cinnamon, Sucanat [this is a vegan sweetener] and coconut milk.
- Process the yams and the coconut milk into a puree.
- Peel very thin strips of ginger and fry them in hot oil.
- Toss the ginger with cinnamon, chili powder, evaporated cane juice, and salt
AND NOW YOU HAVE TO GET A RING MOLD
and fill your ring mold with yams puree, then baby spinach, then tofu, then mango salsa (which you have made yourself at a separate time????), and garnish with some microgreens and scallions.
TOTAL INGREDIENTS: 28, not including the separate ingredients for the mango salsa.
TOTAL DISHES YOU NEED TO CLEAN: Saucepan, grill pan, blender, baking dish, cutting board, pot, saucepan again, food processor, saucepan again, mixing bowl, ring mold.
And here's the thing: ALL of the recipes in the book are like this. I absolutely will put in this much effort two or three times a year to have guests over. But I am always looking for recipes that I can start at 6:00 at night and have finished by 7:00 without having destroyed the entire kitchen.
Now, I DO have enough cooking expertise that I can figure out how to simplify some of these; and I'm not vegan, so rather than put together a vegan buttermilk dressing, I can just buy a dairy buttermilk dressing (as long as I'm not cooking for vegans, natch.)
So for example, tonight I wanted to make Ginger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams (but not fried ginger, because no.) I bought a bottle of Jerk Marinade at the grocery store and marinated the tofu in that rather than making the marinade from scratch. (I don't think this was a rousing success, but I would NEVER make that marinade from scratch, so I don't know. Perhaps I'll just do soy sauce + maple syrup + lime juice + jerk spices.) I made the yams pretty much as in the recipe, except that I put in the spices straight, rather than cooking them first. AND THEN I had a problem, because I put the potatoes and the coconut milk in the food processor only to find out that my food processor could not accommodate them, and also I forgot to put the blade in my food processor, so I had to pour everything back into the pot and beat at the potatoes with a fork for a while until I remembered I could use my immersion blender. And that was it. No mango salsa, no microgreens, no fried ginger. It was fine, but the original recipe probably had a greatness that I could not manage to reach.
So, I don't know. I might get a ton of great ideas from this book, I might reduce a bunch of the recipes into a form that's manageable. But I can't help feeling like this is a book for people with a lot more money and time than I have.
It contains recipes like Ｇinger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams and fried ginger, Bourbon Hazelnut Pancakes, Lemongrass Five-Spice Seitan sandwiches, and other things that sound delicious and look delicious.
But these recipes rate a whole-hearted "Ain't nobody got time for that"!
To make Ginger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams and fried ginger, you must:
- Cook mustard seeds, ginger, garlic, habanero, cilantro, cloves, allspice, tamarind concentrate, tamari, maple syrup, molasses, and lime juice.
- Blend all that into a marinade, which you will use to marinate your tofu.
- Grill your tofu.
- Cook your yams, and drain them.
- Cook ginger, cloves, cinnamon, Sucanat [this is a vegan sweetener] and coconut milk.
- Process the yams and the coconut milk into a puree.
- Peel very thin strips of ginger and fry them in hot oil.
- Toss the ginger with cinnamon, chili powder, evaporated cane juice, and salt
AND NOW YOU HAVE TO GET A RING MOLD
and fill your ring mold with yams puree, then baby spinach, then tofu, then mango salsa (which you have made yourself at a separate time????), and garnish with some microgreens and scallions.
TOTAL INGREDIENTS: 28, not including the separate ingredients for the mango salsa.
TOTAL DISHES YOU NEED TO CLEAN: Saucepan, grill pan, blender, baking dish, cutting board, pot, saucepan again, food processor, saucepan again, mixing bowl, ring mold.
And here's the thing: ALL of the recipes in the book are like this. I absolutely will put in this much effort two or three times a year to have guests over. But I am always looking for recipes that I can start at 6:00 at night and have finished by 7:00 without having destroyed the entire kitchen.
Now, I DO have enough cooking expertise that I can figure out how to simplify some of these; and I'm not vegan, so rather than put together a vegan buttermilk dressing, I can just buy a dairy buttermilk dressing (as long as I'm not cooking for vegans, natch.)
So for example, tonight I wanted to make Ginger Island Tofu with coconut mashed yams (but not fried ginger, because no.) I bought a bottle of Jerk Marinade at the grocery store and marinated the tofu in that rather than making the marinade from scratch. (I don't think this was a rousing success, but I would NEVER make that marinade from scratch, so I don't know. Perhaps I'll just do soy sauce + maple syrup + lime juice + jerk spices.) I made the yams pretty much as in the recipe, except that I put in the spices straight, rather than cooking them first. AND THEN I had a problem, because I put the potatoes and the coconut milk in the food processor only to find out that my food processor could not accommodate them, and also I forgot to put the blade in my food processor, so I had to pour everything back into the pot and beat at the potatoes with a fork for a while until I remembered I could use my immersion blender. And that was it. No mango salsa, no microgreens, no fried ginger. It was fine, but the original recipe probably had a greatness that I could not manage to reach.
So, I don't know. I might get a ton of great ideas from this book, I might reduce a bunch of the recipes into a form that's manageable. But I can't help feeling like this is a book for people with a lot more money and time than I have.
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(no subject)
11/8/15 23:35 (UTC)My limit for a recipe is about 8 ingredients and about 5 steps.