Monday 6 June.
In the East End of London, along Kingsland Road, you are spoilt for choice when it comes to Vietnamese food. There are so many cheap and cheerful restaurants from which to choose but our favourite is the Viet Hoa – it’s website is here.
Ella’s regular choice is their rather fine tofu Bun Xa noodle dish, whereas I change what I eat there a litle more regularly. I like their fried rice – but you can probably tell by now that I’d eat fried rice nearly every day if I could. On our last visit the fried rice came with Tofu with lemongrass and chilli. A few weeks later I thought I’d see if we could replicate it and this a pretty decent attempt. Not sure of the authenticity, but it works.
Serves 2.
First, take a standard block of firm tofu, cut it into little-finger sized strips, no more than 1cm thick. Place them on a plate, sprinkle some dark soy sauce over them and set a side to marinate for 15 minutes. When the time’s up, fry off the tofu in a large frying pan with some sunflower oil until it is golden. Take care not to break the tofu strips. Set aside.
Next, take two stalks of fresh lemongrass and chop them finely. Peel a 2cm piece of fresh ginger root, roughly chop 2 cloves of garlic and finely chop 2 small green chillis and 2 medium shallots. Put all these in a blender, add a splash of rice wine vinegar and blend until you have a paste. You may need to add a little water to help you on your way, and scrape down the sides of the blender part way through the process.
Now roughly chop a red bell pepper into bite-sized pieces, slice six shiitake mushrooms, chop the ends off 6 spring onions then slice into thirds to create segments about 3cm long. Then slice up some fresh red chillis into rounds (as many as you like!).
Heat some sunflower or groundnut oil in a wok and when it’s hot add the fried-off tofu. After a couple of minutes add the bell pepper, mushrooms, spring onions, red chillis and the lemongrass paste. Dry for around 5 minutes, stirring as you go. The pepper and onions should just start to soften a little. When that happens, mix 2tsp of cornflour and a little water in a small cup, stir well and pour into the wok. Add a few splashes of dark soy sauce (but not too much) and stir. After a minute or so this should create an almost translucent ‘sauce’ that will coat the tofu and veg. This ‘sauce’ shouldn’t be watery or overly sticky – it’s neither a gravy or a glaze. Somewhere inbetween is perfect.
Serve with rice.
If you’re vegetarian, what do you eat?
This is a question that us vegetarians get asked all the time. What do meat eaters imagine we eat? A bland diet of Quorn burgers and penne pasta?
The truth is, at Earth To Plate Towers, we don’t like Quorn all that much – haven’t had it for years. And we don’t even tuck in to that much pasta.
So what do we eat? Well, just about everything – as long as it isn’t a corpse. We eat Mexican, Italian, Szechuan, Punjabi, Polish, French, Japanese, Irish and British – and more.
What do you eat?
To enlighten the ignorant, we’ll be listing some of the things we’ve made in our little kitchen in blog posts headed ‘Last Night’s Dinner’. We’ll also report back if we’ve eaten out – and include some pics, links and recipes if we feel they’d be helpful. Hopefully it will demonstrate that as vegetarians we can eat well – eat tasty, varied dishes from all over the world that don’t call for meat at all. Why not follow us and see what we’ve been eating?
Posted in Comment | 4 Comments »