Archive for » February, 2010 «

Thanksgiving… in February?
Sunday, February 21st, 2010 | Author: tofu

So VeganMoFo ends, and I decided to take a small break. Maybe a day or two… maybe a week at most. Well, that was the intent. I was so excited that I’d been a better (more regular) VeganMoFo blogger (mostly due the partnership I had with Seitan of Conscious Cooking), and I vowed to continue with the recipes, reviews, thoughts, and more (someday we’ll start the podcast)… and then life happened. This included issues with one of my other blogs, so I kind of put my Wok on the Wildside blog to the side. What a huge mistake that was, huh? This is the blog I enjoy the most, and I neglected it. The irony here is that Seitan, our families, and I have been continuing our weekly vegan supper club, and we were both musing this past week that neither of us have written much.

But all that is going to change… I swear. I can’t promise daily or weekly entries, but I do promise to write every now and then. This isn’t a promise to any reader in particular, it’s not a commitment I’ve made with Seitan or my family, but it is a promise to me. I want to write more because I enjoy it. I love being vegan, I love sharing food, I love cataloguing my recipes, and I want to showcase that on my blog!

And wouldn’t you know it? Seitan jumped in first and is motivating me again. At a recent vegan supper club, I served a crispy sesame kale that she enjoyed, and she wrote about it on her blog. Now I really have to get moving on my writing!

So in the spirit of starting fresh, here are some pics and stuff from Thanksgiving (Yikes! Thanksgiving? Yep)… and the secret ingredient is love, of course… well, actually, today’s ingredient I’m writing about is tofu skin, but I create the food with love:

thanksgiving walk - 14So Thanksgiving is a tradition for our family. It’s a day that my mom can take a break and I do the cooking for her, dad, my family, and any of my brothers who might be visiting. This year, due to some personal matters, my parents elected not to come by… what a bummer! So instead of moping around, something that I could have done, we arranged for Seitan and The Conscious Eater to come by and start a new Thanksgiving tradition with us. It was nice to do an all-vegan feast and avoid Thanksoween, as Dan Piraro calls it.

Like any good Thanksgiving feast, it was an all-day event filled with eating, cooking, eating, talking, eating, laughing, eating, and more eating. Although Seitan and I cooked most of the day, it was never rushed or frantic. We took breaks and even got a chance to take a walk around the neighborhood. We were actually trying to get boba from our favorite drink place in Temple City (Boba Express), but of course, it was closed. However, the walk was wonderful. Baby Corn and Dumpling enjoyed the weather and company. Having Seitan and The Conscious Eater there also meant that there were two more pairs of eyes to watch our girls, so Sweet Potato and I got a chance to walk together hand-in-hand… a rare event!

spinach salad and seitan turkey

The real magic to the day (other than the wonderful company), was the food, of course.

The menu included:

  • Curried ginger butternut squash soup
  • Beautiful spinach salad (that’s the name I’m giving it)
  • Mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy
  • Roasted seitan turkey with tofu skin
  • Cranberry sauce
  • Lemony green beans with almonds
  • Sticky rice stuffing
  • Persimmon pie with cashew cream sauce

    • Need I say that there was way too much food? If we were hobbits, we would have been in food heaven… of course, if we were really hobbits, then we would have had two or three suppers in the evening. I’d have to say that everything was wonderful… I know, I’m pretty biased, but it was! I was most pleasantly surprised by the persimmon pie. That was seriously good! Think pumpkin pie, but with a soft persimmon mousse like consistency. The spices weren’t overpowering, and the crust was amazing with flavor and hearty goodness. I was surprised by it because I’m more of a crunchy persimmon kind of guy… not the soft squishy ones. That said, it was so good. Just the right amount of cinnamon and nutmeg. Seitan did a great job on it, and it featured her wonderful cashew cream.

    Seitan turkeyOne of the reasons I decided to make my own seitan turkey was because there are too many products out there that cook up really dry. The Field Roast is pretty good, but I have to admit, I’m not a fan of the Tofurkey turkey or the Now and Zen one. I think they’re dry and a little salty. With my own thing, I get to control the moistness of the seitan I make. I can shape it into little drum sticks or larger breasts if I want to. Most of all, I can wrap it with tofu skin to help retain the moisture and give it a crisp exterior.

    So here’s the secret to working with tofu skin (also sometimes referred to as yuba skin or wrap). Okay, it’s not really a secret, but these are tips and tricks I do when I use tofu skin… One quick note, although you can find fresh tofu skin or yuba in many asian supermarkets (or even make it yourself), I prefer to buy the frozen variety because it’s consistent and convenient. So, here are my tips and tricks…

  • To use the frozen tofu skin, let it defrost first. Don’t use a microwave or anything! Just put it in the fridge for a few hours, or leave it on the countertop for about 30 minutes till it’s flexible. Basically, when it’s frozen, it’s brittle. You don’t want it to be brittle. You want it to be flexible so that it can be soft enough to wrap things. Once defrosted, it’s still dried tofu skin (yes, it’s dried before freezing so that it’s not as sticky and doesn’t suffer as much freezer burn).
  • You can leave it in big sheets or cut it into more manageable sizes. I usually cut it up into 8″x4″ pieces (approximately), But that really depends on what I’m trying to wrap with it. This Thanksgiving, I formed little drummettes and a couple of larger loaves when I made my fresh seitan. The 8″x4″ size was really good for the drummettes, and I used about 3 or 4 tofu skin pieces to wrap them. The loaves needed slightly wider sheets, but I guess I could have still used the 4″ wide ones and used more of them.
  • To soften the tofu skin sheets, take a water bottle and put it on its finest setting and mist both sides of the tofu sheet (don’t drench it, but you want as much area covered as possible). Within a minute, you’ll see the results, the tofu skin will get more white colored, flexible, and delicate.
  • Wrap it tightly around the seitan pieces. This can be tricky. You don’t want to wrap it so tightly that the tofu skin splits, but you also don’t want it to be loose and airy. If it does split… no worries. wrap that section again and you’ll be good to go.
  • Preheat your oven to about 350 degrees, and finish wrapping all your pieces. You actually don’t have to start wrapping before preheating. I just forgot to type it above, and I’m too lazy to go back and do it.
  • You’ll get the best results if you can put the tofu wrapped seitan on one of those grills that raises up the food from the bottom of the roasting pan. Place all your pieces on the roasting grill.
  • Baste each piece well. I like to rotate them so that I get all sides of the tofu skin. What baste should you use? Well, that’s personal preference. I usually do equal parts of melted Earth Balance and vegetable stock with a squirt of Liquid Aminos. Sometimes I’ll add a touch of agave to make it sweeter. The point is that it needs to have some flavor and some fat to make the tofu skin crispy without just being hard.
  • Bake for about 10 minutes or so and baste a little more. Bake an additional ten minutes, flip the pieces over and baste some more. Bake for a final ten minutes or so. Honestly, depending on the size of each piece, the temperature of the seitan pieces, the humidity, and the current alignment of the planets, the time will vary. Trust in your eyes. It should be crispy and getting a nice brown color.
  • Remove from oven and let cool for about 3-5 minutes. Slice pieces thinly or leave whole if you have small pieces you want to eat like a barbarian. Here’s where tight wrapping is most evident. If it was too loose, then the tofu skin will totally fall off your slices. Of course, that could still happen if you slice too thinly!
  • Serve with gravy and some cranberry sauce.

    • Tofu skin is very easy to use and can wrap a lot of different things. We love the crispy crunch of the tofu skins that have been basted and baked, so we use it to create little eggroll-like things with stuffing. We’ve also created something I call Chinese Samosas with them. When we do things like that, we actually pan fry them with just a small amount of oil in a cast iron skillet. Very yummy!

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