Vegan Kimchi Fries

Please excuse the crappy cell phone photo

Every year my friends put together a vegan thanksgiving meal. Most of the people who attend aren't vegan, but we all love the challenge of making something delicious and vegan. My contribution this year was vegan kimchi fries. I had a non-vegan version at a Japanese restaurant last year and it sort of stuck with me.

This isn't a lunch thing you would take to work, but man, it was tasty.

Ingredients

• 2/3 package No Name Shoestring Fries (1kg)
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup vegan kimchi, roughly chopped
• 1 package Sol Cuisine Tangy Korean BBQ Meatless Chicken, sliced thinly, not sauced
• 3 tbsp vegan mayonnaise
• Sriracha to taste
• 4 stalks green onions, chopped

Let's Do It!

1. Heat a sauté pan on medium-high and add oil. Sauté the kimchi for about 10 minutes.
2. Add the meatless chicken and stir until heated through.
3. Add the sauce from the meatless chicken package and stir for about 5 minutes. Turn off heat and set aside to let the flavours permeate.
4. Cook the shoestring fries according to the package and put on a nice platter.
5. Reheat the kimchi/chicken mix on the stove, cover the fries.
6. Mix the vegan mayonnaise and and Sriracha to your preferred level of spiciness and flavour. Put in a ziplock bag. Cut off a small corner of the ziplock bag and drizzle over the dish.
7. Sprinkle with green onions.

This dish was a big hit. I can't wait to make it again with non-vegan options.

Korean Seafood Pancake

All my pics at work sucked, so here is a pic of four pancakes I took at home.

I tried one of these at a fantastic Korean restaurant in Toronto and immediately fell in love. This recipe is a mangling of two recipes, one from Maangchi (my usual go-to for all Korean recipes and quite possibly the most comprehensive recipe/how-to site in the universe) and the Kitchn, but I basically just used their sauce recipe. I'm not going to pretend that this is at all authentic. I'm Chinese and struggle to make authentic Chinese food as it is. This is just my version of the dish with what I had in my house.

Ingredients
Pancake

• 1 cup flour (I use whole wheat flour because it's healthy. I think.)
• 1 1/3 cup water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 2 green onions, chopped (you should probably use more, but I only had 2 left)
• 1 cup mixed seafood, chopped roughly
• 1 jalapeño, seeds discarded and chopped. Make sure you wash your hands RIGHT after handling these or else your hands will buuuuurrrnnn!!!
• cooking oil

Sauce (in ratio)

• Mostly soy sauce
• Almost the same amount of rice wine vinegar, to taste
• A bit of sesame oil
• 1 smashed and minced garlic clove

Let's do it!

1. Put the flour, water, salt and egg in a large mixing bowl. Whisk until it forms a thin batter. Mix as little as possible.
2. Add green onions, seafood (I used the ready-mixed frozen kind and defrosted it in the fridge overnight), and jalapeno. Mix until combined.
3. Coat the bottom of a non-stick pan with cooking oil and heat it to medium low. Put in two ladles of the mixture and spread so that the veggies and seafood are evenly distributed. Mine came up to about 8 inches in diameter. Any bigger and I'm pretty positive I wouldn't be able to flip them.
4. Cook until  the sides are cooked and the bottom is golden. At this point, the pancake should move around on it's own if you shove the pan around. 
5. If you can do that awesome pancake flip thing, do so. If you're like me, use a spatula to help you along.
6. Cook for another couple of minutes, until the bottom is golden.
7. Repeat until the batter is gone. Mine made about 4 servings, good for two lunches and two dinners. Or two big lunches, more likely.
8. To make the dipping sauce, just mix all that stuff together.

Lunch it up!

I put this on some rice and had kale as a side. I put the dipping sauce in a small screw-top jar. Here's the pic I took at work. You don't even know what's going on. I'm just happy to have found my nice lens, so here it is.

Pan Asian Submarine

I've been craving Vietnamese subs, Korean food and vegetarian food lately. What to do? Put them all together in a crazy-delicious sub, of course! Basically everything here is a Vietnamese sub staple, but with Korean kimchi and Chinese egg tofu added.

Ingredients:
Vietnamese sub
Some kimchi, purchased or homemade
Pickled daikon radish, purchased or homemade
Egg tofu
Coriander
Mayo
Butter

Let's do it!.. Lunch it up!
This whole thing is put together at work (if you have a toaster oven there). I packed the kimchi and daikon together, the coriander separate, the egg tofu in the little sausage case it comes with and the bread in a bag (that does NOT go in the fridge). I do this because I have a big problem with soggy bread, so I like my sandwiches to be made and eaten with the least amount of time in between as possible.

1. Slice up the egg tofu into maybe 1/2" rounds and lay them on a piece of foil. I broiled them in the toaster oven until they darkened a bit. I only did this because I wasn't sure if you could eat these without cooking or not.
2. Cut the bun almost the whole way through, open it and place it face down in the toaster oven and toast it.
3. Put everything inside. Come on, I don't need to tell you how to make a sub.

So yes, you can make this ahead and eat it at work, if you don't have a toaster oven and if you're not quite as anal about bread integrity as I am.

Here's a pic of the little tofu-lets in the toaster oven. And yes, my coworkers do think I'm a bit too intense about food.