Recipes For Mae, Pt. 1
A while ago, our friend Mae made a request for us to cover vegan cooking in our blog. And what better time than today, Norwegian National Vegan Tolerance Day, to launch this new regular feature! So get out your remaining functional cookware, and lets get to it. And a word of warning: we’re going to start lowbrow, but it’s going to get haute pretty quickly, so watch out.
Lets start with the absolute basics. A good vegan recipe tends to fall into one of two categories:
1) Delicious, reasonably constructed dishes that provide bountiful nutrition.
2) Desperate, fevered attempts to replicate bologna.
For this first recipe, I will be delving hardcore into category 2. Here it is: my recipe for “Chicken” “Fingers”.
You need:
1) A block of firm or extra firm tofu (cut into cubes or strips).
2) A bunch of flour
3) A bit of nutritional yeast
4) Seasoning Salt
5) Pepper
6) Oil
There are other things you can add (I‘ll get to that in a moment), but these are the basics.
So you do this:
1) Get a plastic bag. Make sure the plastic bag is not crappy and full of holes.
2) Honestly, make absolutely sure the bag has no holes. I can‘t stress this enough.
3) Put the flour in the bag. Add the nutritional yeast, seasoning salt and pepper in sensible quantities.
4) Put the cubes of tofu into the bag of flour. Raise the bag in the air.
5) Shake it like you just don’t care.
6) When the tofu cubes are covered in the flour mixture, sift the excess flour with a sifter, or, if you’re living below subsistence level like me, your fingers.
7) Deep fry (should you be blessed with the means) or pan fry them with unfortunate amounts of oil. Wear prescription goggles. Cook until golden brown. Then cook them a bit more. Serve.
Options:
-You can marinate the tofu in soy sauce (or Braggs) with a bit of sugar and hot sauce before breading for added flavour. This is highly recommended.
-You can add stuff into the breading like sage or chili pepper or tumeric or whatever.
-You can serve with a lovely sauce…maybe plum sauce or something. Barbecue sauce?
Mae additionally requested that I write these recipes in poem form; I have not ignored that part, I just chose to do it separately. I’ll give this a shot: here is the same recipe in verse. The parameters are that I have given myself 30 minutes to do it from start to finish, and I can only refer to the recipe for inspiration.
Invisible Detours.
There is music, perhaps, or teaspoons, but they are somehow
misaligned. Why believe them? Your own rhythm quakes through you
and you keep remarkable time, for the most part. Hunger,
longing; you wear this armor just to give them form. It’s
terrifically awkward. Remnantal lumber lies in a wet heap outside
the apartment; rodents skitter by on electrical wires. It all continues
to escape your attention
And the clock, the ringing phone, kettles and pans.
They study impatience. They assume scrappy little
motives and shift to mournful postures. The uppermost shelves
recoil at your touch. Beliefs hiss and harden; globes of
sweat form on appliances. Beneath your skin, things
are in turmoil, too. And isn‘t this how you wanted it.
Elsewhere, servants of landowners cook while the land,
so indentured, drafts a fresh betrayal. Codes appear in
the latticework and in the seams of leaves. What comes next
requires a re-reading: a whistling swirl, a shifting weight,
the cactiform shadows on desert. The gnashing of plates
And in kitchens everywhere, the identical drama.
These grains of sugar that hew soul to body,
the laminated maps of fire exits, escape hatches,
the workspace obscured by flour,
the haunted bits, the orange peels, the detritus.
The quality of your mercy; you
pick at it gingerly through the evening
and nature, in tender siege
sends you love letters on cones of frigid air.
Well…I tried. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, Mae. And, P.S., if you’re the Mae that wrote to me a long, long time ago and you have a site up at deviantart.com, I just want to say that I'm a fan of your writing, too. If you’re not that Mae, you're probably also awesome, but I just don’t have as much evidence.
Next time: Eggplants. Exact measurements. And more bewitching culinary verse.
With love for the Norwegian work week,
Doug.
Lets start with the absolute basics. A good vegan recipe tends to fall into one of two categories:
1) Delicious, reasonably constructed dishes that provide bountiful nutrition.
2) Desperate, fevered attempts to replicate bologna.
For this first recipe, I will be delving hardcore into category 2. Here it is: my recipe for “Chicken” “Fingers”.
You need:
1) A block of firm or extra firm tofu (cut into cubes or strips).
2) A bunch of flour
3) A bit of nutritional yeast
4) Seasoning Salt
5) Pepper
6) Oil
There are other things you can add (I‘ll get to that in a moment), but these are the basics.
So you do this:
1) Get a plastic bag. Make sure the plastic bag is not crappy and full of holes.
2) Honestly, make absolutely sure the bag has no holes. I can‘t stress this enough.
3) Put the flour in the bag. Add the nutritional yeast, seasoning salt and pepper in sensible quantities.
4) Put the cubes of tofu into the bag of flour. Raise the bag in the air.
5) Shake it like you just don’t care.
6) When the tofu cubes are covered in the flour mixture, sift the excess flour with a sifter, or, if you’re living below subsistence level like me, your fingers.
7) Deep fry (should you be blessed with the means) or pan fry them with unfortunate amounts of oil. Wear prescription goggles. Cook until golden brown. Then cook them a bit more. Serve.
Options:
-You can marinate the tofu in soy sauce (or Braggs) with a bit of sugar and hot sauce before breading for added flavour. This is highly recommended.
-You can add stuff into the breading like sage or chili pepper or tumeric or whatever.
-You can serve with a lovely sauce…maybe plum sauce or something. Barbecue sauce?
Mae additionally requested that I write these recipes in poem form; I have not ignored that part, I just chose to do it separately. I’ll give this a shot: here is the same recipe in verse. The parameters are that I have given myself 30 minutes to do it from start to finish, and I can only refer to the recipe for inspiration.
Invisible Detours.
There is music, perhaps, or teaspoons, but they are somehow
misaligned. Why believe them? Your own rhythm quakes through you
and you keep remarkable time, for the most part. Hunger,
longing; you wear this armor just to give them form. It’s
terrifically awkward. Remnantal lumber lies in a wet heap outside
the apartment; rodents skitter by on electrical wires. It all continues
to escape your attention
And the clock, the ringing phone, kettles and pans.
They study impatience. They assume scrappy little
motives and shift to mournful postures. The uppermost shelves
recoil at your touch. Beliefs hiss and harden; globes of
sweat form on appliances. Beneath your skin, things
are in turmoil, too. And isn‘t this how you wanted it.
Elsewhere, servants of landowners cook while the land,
so indentured, drafts a fresh betrayal. Codes appear in
the latticework and in the seams of leaves. What comes next
requires a re-reading: a whistling swirl, a shifting weight,
the cactiform shadows on desert. The gnashing of plates
And in kitchens everywhere, the identical drama.
These grains of sugar that hew soul to body,
the laminated maps of fire exits, escape hatches,
the workspace obscured by flour,
the haunted bits, the orange peels, the detritus.
The quality of your mercy; you
pick at it gingerly through the evening
and nature, in tender siege
sends you love letters on cones of frigid air.
Well…I tried. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, Mae. And, P.S., if you’re the Mae that wrote to me a long, long time ago and you have a site up at deviantart.com, I just want to say that I'm a fan of your writing, too. If you’re not that Mae, you're probably also awesome, but I just don’t have as much evidence.
Next time: Eggplants. Exact measurements. And more bewitching culinary verse.
With love for the Norwegian work week,
Doug.
posted by Doug at 12:43 PM
1 Comments:
my my, i am unbelievably impressed and flattered. i also cannot believe i sent you to that site and i hope it was not in a spirit of shameless self-promotion. there's a lot of shame involved, i promise you. at any rate that was excellent; i shall try to reciprocate someday with some kind of poetic cookie recipe involving vast amounts of dried cranberries and metaphor.
mae.
Post a Comment
<< Home