Adventures and Leftovers

As per Sarah's last post, I made sushi for our recent family gathering. I needed to pick up a few Asian specialty items, especially the inari "bags" for Sarah's favourite sushi. However, going to our usual Asian market, Kowloon, is a trip downtown and isn't too easy on the stomach. It is smelly, dirty and can be crowded. The last time we went, it contained a very strong odour of, well, to put it bluntly, feces, which doesn't really inspire any sort of culinary adventure in me. Pete and I had heard rumours of a new Asian market in the East end through a woman at work*, but she has since moved to California and we were left only with our sketchy memories of her vague directions.

I wanted to stop in at Lush's St Laurent location and pick up some vegan deals, and afterwards Pete drove through the progressively worsening snowstorm and found the mythical clean and tidy Asian grocery mecca we once could have only dreamed about - Uni Mart. It was bright, spotless, well-stocked and relatively odourless. I picked out a basket of items and we made our way to the cash. After ringing us through, we were told to go to Cash #1 for our "free gift". How exciting! I'm not sure what we did to deserve one, but free stuff is always fun. The woman at Cash #1 took our receipt, and reached down and lifted a HUGE can of oysters onto the counter. Oh no. How did I explain that I didn't want her free gift? I told her that we didn't eat animals, so she reached down again and brought up a bag of frozen shrimp. Uh, no thank you, really. I saw a stack of hundreds of packages of little bundles of yam noodles in the corner and pointed at it. She shook her head at me, said "Just for fondue!" like I was a crazy woman and handed me a package. I thanked her many times, smiling. Anyway, if you're in the Ottawa area and want great deals on anything for your Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese cooking, check out Uni Mart. Just be warned about their generous gifts.

I made a soup with my newly acquired udon noodles, lotus root, tofu and enoki mushrooms.



Later in the week, I made more dishes from the Great Tome** of Vegan Cooking - Veganomicon. Here is Penne Vodka. I like the sauce so much more that a run-of-the-mill marinara.



There were leftover mashed potatoes wallowing in the fridge, so I tried Home-style Potato Rolls. They were chewy dough-y goodness. The recipe made so many rolls that I should have stashed some in the freezer, but didn't think of it at the time.



I had cooked a batch of chickpeas and wanted to use them up, so I tried Tomato and Roasted Eggplant Stew with Chickpeas, over the suggested Poppy-Seed Polenta. This was so amazing, I would suggest it for any eggplant-haters in your life - they will realize the errors of their ways. The eggplant melted in your mouth and the flavours were amazing.



* This woman at work, who came to Canada from China about eight to ten years ago, saw me making tea at work in a stainless steel teapot and found it ABSOLUTELY imperative that I understood to NEVER cook snake in metal. Glass or ceramic only. Ya, snake. I made sure that she was talking about the reptile. Yep. I assured her that I never would.

** The definition of tome is "often one volume of a multi-volume scholarly work". I hope that I eventually have a whole bookshelf of Isa and Terry's works.

"Real" Canadian Superstore Ignores Vegans

I sat down with a large grocery superstore's "Healthy Insider's Report" to read about their new organic products. We don't buy veggies at this store, but we usually get soymilk, tofu and other pantry staples there, as they are well-priced and the store is a five minute drive away. They have a fairly well-stocked natural food section and carry many organic products that we use. So I was a little more than annoyed when I saw this page entitled "Vegetarians Rejoice!". They have finally decided to identify their vegetarian products with a symbol. Not an internationally recognized vegetarian symbol, but one of their own creation. They guarantee that the product is suitable for "lacto-ovo vegetarians". Because they are the most "common type". They go on to describe that there are different kinds of vegetarians, such as "flexitarians, freegans and vegans!" but they only label for lacto-ovos because they are the "most common type". It annoys me that they try to discredit veganism by grouping them with flexitarians (who eat meat products when it suits them) and freegans (who are a pretty fringe group that wouldn't buy products at this superstore anyway). They could have said "vegans, fruitarians and raw foodists" or something similar. It is generally pretty easy as a lacto-ovo vegetarian to skim a list of ingredients to determine if the product contains meat. It is harder for a vegan to wade through ingredients like "whey powder" and "dried yolk". They could have easily adopted a variant of the vegetarian symbol to indicate if the product was vegan.
It would be hard for us to boycott this store, as there is only one other local grocery that carries some of the similar products at a higher price and the "locally owned" natural foods store is a twenty minute drive into the city, but we will definitely make an effort to buy less there. And I'll be sending "President's Choice" a copy of this post.

Kowloon in Ottawa

On the weekend, Pete and I went on a whirlwind city grocery shop. We hit all the places we never get to and places we've never been to stock up on those hard-to-find vegan ingredients that our local suburban grocery stores don't carry.

One mega stop was an Asian grocery store downtown, the Kowloon Market. It reeks of fish, but has some great buys, including the best fresh tofu and the cheapest silken tofu around.

I made this dish by coating the tofu in cornstarch and sauteing, then topping with spicy peanut sauce. Super easy.



Kowloon carries a variety of asian veggies, including my fav, lotus root. I love it sauteed in a little oil, with soy sauce and a sprinkle of cayenne.



And they have soy sprouts and other goodies for a homemade thai soup.



We also picked up nori sheets, frozen vegetarian dumplings, soba noodles and tapioca pearls for bubble tea. I'll post the rest of our finds soon!