Another semi-homemade thirty minute meal.

I’m really just making this post to talk about Companion Mock Chicken. I bought a can of the stuff on a whim while making an assessment of a local (mostly) Vietnamese supermarket, and it’s sat in my pantry for months, even surviving an apartment move. I finally cracked it open because I was mostly out of food and feeling too lazy to go to the store for fresh ingredients. (Goes to show how much I’ve changed, I used to be primarily a tv dinner/food out of a can person – now I avoid that like the plague.) Judging from the listed ingredients, it’s a chicken-style firm seitan, complete with a semi-creepy ‘chicken skin’ pattern on various surfaces of the pieces. It’s just convincing enough to work well for when you want to make your favorite super-unhealthy (California-Cantonese) Chinese dishes and it will probably satisfy any wandering omnis that get lured in by the aroma of your cooking. I just sauteed it all together with a few dollops of some Mandarin Orange sauce from Trader Joe’s, which I hadn’t found a good use for until right that minute, steamed some frozen vegetables and cooked the very small amount of sushi rice that I had left.

I think a can of this would go very, very well with the General Tzo sauce in an earlier post…

Yup, not a typo. Also, the easiest recipe ever devised.

Anelleti pasta and vegan meatballs from Trader Joe’s, one can condensed tomato soup, add nutritional yeast, onion powder and garlic powder to taste.

Verdict? Dead on and awesome.

This is probably the most simple meal I’ve made in a while, but it’s also photographed the nicest, thanks to my obsession with Japanese dishery. (No, dishery probably isn’t a real word, but I’m owning it thanks.)

The soba was bought from Mitsuwa a few days before I noticed that Trader Joe’s started carrying the same item. It’s just regular soba that has powdered green tea in the noodle dough. The taste change is subtle, but the color is appealing.

When you eat cold soba, you would usually dip it into tsuyu, which is also used for dipping tempura items. Tsuyu is very rarely vegan (though I hear that Yamasa’s tempura tsuyu is fish free), so I pulled a recipe from one of my numerous Japanese veggie cookbooks, Japanese Cooking – Contemporary & Traditional by Miyoko Nishimoto Schinner. Condiments that I chose for the tsuyu were scallions and wasabi, and used a fancy schmancy sakura shaped vegetable cutter for the carrot bits (which I only did because I was going to photograph the meal and to show off.)

I was having a serious edamame jones, and I didn’t have any unshelled edamame on hand so I boiled up a bag of the shelled ones, sprinkled with some sea salt (I really need some kosher salt) and called it a day.

The tea is gyokuro, a hoity toity green variety that is prepared using not very hot water and you only steep it for a short time. Anything more harsh than that kills the delicate flavor of the leaves; they’re the same leaves used for maccha, the powdered green tea used in tea ceremony.

It was yummy and now I have to run out and buy soba trays (basically a bamboo sieve) and chopstick rests because I have an overwhelming need to be fancy.