Mad About Udon

Mmmm… falafel. I once penned an editorial for the campus newspaper that began “I nearly choked on my falafel when…”, seriously. And did you know that Pythagoras urged his followers not to eat falafel? I learned this in Intermediary Metabolism last semester. It’s because because traditional recipes contained fava beans, which contains divicine, which catalyse the transformation of oxygen to superoxide radical (bad!!) which are normally detoxified by glutathione peroxidase. People with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (essential to make glutathione peroxidase) deficiencies (~25% of the population) are unable to undergo this metabolic detoxification reaction and so face kidney failure, especially if they consume lots of fava beans!

That would be one of the 3,000,000 annoyingly meaningless facts I “learned” in university.

So… what were we talking about again? Oh yeah… falafels!

Falafels

2 cups canned chickpeas
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp fresh cilantro
1 tsp dried mint
1/2 tsp cumin
2 tbsp flour
1/2 cup medium-firm tofu
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil

The recipe indicates that all of these ingredients are to be blended until well-mixed. Unfortunatly, in addition to not having a tea strainer, my new apartment doesn’t have a blender. I did my best (somewhat pathetically) using an electric mixer, and it actually did mix pretty well… eventually.

Roll by hand into balls…..

…and then “saute balls in oil until browned on all sides”. Now, may I asked the question, how does one brown a sphere on all sides? If one browns a sphere on all sides in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it makes a sound? What is the sound of one falafel frying?

Anyway, so fry on medium high heat, in whatever way you are able, to get all sides brown. I went for Falafel Rectangular Cylinders:

I enjoyed these falafels all week in whole wheat pitas with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, hummus, bean sprouts, BBQ sauce, and mustard.

Finally I’d just like to share the lovely breakfast I had this morning: baked marinated tofu, alfalfa sprouts and cilantro on dill-potato bread.

-Maureen

I had forgotten what an amazing workout it is to box with WBK! If you are interested in non-competitive boxing training, I would highly recommend them! I can not think of any activity which has brought me greater pleasure, aside from seeing Daft Punk live at the Bell Centre last summer. I was too exhausted to prepare a meal from scratch after class, but was desperately in need of a high calorie meal! Here is what I came up with:

Clockwise from upper left: 1 container of yoso vanilla soy yogurt with 1 c of blackberries and half a banana, 2 T of hummus with 5 olives, 8 baby carrots, and half a whole wheat pita with 1 T of PB (although I am allergic to tree nuts, peanuts are still cool as far as I know!) and the other half of that banana.

It did the job!

- Aly

I made lunch for a omnivorous friend yesterday who was curious about the sorts of things I can eat with my allergies. I was quite nervous about this at first as I always want to leave my friends with a good impression of vegan fare! I ended up preparing roasted brussel sprouts, a salad and a pasta and mushroom combination:

It is going to be difficult, but not impossible, to get school stuff in to my photos now that the semester is over ;)!

I used the FFVK’s fantastically simple and delicious roasted Brussels sprout recipe. The blob of hummus in the salad was also inspired by various FFVK posts. The pasta dish was a mixture of Eddie’s vegetable confetti pasta, shiitake mushrooms, fresh oregano, onion and various herbs and spices. It turned out pretty well!

On a distantly related note, I had the pleasure of going to a vegan brunch today (I wish I had had my camera!) where I was introduced to Yoso, a tasty soy yogurt which was definitely more palatable than any other soy yogurt that I have tried!

- Aly

Okay, so I do have pics from my Valentine’s Day baked goods but my camera is being weird, so I’m posting a random mix of pictures from the last little while.

There are the gogi berries that Alison is always raving about. I guess they look kinda like almonds, but are chewy like dried cranberries.

Roasted-red pepper hummus. I’m not home right now but I’ll edit the recipe in later.

My second dinner of the night at Alison’s house. A mini carrot muffin and an oh-so-delicious sandwich. Unfortch, I can’t remember what was in it. Alison, help? The bread was gluten-free (GF) so it was pretty dense. GF foodies have my sympathy, for real. I had to go GF for a couple months in high school and I went crazy missing the soft texture of wheat bread and the convenience of all things wheat. (Random story: my sister eats GF and once a couple years ago my mom actually prepared several dishes free of wheat, rye, oats, barley, meat, eggs, & dairy!)

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I heart Herb and Spice, but I’m sick of getting ripped off by their baked tofu slices ($0.55 each!) so I decided to prepare my own. I bought a lb bulk from H&S for $1.89, sliced it into 1/2 in slices, brushed each (top & bottom) with sesame oil, then grilled it on my George Foreman. Et voila!

1 lb makes about 8 or 9 thick slices, which would have cost me $5 at Herb & Spice. A savings of $3 a week! (Yes, I do eat that much tofu…). Although, I inevitably end up buying some random bulk stuff while there to pick up the tofu so I’m actually not saving anything.

Happy Reading Week!

-Maureen