This is one of my very favorite recipes from Vegan With a Vengeance (VWAV). There are several good reasons for this, not the least of which is it’s delicious peanut and lime flavour explosion. It also happens to contain one of my favorite vegetables… bean sprouts! It’s also a lot of food for the price, we get 7 meals when we make this and it costs approximately 7 dollars. On the last iteration, which was Monday night, we both had dinner (I had seconds) and we still had 5 lunches worth of food… yowzas! It’s also very straight forward to make, you only spend about 4 minutes frying things once you have the prep work done.
Here’s our creation:
You should be able to discern the following ingredients, in order of glaring visibility (with ties going in favour of vibrant colours): lime wedge, cilantro, rice noodles, green onion, red onion, bean sprouts, peanuts and tofu. There’s also some garlic and lemon grass kicking around in there somewhere. The sauce is rice vinegar, tamari, hot sauce, sugar and tomato paste.
There are a lot of pictures of this dish on flickr, a search for ‘Brooklyn Pad Thai vegan’ yeilds a list of 31 photos. Here’s one of the better composed ones:
I have no idea how this compares to authentic pad thai purchased in Brooklyn, but here’s a shot of what I can only assume the real thing looks like:
I wonder where the cilantro is? If crushed peanuts, rice noodles, bean sprouts and a slice of lime define Brooklyn pad thai then I think ours is a shining example.
Looks tasty. I picked up La Dolce Vegan and adapted her Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe to suit my piece de’ resistance: Cinnamon Apple Cheesecake. I’ll let you know how it turns out as it is cooling as I write this.
Cinnamon apple… sounds ambitious! What does it use instead of cheese? For my last birthday my housemate made me a cheesecake using Tofutti cream cheese and it was amazing… of course it ended up costing like 20 bucks but it was well worth it. I wonder why I never blogged about it… hmm.
No fake cream cheese here. If you have La Dolce Vegan, it’s the recipe for the pumpkin cheesecake. Instead of fake cream cheese it uses a combo of firm and either silken/regular tofu (I used regular-next time i will use silken). The main thing I changed was the use of pumpkin in the filling. Instead I used 1 Tbsp of cinnamon, 2 Tbsp apple juice, 1-2 tsp vanilla. The flour the recipe calls for may not be neccessary. I found it gave the cake a bit of a pasty flavour (ie. you could taste the flour) but I don’t know if that is needed as a binder since there are no eggs in this recipe. Once the cake cools down, you top it with apple pie filling. It turned out very well and was much closer to the real thing than I would have thought. Again the only changes would be to use silken tofu for a more creamy texture and possibly reduce the amount of flour. In terms of cost, it is much cheaper than a traditional cheesecake which, in my experience, uses 3-4 blocks of cream cheese and 3-4 eggs. The cost is reduced by using tofu instead ($2 for a block here).
And if you are going to try it, I recommend a food processor and adding each ingredient one at a time until fully incorporated into the mix.
I imagine the tofu is healthier too…
This is a great idea for the upcoming thanksgiving fiasco :) Thanks for sharing your tweaks and experience.
Speaking of vegan versions of tasty non-vegan things, we ordered a tube of Teese, the latest vegan cheese. We made some little pizza’s last night and it was pretty impressive. We’ll be posting some photos etc soon.