Nasu Dengaku and Kenchinjiru

Commemorating nine(!) years ago this week that I moved to Japan to teach English. Oh jeez.

Yuba Rolls!

I finally got around to making Yuba rolls! I've had something similar before at Buddhas vegetarian restaurant. They were not actually that hard to make. I soaked Yuba in vegetable stock, and filled it with daikon, shiitake, and tofu that had been marinated with ginger, onions, soy, salt, sugar and gochujang chili paste. And I rolled them like burrito and fried until all sides were golden. I can't wait to try them at lunch tomorrow!

Beautiful failure: rainbow vegan cookies

Never before have I put so much effort into something that turned out to be such a disappointment. These cookies took the better part of four hours to make, plus chilling time. My mistake(s)? Using an untested vegan sugar cutout cookie as my base. Making these cookies required mixing food colouring into six balls of dough, which decreased in size. The dough wasn't sweet or tasty enough to stand alone without icing. It couldn't stand up to all of the mixing required to get the colour evenly distributed. So I sadly threw 90% of these away. Lesson learned. Test first!

Eggplant "Meatball" Sandwich

So I made a giant batch of caponata for dinner at my boss' house.
It took all the steam out of me with my limited kitchen. But I needed to eat!
Enter the veggie meatball. I'm not really huge on fake meat but these were a gift from a friend who couldn't eat them.
I baked the meatballs for 15 minutes at 400° and then simmered them briefly with a few spoons of yesterday's caponata. Et voila! Meatball sub fake out!

What's in the Bun?

Garlic balsamic sprouts, Ont. corn tomato-olive-chickpea salad and rice/quinoa with seaweed

Meat Turtles

Not a recipe...an oddity.
I went to a barbecue last week and one of the guests had prepared these.
Burger body, hotdog limbs and a bacon shell. Jesus they were terrifying. But everyone who ate meat seemed to enjoy them.

Strawberry teff scones

In what will likely go down as the best Sunday ever, I shared strawberry scones at a picnic with my lovely friends from the notso amazon softball league and choir! choir! choir! recorded a short background clip for Hayden! My seventeen year old self couldn't stop swooning.