So for the last Saturday of January I prepared the broccolini and sweet sesame salad from p. 94 of Plenty and also featured online here, and the brussels sprouts and tofu dish from p. 105 of Plenty and featured here.  I’ve been totally obsessed with Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty and these two asian inspired meals captured my attention. After cooking and eating them I realized that everything I had made was vegan, except some might want to swap agave for the honey in the broccolini sauce. So here you go, a healthy, delicious, and an unintentionally vegan feast :)

Me showing off the unintentionally vegan feast

As any reader of Plenty will know, some of the ingredients are seriously difficult to source. There’s no quick dash to the grocery store when it comes to these recipes.  I looked all over and let me tell you, as far as I’m concerned, nigella seeds don’t exist in grocery stores.  I even looked up alternative names on  Wikipedia such as black caraway, and Roman coriander, but the Safeway spice guy was at a loss. It appears that the internet is the way for these supposedly delectable seeds (I wouldn’t know quite yet) and here is a nice cheap version of the seeds.

Me checking in with Ottolenghi to make sure I’m getting everything right!

So the first step of the broccolini and sweet sesame salad is to make the sauce, which involves whisking together tahini paste (I bought this from the Middle eastern store down on San Pablo and University but I’m sure regular grocery stores have it too), water, a garlic clove, tamari soy sauce (not sure exactly why tamari soy sauce is specified here, but I took his word for it and bought it), honey (substitute agave if you are vegan), cider vinegar, and salt. Next, you have to blanche the vegetables. So as you’ve probably figured out by now by my tales of bumbling around the kitchen, I’m a total novice at this.  I’m sure many more could manage to blanche broccolini, grab it out of bowling water and rinse it off and boil the snow peas and green beans in the same water more adeptly than I, but basically I used a plastic tong to grab the vegetables out of the boiling water and dumped them into a colander in the sink.  I think I need to buy one of those scoopable colanders if I’m going to keep up with this! So basically you blanch the vegetables then rinse and dry them, add some oil and sesame seeds, and then mix in the sauce, and voila, delicious hearty salad! It’s really a very tasty and hearty salad and you can see I had a lot of fun making it despite the difficulties blanching the vegetables :)

Mixing in the tahini and sweet sesame sauce with the broccolini, green beans, and snow peas

And here is the completed dish!

Broccolini and sweet sesame salad

Next I put some white rice in my handy rice cooker, and started onto the brussels sprouts and tofu dish. I must say, this is one of the most delicious ways I’ve ever had tofu or brussels sprouts before. Bravo, Ottolenghi! This dish is pretty easy too. I had never bothered to marinate and sear tofu in this way before (usually I just throw it into a stir fry and add teriyaki sauce or soy vay) but the marinade on this dish is so good. It definitely takes an investment into buying a lot of asian sauces (see below), but hopefully I will find a use for my giant bottle of sweet chilli sauce! I’d actually never used sunflower or peanut oils before so I had to buy those for this dish as well, but less than a month later and I’m already almost out of my sunflower oil so it’s definitely a useful oil to have on hand!

Ingredients for brussels sprouts and tofu dish

You have to whisk together 2tbsp of sweet chilli sauce (I bought this at Safeway in a ginormous bottle for under $3), 1.5 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp sesame oil (this stuff is really really good, definitely worth buying), 1 tsp rice vinegar, and 1 tbsp maple syrup.  I learned the importance of real maple syrup while living on a farm in Vermont in high school (it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup! Tapping trees is hard! Real maple syrup is wayyyy better than the fake stuff!) so I always happen to have real maple syrup on hand. So whisk together the ingredients for the marinade, place the tofu in it, and set aside.

Sauteeing shiitake mushrooms, green onions, and chile

This dish actually called for mushrooms, so of course I loved that :) After sauteeing the brussels sprouts in a ton of sunflower oil and getting them super crispy in one dish, I had to chop up onion, a red chile, and mushrooms to saute in a different pan. I was super nervous chopping up the red chile so I was a nerd and put plastic bags on my hand. I’ve heard enough horror stories of friends cutting chiles with their bare hands and then burning their eyes while taking out their contacts to know to be careful!  Next, add the tofu to the pan and let it caramelize.

Brussels sprouts with tofu and mushrooms

These dishes complemented each other really well and resulted in a hearty, substantial, tasty, healthy, vegetarian dish. It was the kind of food that just made you feel healthy and good about yourself eating it!

Broccolini and sweet sesame salad, brussels sprouts and tofu, and white rice vegetarian meal