Vegan MoFo, Day 7 – Make / Eat Something Inspired by a Book or Film

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (clip may be considered NSFW due to one instance of profanity)

Have no fear, Todd – your intrepid Fake Meat and True Love blogging staff has you covered! That’s right, Chicken Parmesan is, in fact, vegan…at least if you do it our way!

We started this one out using Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe for Breast of Tofu. It is a deceptively simple recipe – marinate tofu for one to fourteen days in a mixture of water, soy sauce, nutritional yeast, garlic granules, and onion granules, et voila! Your tofu is miraculously transformed into a fabulous substitute for chicken. All the flavor, none of the cruelty!

From there, nothing else in this dinner came from a book. I can’t provide you with a recipe, because I didn’t measure anything. Don’t worry though, I’ll tell you what went into everything. Mostly, it was garlic.

I peeled a lot of garlic. These were monster cloves, too! The largest one was about an inch and a half long.

The most important part of any Parmesan dish is your red sauce. Mine is never the same twice – it depends on what’s in the house and how I’m feeling on that particular day. Today, I started with a ton of the garlic pictured above (minced) and some chopped sweet yellow peppers sauteed in olive oil. Once they were nice and golden, I added some of the beautiful tomatoes we canned last summer, dried basil, dried Turkish oregano, red pepper flakes, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper. I let that cook down for a good 45 minutes while I worked on everything else.

The “chicken” needed to be breaded and fried after it came out of its marinade. I dredged it in flour, dipped it in soy milk, and pressed it into some panko crumbs, and then into the hot oil. Look at how delicious and golden brown they came out!

Look at that!

For those of you who don’t know yet, Miyoko’s Creamery is now producing a vegan “buffalo” mozzarella. We tried it for the first time tonight, and it is astonishing how much it tastes like dairy mozzarella! It freaks us out a little bit, actually. It was perfect for this dish – each piece of tofu got a dollop of sauce and a few hunks of the mozzarella, and then it was into the oven for about 15 minutes at 375 degrees. It didn’t melt as much as I had hoped…I’m thinking that I need to try to slice it a little thinner next time.

Meanwhile, I also cooked some spaghetti and roasted some broccolini. I sprayed it with a little canola oil from our mister and sprinkled on some of the aforementioned garlic and some steak spice that we accidentally ordered from World Spice Merchants, our favorite spice store. It went into (and out of) the oven at the same time as the chicken.

To round the entire meal out, I made some of my famous garlic bread. I started with a nice loaf of bread from the grocery store bakery, but dressed it up with fresh garlic, garlic granules, dried basil, dried oregano, salt, and pepper before toasting it up in the oven. All together, a hearty and delicious meal suitable for vegans and non-vegans alike!

SO PRETTY.

It even looks like chicken on the inside!

I ate too much of it, but after my stomach settles down, I’ll try to have some dessert.

Not necessarily milk and eggs, b****.

Cheers,

Mike