Since we’re now trying to eat plant based, I attempted a fancy Valentine’s dinner using mostly vegan (cheated a bit with butter and cheese) ingredients:
- Appetizers: air fried sweet potato fries and stuffed dates
- Main course: air fried marinated tofu with soy ginger glazed veggies on a bed of sweet potato puree. Vegetable stock based sauce on top
- Palate cleanser: the vegetable stock used for sauce / cooking veggies in
Overall meal was tasty but imbalanced, there was too much flavor that got a bit overwhelming. Dates + sweet potato puree both very rich. Sauce added strong flavors. Should have had something lighter to cut through the richness.
Notes on each part:
- Vegetable stock - soaked kombu and shittake and their water, baked button mushrooms, kombu, miso, onions, carrots, celery, radish for half an hour at 350F. Mix all together and cook in pot of water for an hour. Does not taste that good on its own, but made into a sauce (+ soy sauce and roux) was really nice. A bit bitter, might be because I didn’t take out the kombu when cooking the stock. Baking definitely intensified taste, but might actually be better without it.
- Air fried Sweet potato fries - did not turn out. Not crisp at all, though the darkened bits tasted very caramelized, pretty good
- Sweet potato puree - 500g sweet potato thin, 100g water, 100g butter, 4g salt. Cook til water almost all evaporated. Blend. Tasted really nice texture-wise, a bit too buttery
- Green beans + carrots with a soy ginger sauce. Tasted okay. Color got really dark, which isn’t great for plating Air fried tofu with a soy + sesame oil marinade. Quite good
- Stuffed dates - take out seed, add in parmigiano + almond. Almond adds really good texture, parmigiano flavor went well with it