Bok Choy Bohemia | A Vegetarian Blog

Friday, March 20, 2009

Black Bean Un-Koftas, Crumbled Potatoes with Edamame, and Red Cooked Daikon

This was a very ethnic meal, which I’m sometimes thrilled with, and other times they can be a flop. This one was good. Flipping through Brand Name Chinese, I saw a recipe for lamb koftas, which are meatballs with an almond stuffed inside, covered with a thick yogurt based gravy. Commence mission veganize:
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I came up with my own “meatball” recipe based loosely on a combination of their instructions for lamb ones and the beanballs from V’con. That follows:

Ingredients
1 15.5 ounce can black beans, drained
½ cup panko bread crumbs
¼ cup vital wheat gluten
2 tbs. olive oil
2 tbs tomato paste
2 tbs. soy sauce
4 tbs. cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp garam masala

Directions
Preheat oven to 375. Mash the beans in a bowl until pretty smooth. Add all the other ingredients, and mix until uniform. Feel free to get your hands in there and do some kneading to activate the gluten. I did…but then I really enjoy being tactile with my food.
Shape the mixture into balls slightly larger than walnuts. Grease a large glass casserole dish, and place the balls about 1 inch apart. Drizzle more oil over the tops of the beanballs.
Bake for 20 minutes at 375F, Flip, and bake for another 10 minutes, remove.


I elected not to stuff an almond inside the balls, just because I wasn’t really in the mood for a nutty surprise. Knowing me, I’d forget it was in there and choke on the thing. You could definitely do it though, and keep everything else about the recipe the same. I copied the gravy directly from the cookbook, so I can’t share that recipe, but I can say that I replaced the yogurt with ¾ cup of plain soy milk. It was delicious.

The latter two recipes were from Madhur’s World Vegetarian, and I was pretty happy with both. The potato dish tasted very good, although they were more like heavily flavored mashed potatoes then crumbled potatoes…I mean they were crumbled….until they were boiled with water for twenty minutes. I’ve always been a fan of potato dishes with turmeric, which was definitely delivered in this:

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The dish was supposed to mix peas in with the potatoes, but I only had edamame, so I went with that. Peas would’ve been good too…

Last but not least, was something called ‘red-cooked daikon’. This was supposed to simply be daikon stewed with scallions, but I had to replace scallions with leftover bok choy. This also wasn’t red, so if someone could explain the name to me I’d really appreciate it.

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I did learn how to roll-cut daikon in the process of making this recipe, but I still don’t understand why it’s called roll-cutting…there’s nothing “rolled” about it. Basically, you’re cutting the radish into triangles. I’ve decided I very much like my daikon cooked until tender though, so this is something I’ll be doing again.

Selah.

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