Weekly Round Up: A Cooking Spree

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I brought a few cravings to life in the kitchen and the hubs and I saw THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE.

Eats/Cheap Lazy Vegan Fangirling

I got the mother of all food hankerings on Saturday thanks to this Cheap Lazy Vegan video about the menu at her vegan cafe.

Since Calgary is a bit of a hike (HI NICOLE want to stop by the SaVeg cafe and check it out for us???), my only option was to try to make my own versions of every single thing that she mentioned in the video.  After a lot of discipline I got the list down from "everything" to my two most pressing cravings: eggs benedict and japchae with gyoza.  I ran by the grocery store later in the day so that everything was ready to go on Sunday around lunchtime.

Eggs benedict is something that I like to order when I go out for breakfast but I've never tried to make it at home since Hollandaise sauce sounds complicated/fatty/not fun to make.  So that's why a vegan version of this dish sounded right up my alley.  I scoured the internet for recipes and found things that I liked and didn't like about various sources, so I cherry picked to get what I wanted:

"Eggs" from Sarah's Vegan Kitchen.  At first I thought that I would just use regular eggs - yes there was that time a few weeks ago when the grocery store was clean out of eggs but since then they've been fully stocked and jumbo eggs are currently $3.49 a dozen so we're managing.  But at the last minute I decided to live large and try tofu egg patties.  I used regular flour and left out the black salt since I didn't have any.  I wasn't sure how the breading was going to stick to the tofu but sure enough it did just fine.  I air fried the tofu slices in the air fryer at 360 for about 15 minutes.  Do they taste like eggs?  No, but in the context of the recipe they taste divine and exactly what I was going for.

Sauce from Minimalist Baker.  Pro tip, I used the leftover flour mixture from the "eggs" which was about one tablespoon.  And oh yes I'm not vegan so I used regular butter and milk.  It's been so long that I don't remember what real Hollandaise tastes like and now that I've made this sauce I've got no reason to find out.

Veggies: I really, really, really wanted avocado but of course there were no ripe ones at the store so that part of my craving is on hold for a few days.  The rest of the list was spinach, mushrooms, and red onion.

Anyhoo, I pan fried up the mushrooms, made the tofu eggs, and whipped up the sauce.  Then I toasted up an English muffin, put down a spoonful of sauce (yes veggies are all very well and fine but let's be honest that I'm here for the sauce), stacked up the veggies, and then topped it with the tofu patties and a bunch more sauce.

And it was everything that I dreamed of though man oh man I want that avocado so badly.

Afterwards I immediately made up 2x the sauce recipe since the one batch was very scant and as I've mentioned, the sauce is really what this is about for me.  I also decided to go for broke and pickle the leftover onions to make them last longer.  This is something that I keep hearing about but have never gotten around to trying.  My method was to goggle a bunch of pickled onion recipes to get the gist and then eyeball enough vinegar to cover the onions plus a spoonful of sugar and a pinch of salt.

This is what breakfast will look like for the foreseeable future until the obsession wears off.  

Next up, it was time for the japchae and gyoza.  I love gyoza but I've never been quite sure what to serve them with.  About the best that I've done was fried rice but as soon as I saw them with japchae I knew it would be a match made in heaven (plus I have a bunch of japchae in the pantry).

Again, it was a matter of cherry picking through recipes.  I got the idea to soak the japchae instead of boiling it via Beyond Kimchee and I used the sauce from Gimme Some Oven because I know from past experience that it's easy and yummy.  From there I stir fried onions, a red pepper, and a julienned carrot, tossed in the noddles and sauce, and then added spinach in the final minute.  The gyoza are from Trader Joe's and you just pan fry them from frozen so that's dead easy as well.  I took a taste and I'm looking forward to diving into this for lunches and dinners next week.

Workouts

Week 3 of 10 of Caroline Girvan's Epic III is done and dusted.  I like it a lot, there's just nothing new to say about it.

Watching

Woof!  My husband found The Worst Movie Ever Made AND WE WATCHED IT THIS WEEKEND.  I cannot bear to link the trailer, so I'll let you watch it on IMDB if you're so inclined.  Click if you dare to learn more about Fateful Findings.

This leads to a philosophical discussion that there are reasons to watch bad movies.  In this case we're interested in a related documentary and we felt that we needed to check out the source material.  The problem is that Fateful Findings is way too bad to just sit down and watch.  It's not like Showgirls or The Room, which are so bad that they are delightful, this movie is truly a slog.  The experience reminded me very much of that time that I saw down to watch a slasher movie called The Evil Dead.  There were reasons why I wanted to see it (to get the background on the very funny spoofs that came later) but I don't have the stomach to just sit down and watch 90 minutes of gore.  The way that I got though The Evil Dead was to watch the first half one day and then the next day I finished it in 5 minute chunks over the course of a bright sunlit afternoon.  We took a similar approach with Fateful Findings.  It's 140 minutes long so we watched 40 minutes on Friday, 30 minutes on Saturday, and 30 minutes on Sunday.

Reading

Still on on Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, still loving it, still determined to keep it going for as long as I can.

Your turn: whatcha cooking?  Have you ever watched a bad movie on purpose for bragging rights?  Ever had a book that was so good that you took forever to read it?