Week 39 - Made Two Ways

The "made two ways" theme has come up before in the 52 week cooking challenge, and I tackled this back in 2015 with a bunch of dishes using carrots. I'm often looking for quicker and simpler recipes these days, now that school is in session, so multiple dishes using the same ingredient can be a bit challenging. I had some trouble deciding on something for this challenge until it hit me that what I was already planning to make for one of our meals fit - loco moco. I was planning to use Impossible Burger and also make some vegan eggs on top, so based on the recipe from Nutti Nelli I was using as a starting point for the eggs and gravy, I was using soy in two ways - Impossible Burger and silken tofu!

Loco moco generally consists of white rice topped with a burger, fried egg, and a brown gravy. We had a few versions of it in Hawaii, but it had been a long time since we had it. We definitely hadn't eaten it since B came along, and with his egg allergy, I wasn't sure how to replicate it for our Hawaiian meal. The recipe I based this on had such an interesting veganized egg, and I couldn't wait to try it.

The egg white here was made out of a blend of silken tofu, kala namak (black salt), and cornstarch, with an egg yolk made from pumpkin puree, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, black pepper, and a little bit of water. I followed the recipe fairly closely here because I wanted it to turn out right. Blending everything together was easy, and laying down the "egg white" followed by a spoonful of "yolk" in the pan wasn't that difficult either. The hardest part for me was the actual cooking. It was supposed to fry for 2-4 minutes in the pan and be done, but what I wasn't expecting was just how fragile they would be. The first few broke as I tried to lift them, but I got a little bit better as time went on. This was definitely the most time-consuming part too, as they took a little longer than the estimate, plus I was being extra careful, trying not to break them.

As far as flavor, we wouldn't say that they tasted like eggs on their own, but more like a nicely-flavored tofu pudding. But they did have the appearance of a fried egg, and mixed into the final dish, they had the consistency of a runny egg. Eaten together with the burger and rice, it somehow did actually taste similar to loco moco, so the veganized egg brought in some elements of flavor similar to an egg. Such an interesting experiment!

For the rest of the dish, we just made a few cups of Calrose rice, patties of Impossible Burger seasoned with salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder, and gravy of vegan butter, flour, and chicken broth. I thought I had the right poultry seasonings to be able to make this fully vegan, but apparently I didn't, so we had to go with chicken bouillon. Maybe next time. I was also originally going to make mac salad on the side, but it wasn't meant to be, as this did take quite a while to make. Maybe next time!