Ching Ohana Home Cooking Journal

Life happened. As much as I love food, I have realized I cannot eat the same way I did when I was a teenager. I teach about the importance of a whole-foods plant-based diet, but I don't always practice it. Now that I'm on summer break with more time to meal prep, I'm using this space to keep myself accountable as I dive back into whole-foods plant-based cooking. Tofu and Sweet Potato Peanut Butter Curry  by Hetty Lui McKinnon from NYT Cooking was easy to put together. I didn't have plain frozen peas on hand, so I used the frozen peas and carrots mix we had instead, and it turned out great. The recipe calls for serving it over rice, but since I'm trying to lower my A1C, I opted for quinoa instead. I also made Tofu Scramble With Black Beans and Corn , another recipe by Hetty Lui McKinnon from NYT Cooking. This will be breakfast for the next couple of days, with whole-wheat tortillas and fresh sprouts.

Langar ki dal, creamy mixed lentils Cucumber raita Aloo jeera, cumin spiced potatoes One thing about Indian food is that it's already mostly vegetarian, and many things are straight up vegan if you use oil instead of ghee. During our strict phase, we ate a fair amount of Indian food. Now, we don't cook that much of it since it's not a family favorite, but occasionally when I feel the need to eat something different, I can whip out a couple of dishes from things we have lying around. All recipes from Urvashi Patel's Indian Instant Pot cookbook . Secret ingredient in the lentils? Ajinomoto!

This has become a staple in our house because it is so easy and the daughter loves mushrooms. It's from Serious Eats . Tofu, olive oil, a little lemon juice, miso, wine, and mushrooms, over pasta. Too easy! The one thing about the recipe is that it calls for 2 tsp pepper, which is a lot of pepper. I don't mind, but it's pretty aggressively peppery if you use that much.

Pumpkin baked ziti out of the Veganomicon cookbook. I ran out of panko for the topping so I ground up some toasted no-knead bread. It was, uh, chewy but not totally unpleasant since it still did the job of adding texture to the dish.

Obviously we neglected the blog for 2.5 years here, but we're in the mood to start posting things again, for no real reason other than we felt like it. This post was written in February 2021 but placed in January to kick off the journal reboot. The biggest food change since the last 2018 post was that we began eating a more plant based diet in late 2019. Initially we were pretty strict, but if we went out to eat, we would eat fish and occasionally other meats, like chicken or pork. We ate a lot of tofu and cooked a lot of dishes from Veganomicon. They would have made for some great posts. Samosas, lasagna, baked pastas, sandwiches, seitan, dumplings... the list goes on and on. For the most part they were great, but there were some disasters too. One time I forgot to add enough liquid to the mac and cheese and it came out dry and sticky and barely edible, though I did try to serve it... After a few months of a mostly vegan diet, we eventually loosened up, maybe because the pande...

2/27/21: Posting some old photos that I had sent to the blog but never written up. Frittata with shoyu pork? I don't think I would make that again.