Vegetarian Recipe: Chinese Five Spice Quorn & Celery Stir Fry

 

If you've never tried a vegetarian Chinese recipe with Five Spice that might be because it's most often used with meats like chicken and beef. I first tried this flavour combination when I was still eating meat, in a Beef Stew simmering in a five spice sauce for 5 hours and the flavour of the spices was something I'd never experienced before! As a vegetarian, I don't think something so wonderful should be off limits so, I've decided to try it with vegetarian meat substitute, Quorn.
 
Because it's such a staple of Chinese cuisine, 'Chinese Five Spice' or simply '5 Spice' should be available in any good international food shop though the specific blend of spices may vary. Apparently the name is a reference, not to a specific number of spices, but rather a balance of five types of flavour: sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, and salty. So while one recipe may include aniseed, fennel seed, ground cinnamon, whole cloves and whole peppercorns another might feature star anise or cumin or ginger. The mix that I used, was mostly cinnamon with coriander powder, bay leave powder, star anise powder and a hint of all spice.

I chose a stir fry as a first go because it's easy to control the flavours and I had a real hankering for cooked celery! I found that the mixture actually worked alot like a curry powder in that adding a little bit of water to it made a really thick sauce. I was interested to see how Quorn worked with seasoning and was pleasantly surprised.

Vegetarian Recipe: Chinese Five Spice Quorn & Celery Stir Fry

Ingredients
1 tbsp cooking oil
2 celery stalks
1 spring onion or chive stalk
1 green pepper
2 cloves of garlic
1 cup of Quorn pieces or 1 cubed Quorn fillet
1 tsp of Chinese Five Spice
1 cup of water
 2 tsp vinegar
1 tsp garlic powder

Also, before beginning my prep, I put on the rice in the rice cooker, so it's all ready when the stir fry is done. 

1. Chop celery and green pepper into bite sized pieces. Finely chop green onion and garlic.
2. Heat oil in pan and add vegetables with Quorn pieces at the same time on medium heat. 
3. Cook for a few minutes until the celery begins to soften. Next add the five spice to the mixture stirring until well coated.
4. Don't let the stir fry dry out, use your cup of water (I added a few drops of soy sauce to this) to create a nice sauce by slowly adding to the mixture as it cooks.
5. Stir regularly and taste to make sure it's to your liking. If it's too sweet, add a bit of vinegar. Too bitter, add some soy sauce. I found that I need to to top up with a bit of garlic powder but key is to keep flavouring it as you go along.
6. When the rice is ready and the veg is nice an soft, then it's time to eat.

Happy Birthday to Hip Hop Vegan, Andre 3000

Source PETA

 It's May 27, which means that Roots and Greens has the honour of celebrating the birthday one our favourite human beings and commited vegan, Mr. Andre 3000. Along with performing serious services to awesomeness with hip hop crew Outkast, Andre 3000 has dabbled in acting, activism, fashion, and music production. His commitment to the cause earned him a place as PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrity in 2004. For his birthday, I put on the Love Below and I've prepared a special Andre 3000 inspired vegan meal that even Ms. Jackson would like. Happy birthday Dre, I hope you like the Bombs over Butter bean Cassoulet with Idle -Wild Rice and Spinachplayalisticohsosimpesideofsalad as much as I did.

  Idle-Wild Rice

Wild rice needs a little bit more prep than most store bought rice. I used a Thai Glutinous Black Rice for this and it need to be soaked for a hour before I could put it in rice cooker - but it was worth the wait for the beautiful colour and nutty flavour of the rice. I'll be honest, though, I didn't find it that sticky! 

Chinese Stir Fry: Rice vs. Rice Noodles

I love a good stir fry. Because, I mean, who doesn't?  The question I sometimes ask myself though is, should I use rice noodles or rice? Let's settle this once and for all!

Ease of preparation:

I have rice cooker. It's amazing. I love it. I wrote a song about it, it's that awesome.

If you don't have one of these amazing contraptions, rice cookers let you make perfect rice 99.99% of the time with no stirring or straining. Rice in. Water to the line. Click. Cook. When it's done it even keeps it warm. So basically if I'm hooking up a stir fry, I can set it up before I get chopping and it'll be ready when I'm done. Sweet!

Of course...rice noodles are also pretty quick on the cook up. I literally boil the kettle and pour hot water on top of vermicelli style noodles and they're done. You have to drain off the excess, but it's pretty flipping easy.

It's a close call but I'm giving the edge to the rice because the rice cooker means that I my rice won't go cold if there's a delay. Without a rice cooker, I would say that this one goes to the rice noodles.

Munchability:

With chopsticks, this is easy: noodles. End of. And even with a fork I think you're still more likely get most of your meal in your face and less on the floor with noodles.

One all.

Tastiness - the tie breaker:

In general, rice noodles are a bit like tofu, they taste like whatever you cook them in. This is great with a tasty sauce. Rice on the other hand can lend a whole new dimension to your average stir fry. Don't limit yourself to Uncle Ben's, jasmine, basmati, Thai fragrant, wild, and brown rice will each bring a different party to your palate. There are apparently more than 35,000 different types of rice grown in the world. That' s a lot of grain. While there are lots of different types of noodle - wheat, rice, potato, egg, yam - you generally only come across one type of rice noodle in various shapes. The winner, for best stir fry cooker upper, must therefore be...rice.

Congratulations for being yummyful.