french toast in france

Greetings, friendly readers.

As you may have noticed, I took a hiatus from posting due to a hellish and hectic spring finals period followed by a summer of European travels and then a cross-Boston move.  I never intended for the gap in posts to grow so long, but what can I say?   In the words of John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

While Europe was an amazing experience, both culinarily speaking and otherwise, it posed a number of challenges to plant-based eating (and yoga practice too, but that’s a whole different story).  Let’s just say that I got quite adept at reading food labels in other languages.  Now that I’m back in my own kitchen, regular posting should resume.  But first,  I thought I would share a few words about my Euro-cooking experiments.

While I was lucky enough to travel all over Europe over the course of the summer, I was largely stationed in Strasbourg, France, where I had an internship with the Council of Europe.  Although the kitchen in my flat was workable, I felt a bit lost without some of my beloved kitchen tools and appliances.  It only took one day of drinking Nescafe for me to invest in a French Press, but the lack of a food processor was another story entirely.  I found myself buying packaged hummus for the first time in over a year — only to discover that the Euro-version of this vegan staple listed lait as its second ingredient.   I’m not even sure that such a product could rightfully be called  hummus.  As Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romano so accurately put it in their excellent cookbook Veganomicon, “Hummus is to vegans what air is to the rest of humanity.”

Luckily, I landed a sweet and spirited roommate named Rita, a Portugese girl who shared my interest in cooking.  Rita’s mother shipped her a hand-held blender, which is quite a handy device.  It functions much like a blender or food processor, yet is considerably easier to clean (if my old yoga teacher Scot happens to read this, he will be thinking “I told you so”).  Rita was generous enough to loan me the use of her blender to make my vegan French Toast batter.   She also turned me on to the organic whole grain bread stand at the biweekly farmer’s market in our neighborhood.  This thick, hearty bread made for fantastic French toast.  When topped with maple syrup, shaved chocolate, shredded coconut, toasted almonds and fresh organic berries, it was really to die for.  It even won Rita’s seal of approval: “If I could eat like this,” she said, “I could be a vegetarian, too.”

Unfortunately my apartment lacked measuring cups, so I can’t provide the measurements I used (and even if I did have measuring cups, they would have been in metric).  The batter is similar to my perviously posted French Toast recipe, which goes to show how malleable such recipes are.   But I found the addition of a banana into the batter yields a very tasty end result.  The batter should be the consistency of a thick milkshake; add more soy milk to thin it out.  You can make a big batch of this and keep in the fridge and have French Toast all week (you may need to add more soy milk to thin it out). Basically, blend or process the following together:

  • banana
  • firm tofu
  • soy milk
  • whole wheat flour
  • raw sugar
  • vanilla bean

Then heat a skillet with a bit of oil and, after submersing slices of the bread of your choice in the batter, fry the bread on each side until golden brown.  The bread I was using in France was very dense and chunky, so I even stood the bread up on its side and heated the edges for a bit, just until browned.  Then go all out and top with fruit, chocolate shavings, coconut, nuts, cinnamon,  maple syrup — whatever strikes your fancy.

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So onto . . . cooking with orange juice?

stir fry

Yep.  In trying to improvise stir-frying in France, I started using orange juice, which provides a great tangy sweetness that really compliments cooked leafy greens like spinach, which I used in the pictured dish above.  This is good knowledge to have because orange juice is easy to find, easy to keep on hand, and incredibly versatile.  OJ also goes well with tomato based dishes — orange juice, tomatoes, and cinnamon make a fabulous combination, for examle.  To use the OJ in your stir-fries, just start with a bit of oil and add your veggies in layers, incorporating the orange juice toward the end.  I found that orange juice, coconut milk, and soy sauce make a fantastically creamy stir-fry trio (especially when cooked with fresh minced ginger).