Veggie Terrorist

For this week, I'm featuring a recipe I tried from FOOD Magazine's sister, Foodie Magazine. We have about four or five of these magazines in our rack, which was part of brother's collection, but sadly, the magazine is no longer in publication. I guess ABS-CBN Publication would just want to concentrate on FOOD Magazine.

Anyway, this recipe came out in their Vol. 2 No. 1 issue. It was shared by Lourd de Veyra (of Radioactive Sago Project), and was a dish he adapted from a small resto in Teachers Village. According to him, he didn't know why it was called Veggie Terrorist, but he suspected it was the curry that gave it some racist connotations. It's not his original recipe, but since he tweaked it a bit and became my inspiration for this dish, I guess I can attribute the recipe to him.




Veggie Terrorist
{Serves 6}

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup veggie meat cutlets, diced
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce or liquid seasoning
• 1 cup of tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• vegetable oil, for frying
• 2 tablespoons chopped garlic
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 small can button mushrooms, drained and sliced
• 1/2 cabbage, shredded
• 3 cups left over rice
• 2 tablespoons yellow curry powder

How to Cook:

• Marinade veggie meat cutlets in soy sauce, salt, and pepper (or liquid seasoning) for 10 minutes then drain. If needed, squeeze well to extract all remaining liquid.
• Heat oil in pan over medium heat. Fry cutlets until crunchy, like bits of chicharon. Remove from pan and set aside.
• In the same pan, brown the tofu then set aside.
• In a large wok, saute garlic and onions in butter until translucent. Add the mushroom and the cabbage, toss well. Add the rice, curry powder, tofu, and the crunchy veggie meat bits. Mix briefly. Season with salt and pepper. Serve in bowls.
  

Points to Consider:

• Make the veggie meat crunchy, because the pleasure of this dish is in the texture (guess that is why it's "terrorist").
• You may also opt to add a bit of the marinade in the rice while cooking.
  

I don't know where to buy veggie meat, so I tweaked this recipe a bit just to make use of what we had in the pantry. Instead of veggie meat, I used real beef - cut into little pieces and marinated in soy sauce, pepper, sugar, and sesame oil. After a few hours of marinating, I cooked it in a hot pan with some butter, and when the beef is cooked, I went on to cooking the whole dish. This one didn't have the tofu, though. It was quite late when I realized we didn't have one in the fridge. Guess I will just re-create the dish sometime in the future.

If Lourd de Veyra called his dish "Veggie Terrorist," I called mine, "Asian Infusion," because I combined Korean (sesame oil) with Thai or Indian (curry powder). The dish, even though tofu was missing, still tasted great. My brother didn't comment on the food - but him cooking the dish a few days later was proof enough that he liked it. :) The curry powder was the key ingredient here, it just blended together well.

*** Jenn ***