You gotta eat: Chicken-style tofu nuggets and Sweet Potato Chickpea Curry
This month, we made two recipes from Jenné Claiborne at Sweet Potato Soul. Jenné is one of my go-to vegan recipe resources. I love her meal-planning guides and her how-to videos.
Chicken-style nuggets
I have a confession: I have no memory of ever eating chicken nuggets.
I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life, and I wasn’t a meat-eater as a little kid. Chicken nuggets became widely available in 1983 with the nationwide launch of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. So I missed what seems to be a mainstay of children’s diets.
I do, however, enjoy the novelty of eating a dish that I have no experience with. So when Sweet Potato Soul sent out a link to her chicken-style tofu nuggets, it was an enthusiastic: “I’m in!”
This is an easy weekday meal, especially if you split the prep from the cooking. Great with salad and grilled cheese. The most time-consuming part is pressing the tofu. We have a locally made tofu press I found from Seattle Products on Etsy. It’s a bamboo press, and we really love it.
We press tofu anywhere from one to two hours, sometimes less; it just depends on how much time we have. For this recipe, you tear the tofu after pressing it. This is a great technique if you’re using any sort of sauce; it creates more crevices for the marinade than a straight cut might. I usually press the tofu as a separate step. I put the liquids in one bowl, and the dry ingredients in another bowl. Robert usually does the assembly and the air frying.
Whenever we try a recipe, and we’re ready to make it again within a couple of days, you know it’s good. One of the things I like about this is that it tastes great. It’s relatively healthy, and it’s versatile.
Recipe note: If you don’t have dill pickle juice, you can use apple cider vinegar as a substitute. But this recipe is a great excuse to get some dill pickles.
Sweet Potato Chickpea Curry
Jenné also has a supper club. She picks a recipe and invites everyone to make the dish and share the results. For March, the recipe is Sweet Potato Chickpea Curry. I like chickpeas and curries, so this was another easy yes. I made this as a weeknight meal, and again, I split up the prep, which seems to be my go-to on almost everything, so I got all the ingredients together. I cut the onion. I pressed the garlic. I mince the ginger. I assembled the spices and drained the chickpeas, reserving the liquid (A.K.A., aquafaba) to make whipped cream.*
Then I came back and assembled the dish. This sweet potato chickpea curry uses mainly pantry staples. As long as you have a sweet potato and an onion, you’re good to go. You might need to stock up on Garam Masala. I tend to stock up on the bags from Penzey’s. I do not fool around with stocking Garam Masala (or cumin): I go for the big jars. You can also make Garam Masala; there are good recipes online, and it’s worth doing if you have the time.
Recipe notes: Because I had a fairly large sweet potato, I microwaved it first to make it easier to cut. It also made the sweet potato easier to peel, and the dish cooked more quickly. Win-win-win. We used fire-roasted canned tomatoes to make this dish.
I appreciate that Jenné explains why you do certain things, and that is very helpful because you can then apply what you learn to other recipes. The result was a dish that tasted like one served by a favorite Indian restaurant.
* I never want aquafaba to go to waste. This curry recipe yields enough aquafaba to make a mixer bowl full of whipped cream or about three whipped topping-sized containers of whipped cream. No ultraprocessing here! This homemade whipped cream has four ingredients: aquafaba, sugar, cream of tartar, and vanilla extract. You will beat it longer than you think you need to, but you’ll have creamy topping straight from the freezer without thawing.
P.S. We made the mug cake recipe from Nora Cooks to celebrate our anniversary, the one with more traditional ingredients: Chocolate Vegan Mug Cake. Loved it!
Photo by Anthony Camp on Unsplash
