meansoybean

Look at what I made yesterday… the Sticky rice in lotus leaves from Chow Vegan’s blog.

In preparation for this, I took a trip to Hawai. Not the vacation spot, but the grocery store in Ville Saint-Laurent (1999 Marcel-Laurin). Have you heard of it? It’s a pan-Asian market that offers such a huge selection of foodstuffs that you have to visit to believe it. To give you an indication of what’s in store, they have an entire aisle dedicated to noodles — more than half of which contains ramen.Whenever I go, I spend about an hour carefully walking through each aisle — it’s that interesting, even if it’s not all vegan. (This is the place I used to buy vegan ready-to-eat, made-in-China, frozen sticky rice wrappers).

Anyway, lotus leaves and sweet rice in hand, I took a stab at making my own… sticky rice wrappers. Given that it’s a multi-step recipe, I think it went well. I neglected to soak the rice before cooking, chalk that up to not reading carefully. The leaves were a bit awkward to soak, as I didn’t have a large enough vessel to do it in. I used Yves Spicy Italian sausage, but next time I think I’ll use some sort of vegan asian “meat” instead, like the stuff found at Tiende Santé. If I could, I’d totally use a vegan chinese sausage, but the faux versions I’ve encountered have milk in them (why?!).

As you can see, I need to practice the leaf-folding, they look kinda funny, but it doesn’t affect the taste. I don’t have a bamboo steamer, so I just put a round cooling rack, without the plate, in the wok and used the lid. Besides being a little on the wet side, it turned out swell. Horray!