Thai pizza (or Caribbean jerk pizza) with coconut crust

I've been making both Thai pizza and Caribbean jerk pizza (with tropical mango / pineapple salsa) for about 20 years, and it finally hit me: why not a coconut pizza crust!



So the recipe for both Thai pizza and Caribbean jerk pizza is available at http://food.sciencejon.com
http://food.sciencejon.com

The only thing you need to change is to substitute 1/4 cup melted coconut oil for the 1/4 olive oil. The flavor is really lovely, and it's a bit more flaky and tender than normal pizza crust. In the Thai pizza above I also added some powdered galangal, ginger, turmeric, and lemongrass.

Next time I make the Caribbean pizza I'll try the coconut crust and add a photo here.

Review of Beyond Meat @ Tropical Smoothie Cafe

I was curious to try the new "Beyond Meat" product at Tropical Smoothie Cafe. I'd had it a couple of times other places but it was always super bland and not that good. These looked better, but I was curious what non-vegetarians would think. Often I think fake meat is not that realistic, while other veg*ns think it's just like the real thing.

So I bought several sandwiches (Thai peanut, Jamaican jerk, and buffalo) for myself and 6 of my colleagues and we had a taste test. Here's the pile of sandwiches before opening:


The ratings for "overall quality / deliciousness of the sandwich" on a scale of 1 to 100 came out at a mean of 80.8 (ranging from 70 - 90). The ratings for "chickenness" of the beyond meat (as compared to a similar sandwich from Cosi or something) had a mean of 79.4 (68-90). One participant noted that it wouldn't pass for a good roast chicken, but was virtually identical to the generic chicken you get in other sandwich shops.

Here are the tasting notes / reviews (I was #7):

1. Tasty but I'd be interested to know more about it (nutritional info, environmental footprint, ingredients, etc).
2. I found the texture to be fairly convincing. I only tried the chicken and not the sandwich so I'll   give it a 50.
3. The buffalo "chicken" sandwich was great. I would likely order it in the future, especially because I love buffalo chicken sandwiches but the chicken skeeves me out at most places that serve them.
4. Great taste, with firm texture (sightly more so than real chicken, with much less fat). 
5. That's a good sandwich!  I was surprised a how chicken-like the beyond meat was, they almost nailed the texture!
6. I like how the consistency is very consistent - no weird tendon parts or fat. The flavor is just as good if not slightly better than actual chicken. Curious how the stuff is made, shipped, prepped at the shop, and how it might hold a marinade
7. The texture is less smooth / shiny than chicken, and the fibers don't align as well. However, the flavor is pretty similar, and once you're chewing it the texture is reasonably similar to real chicken as well. The sauces on the Jerk and Thai sandwiches were great, the "buffalo" was just hot sauce. The overall experience was crazy salty, I was chugging water all afternoon.

A simple three-course Thai meal: Tom Yum, Thai Spring Rolls, Coconut Rice w/ Mango

We recently saw some fresh galangal (looks like ginger, but has a different, sort of flowery odor) at the farmer's market  and were inspired to make a Thai meal. Ever since I had a bowl of mind-blowing tom yum in Hawaii I have been wanting to try and recreate it.

Once we'd decided to do that, why not Thai spring rolls and mango coconut rice?


In planning the soup, I thought back to that eye-opening bowl I'd had on our  honeymoon. The key difference from most tom yum I'd had was the strength and simplicity of the flavors; the flavors of the large inedible chunks of lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves in the soup blended together and made it clear that this soup meant business. Anyway, I didn't want our guests to have to pick out inedible chunks, but I still wanted to focus on the flavor of the broth because the typical ingredients to vegetarian tom yum (tomatoes, canned straw mushrooms, tofu) were uninspiring. As a result, I just filtered everything out and served it as a plain broth. Now that I've verified how good the broth is, I'm going to try again with a few solid ingredients and see what happens. Here's the recipe I came up with:
In a saucepan, add:
4 cups vegetable stock
~1/4 cup lime juice (I used 1.5 limes)
2 Tbsp sugar
2 stalks lemongrass (remove the outermost dirty layer, and score the entire length of it with a knife)
~1/3 cup chopped fresh galangal
8 kaffir lime leaves
2 tsp chili oil (I used sesame chili oil, but that was a mistake. plain chili oil or canola would be better)
1 fresh cayenne pepper, minced (or other hot pepper)
garlic (maybe 2 cloves? I used a big splash of homemade garlic vodka / garlic extract)
2 pickled umeboshi plums, pitted (these provide a nice salty pungent umami flavor in place of fish sauce)
maybe 1/2 cup cilantro probably would be good, we just didn't have any

Heat the saucepan on high, and once boiling reduce to simmer and cook for about 20-30 minutes until delicious. Add salt to taste if needed. Strain out the broth so you won't have to pick out the inedible bits (lime leaves and lemongrass) You could make this with enoki mushrooms, or straw mushrooms if you don't hate them, or tomatoes (I guess), or tofu.

For the spring rolls (what I call non-fried rice paper rolls, some other people call them "fresh rolls" or "summer rolls"), we started by freestyling a coconut-lime-peanut sauce (sorry, I didn't keep track of what went in but it was tasty). Next we sauteed up some homemade seitan with garlic / soy / mirin / galangal, and minced it in the food processor. We shredded some carrots, thinly sliced the fresh red peppers which we can STILL get at the farmer's market in late November (good enough to eat like an apple), and washed and chopped the arugula. We got a good factory assembly going where I softened up the rice wrappers (since I have heat-resistant hands) and passed them to Sarah to stuff and fill.

Sadly our rice was not all it could have been. We basically used the coconut rice recipe from Joy of Cooking (which is good), but instead of jasmine rice (as they recommend), or sticky rice (which is best), we used some leftover arborio rice we had from a friend who just moved, plus a bit of jasmine rice for flavor. Tragically the only mango at Whole Foods was overripe on one end, and under-ripe on the other, but we got enough mango out of it to at least give our dinner guests a good mix of mango and coconut rice. The leftover rice got dry in the fridge overnight, but was excellent with some So Delicious vegan nog on it and then microwaved until it was soft.

Thai Lasagna

I’d been craving lasagna, so had just bought the supplies I needed. But when I was at the Thai grocery store recently to restock on curry paste (after a dinner plan of cooking up eggplant and greens with curry paste and some soy sauce was derailed but the lack of both curry paste and soy sauce) I saw these:

and realized that I could make Thai lasagna. The basic concept was to use the rice noodles as lasagna noodles, coconut milk with one kind of curry paste in place of tomato sauce, and the layers of toppings would be seitan, tofu, and broccoli, each with a different type of curry paste. In the end, I realized that would be silly since I’d end up with several open cans of curry paste, so I just went with green curry for the seitan, and Kaeng Par for the tofu and coconut milk “sauce” that I put on each layer of noodles.

This came out really well, although very spicy and salty, so I ended up taking the leftover rice noodles and broccoli and cooking them up “plain” so we could mix that with the lasagna for a more normal tasting meal.

For ingredients, there were 3 packs of seitan (cooked in a bit of peanut oil, 1/6 can of coconut milk, and most of a can of green curry), 1 pound of tofu (cooked in the same amount of peanut oil and coconut milk, and a bit of Kaneg Par curry instead of green curry), 1 bunch of broccoli (just sautéed in a little bit of peanut oil), and a pack of rice noodles (I used the other 2/3 of the can of coconut milk, mixed with the rest of the Kaeng Par curry to go on each layer of rice noodles). Here's a "side view" showing the layering: