I’m catching up on some work tonight, so although I made a real dinner while practically tethered to my laptop, I didn’t take photos or try anything too experimental or involved. What I made was a sort of hybrid between Peng’s Home-Style Bean Curd from Tigers and Strawberries (one of my favorite non-vegan blogs) and SusanV’s veganized version from Fat-Free Vegan, bastardized versions of which I’ve made before. In the past I’ve been too lazy to fry OR bake the tofu, but tonight I baked it (finally, a use for that spray bottle of Bragg’s I bought when Whole Foods was out of the larger, non-spray version!), which not only gave me half an hour to get some work done while it baked, but really did make the dish much better.

Instead of the shiitakes used by SusanV and often suggested by Barbara for veganizing her non-vegan dishes, I used Soy Curls because I find mushrooms revolting. That was perhaps a lot of soy in one meal, but we haven’t had any other soy products all week, so what the heck. I had to use a green bell pepper instead of red because green peppers were 99 cents at Wegmans yesterday and red ones were $3.76…and I’m cutting back my operating costs in preparation for telling Mark how much my ticket to Sydney is going to be. So expect more thrifty meals in the near future! (I also discovered this crazy thing called the library, which I am visiting in lieu of my habit of buying 5 books a week. I’ll have that plane ticket paid off in no time!)

I’d like to have had more veggies with my dinner, but it was a one-dish meal tonight. Except I just remembered that I bought baby bok choy last night that I could have made. Mark loves those things. Oh well. I was busy. I’ll just congratulate myself on making a fresh – and delicious – Chinese meal instead of ordering Chinese delivery. And it really was delicious! I definitely recommend this dish, either Susan’s version or your own veganized version of Barbara’s original (which is really from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook).