Recipe Round-Up: Cafe Flora Cookbook

Time to keep moving through these cookbooks. Today the alphabetical order brings us to Cafe Flora Cookbook. I am pretty sure someone gave me this during a clean out they were doing, and I took it because I have been to Cafe Flora several times before. And now I'm feeling sad looking through these blog posts, I miss my friends. Not just my Seattle friends, but my everywhere friends. The friends I haven't even had a chance to meet yet. Sigh. Let's look at some food. This cookbook, like the restaurant, is vegetarian with lots of vegan options. And honestly plenty of the vegetarian recipes can be easily subbed to make vegan. This is the first official round-up of this cookbook, but I've posted about a few individual recipes before

Roasted Vegetable Tofu Scramble with Cafe Flora Fu Sauce and Rosemary Roasted Potatoes: A pretty classic brunch plate. The scramble has a mix of roasted vegetables (I didn't have onion or yam, so I added extra of the carrots broccoli, cauliflower, and zucchini), that are mixed into a pretty basic scramble. A lot of the flavour comes from the Fu Sauce, which has sesame seeds, soy, mirin, cinegar, ginger, mustard, garlic, and sesame oil (I left out the red pepper flakes). I also added spinach to the scramble. The potatoes are simple but a classic. Parboiled and then roasted until crispy on the outside.
Rating: Scramble :), Potatoes :)



Dill Caper Tofu Aioli: Dill and capers? Sign me up. This is simply blended up using silken tofu as the base, I used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and added extra dill and capers because obviously. This is meant to be served with a selection of crudites. I went slightly off script, with some nuggets along side my cucumber, celery, and grape tomatoes for a fun dinner.
Rating: :)



Sesame Vegetable Soup With Miso: I was excited for this, because I love a good miso soup! But unfortunately the flavour just fell a little flat. I did enjoy making my own dashi with dried mushrooms and kombu. Despite it having red miso and soy sauce, it just needed a bit more of both of those. As you can see, it also had leek, celery, carrot, and silken tofu in it. I made a half recipe, and got just over two serves.
Rating: :|



Smoky Split Pea Soup: Again, another soup that fell just a little bit flat. I found i needed to cook it for longer, because even soaking my split peas overnight they were still a bit firm at the end of the cooking time. The recipe calls for smoked mushrooms, but as I don't have my own smoking abilities I went for some smoky tofu bacon instead. I pureed it a little bit at the end to thicken it up.
Rating: :|



Ginger Miso Dressing and Garlicky Sweet Shiitaki Mushrooms: Both of these were elements of a salad that I didn't really feel like making, I just wanted to make these parts. So I did, and I turned it into a little bowl. The dressing is lovely with misop. roce vinegar, and garlic. I replaced the oil in the dressing with water and guar gum, as I just can't handle really oily dressings. The mushrooms are simply sauteed and then doused in dry sherry and sweet soy sauce. I added a little bit of tofu to them as well. Rather than letting the mushrooms cool, I had them hot with rice white, baby spinach, avocado, and pickled carrot and ginger. Poured the dressing all over the top, and sprinkled with some black sesame seeds.
Rating: Dressing :), Mushrooms :)



Soba Salad with Peanut Sauce and Vegetables: I love noodle salads with peanut sauces. This one has a couple of components, with a quick pickled red cabbage and the peanut sauce. For the cabbage, I didn't have any raspberry vinegar so I just used rice wine vingar instead. The peanut sauce was meant to be spicy, but of course I left out the spicy part! Rather than blanch broccoli florets separately, I added them to the soba in the final minutes of cooking and then drained them and ran them under cold water together. I also didn't bother to serve the noodles and the broccoli separate, I just mixed them together. And I added some Soyco Japanese Marinated Tofu as well. Topped with the cabbage, pickled ginger, and some Seaweed Salad Topper I had hanging out in my cupboard. The recipe suggests topping with pistachios and seaweed salad, but you do you!
Rating: :)



Janine's Wasabi Potato Salad: This is a lovely mix of regular and sweet potatoes. It is meant to be purple potatoes rather than white, but we do what we can with what we have. I took a shortcut on the wasabi dressing and used Vegenaise in place of the silken tofu, rice vinegar, soy milk, and vegetable oil. Mainly because it required such a tiny amount of silken tofu that and I didn't have any immediate plans to make anything with the rest of a packet if I opened one for this. It also has baby spinach, snow peas, and cashews. I really enjoyed this, but I would increase the wasabi powder in the dressing because I like a bit more of a kick.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Yesterday was ten years since Gizmo passed away, which seems impossible. I miss my sweet, caring, tabby girl.