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With things in the house quieting down and both of us working from home, we have more opportunity to cook. Things that require a lot of time but do not require constant supervision are ideal to cook during work. Things like proofing and baking bread and boiling down chickpeas for hummus can just be started and either be on a timer or you can just check every once in a while.

And we’re converting more and more things to plant-based alternatives. We’re not fully vegetarian, but if there is a vegan alternative that works well for us, we’ll use it. One of those things is toasted shredded tofu. You shred tofu and marinade it in smoked paprika, onion and garlic powder, plus a dash of MSG and a good splash of soy sauce. Then you spread it out on a oven tin and roast it in the oven, basically drying out the flakes. The result is like shredded ham, except vegan!

And we regularly eat okonomiyaki. One of the ingredients is shredded cabbage. I used to buy pre-shredded, until I realised that a whole cabbage is much cheaper and has a higher yield. We have a shredding attachment for the kitchenaid machine, so it’s not that much of a burden to shred the cabbage myself. But there’s always cabbage left. I’ve taken to pickling it, with whatever vegetable we had leftovers for or which is on sale that week. Usually I add a bit of turmeric to turn it into something resembling atjar. But I also like to bake it down with some sliced onion and other vegetables, with a good dollop of gochujang and soy sauce, and really cook that down into a nice spicy vegetable mix.

It’s a lot of work, and I spend more time cooking than I did before, but it is very nice to have these things just available and having made them ourselves. We’ve always done a lot of cooking, but we’re turning more into an “ingredient household” these days.

Here’s what we typically have for lunch: a thick slice of home-made bread, lightly toasted so the outside is crunchy but the inside is soft. We spread home-made hummus on that (so much tastier than store-bought!) and put some grilled vegetables on top of that with some truffle sea salt flakes and a crush of black pepper on top. (We get the grilled veggies in a bag from the freezer at the supermarket!) To that we add a bowl of lettuce that is topped with the shredded tofu flakes, the spicy vegetable mix and the pickled cabbage. We usually top this with home-made mayonnaise too — store-bought is always so sweet, and I put sufficient white pepper in mine to really make the taste pop. We get a mug of soup too, but that’s from a packet, we don’t eat enough soup in one go to make it worthwhile to make our own.

The day the photo was made, we also had some pickled daikon and some pear compote from the pears we got from our neighbour.

I am aware that it’s a kind of privilege that we have the opportunity to cook and eat like this. It works very well for us, I love having this hearty lunch together with my partner, a little pause in the busy day to recharge and regroup.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.