Happy Tuesday and Happy October 1!

I hope you enjoyed that fabulous alliteration of a title. If you haven’t noticed from previous posts, alliterations are my favorite literary device, so I try to use them as often as possible. They’re just too fun to pass up.

I cannot believe it’s already October…how time has flown! All of these tests I’ve been taking have been titled “Midterm” or “Midterm 1,” which slightly freaks me out. I feel like the semester just started and here we are mid term already? I don’t know about this nonsense.

Let’s switch directions to food, my happy place.

After the past couple of stressful, too-busy-to-do-anything weeks, I was wiped clean of all my produce and yummy, healthy foods. It was about time for me to restock. After my exam on Thursday evening, I went to Kroger and spent about an hour and a half roaming the aisles, looking at everything that caught my eye and of course, every nutrition label. As much as I love going to the grocery store with a friend, sometimes it’s nice to have no time constraints, to not feel pressured to rush for anyone. That is exactly what I was feeling last Thursday evening; enough so, that I spent almost double that of my usual grocery bill.

Among the copious amounts of cool food I bought, I picked up some tempeh. I had tempeh for my first time during my visit to Boone a couple of weeks back, and loved it! It was the closest thing to meat I’ve had since making the switch over to veganism.

So, here goes my tempeh experiment.

I looked up a few ways to go about cooking my tempeh, but I knew I could figure it out on my own. No biggie.

I also needed to use my spinach up, so adding a salad into the mix seemed like a good idea.

Here’s what I had to work with. The packaging also provides you with a description of tempeh if you are as clueless as I was a few weeks ago.

I began with cutting the tempeh block into smaller pieces, then placing them in my marinade. My marinade consisted of soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds and ginger sesame sauce. I let sit for 20-25 minutes, but for future reference, I should have let it sit for longer (1+ hours) and kept it in a plastic bag to conceal all flavors.

I transferred the tempeh to a sautéing pan smeared with coconut oil. I turned the heat to medium-low and let simmer with a close eye on it for about 20 minutes.

I then covered the pan with a lid to speed up the cook time, as my tummy was getting a little impatient.

While I was waiting, I created a peanut-soy dressing for my salad. This included PB2, water and soy sauce.

Finally the tempeh was browned to my satisfaction and was ready to add to my lovely asian-style salad.

Atop a bed of spinach leaves, pickled ginger, and almonds, I laid my tempeh, along with my peanut-soy dressing and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.

The ginger and the asian-seasoned tempeh were perfect compliments of each other, a winning combination.

My Asian Tempeh Salad

Ingredients

Tempeh=

• Tempeh
• Soy sauce
• sesame oil
• Sesame ginger marinade
• Coconut oil
• sesame seeds

Salad=

• Fresh spinach leaves
• Pickled ginger
• Raw almonds
• Sesame seeds

Dressing=

• PB2
• Water
• Soy sauce

Today, I whipped up an Asian Tempeh Salad Wrap with the tempeh I had leftover.

Using the new Ezekiel Sprouted Grain Tortillas I bought, I whipped up the salad I had last night almost to a tee.

I microwaved the tortilla for about 2 minutes, as Ezekiel products are always fresh frozen. I then heated up the tempeh and after, placed the tempeh, pickled ginger, spinach, almonds, sesame seeds (and added carrots) and a little sprinkle of PB2 onto the tortilla.

I wrapped it all up and it was good to go. I think I even preferred the salad in the wrap. The Ezekiel tortillas are fabulous. You can tell their quality when you’re eating them. I loved getting all the flavors from all the ingredients at once.

I highly recommend trying tempeh if you haven’t already. It’s a great, wholesome source of protein and we all need variety in our diet, vegan or not, so might as well give it a shot.

I definitely intend on experimenting further with tempeh, so I’ll keep you posted!

Have a fabulous rest of your Tuesday, everyone! Chow.