(Almost) A Vegan Day

I'm not a vegan, but I've been steadily reducing the amount of eggs and dairy I consume over the last seven years I've been a vegetarian. I still like to eat baked goods that contain eggs and still eat way too much cheese and butter. So I set out to have a vegan day on Saturday. For breakfast, I had my usual banana. For lunch, I decided to have a very unbalanced meal of raw peanuts and a McIntosh apple. And for dinner, Indian-ish food.

I was inpsired to have Indian food when I saw this More Than Tofu Indian Masala-flavored tofu at Wild Oats last week. I figured it would make a good substitute for the paneer/panir that I love to eat in Indian restaurants. So, for dinner, I cooked some jasmine rice (to which I added some cardamom and cloves while it was cooking) and made a main dish to go along with it.

And that's where my plans of veganism got off track. When I bought the Seeds of Change Tikka Masala Simmer Sauce, I didn't think to look at the ingredients (starting to see a pattern here with that?) because I just assumed a tomato sauce would not have dairy in it. Au contraire, there it is--heavy cream. Though there seems to be little of it since it's fairly far down on the list of ingredients. Nonetheless, I wasn't able to get through the day without consuming a dairy product. I should have gotten the Madras sauce instead.

But I decided to go ahead with my Indian food preparation. I browned slices of the tofu in a pan, then added the simmer sauce along with some thawed frozen green peas and a handful of currants. I cooked it all long enough to get hot, put it on the plate with the rice and garnished it with some fresh cilantro (popular in Indian food as well as Mexican and Vietnamese). Voilà!

It was good, but I don't think that the cream added anything valuable. Perhaps next time, I won't be so lazy and I'll make my own sauce.