Girl Eats Food - Vegan Cornish Pasties

As I’ve explained before, I come from a family where the general culinary consensus on how to deal with anything with a face is to kill it, cook it, drown it in animal by-products… then eat it. Once I was freed from my mother’s apron strings, it took me a while to understand people who didn’t enjoy meat. I didn’t understand that asking whether they valued animal life on a scale of cuteness or size wasn’t the right way to approach vegans. So, in an effort to be more open-minded, I’m extending an ethically farmed olive branch to all my meat-hating homies. The only thing killed in making these scrumptious gyoza fried dumplings is my patience for militant veganism and possibly a couple thousand field mice from harvesting all that flour. Vegan Cornish Pasties When you’re going to have to exist on the wilfully unbalanced diet of a vegan, it’s important to get to grips with protein substitutes like tofu. A lot of people say it tastes like death, which is unfair, because it doesn’t actually taste of anything. It’s just that no one in the Western world can marinate for shit, so they end up frying it into rubbery blocks of greasy foot cheese. So, as with the Cheesy Golden Money Bags, when cooking all the way up from your moral high ground, you need to look East. This time to Japan; the OGs of tofu maintenance, which is surprising for a culture that will happily murder and dine on Cocker Spaniels if it makes for a good stew. And, according to Wikipedia, that’s exactly what they do. All the time. Day and night. Ingredients Wrappers

1 x cup of plain flour
½  x cup of boiling hot water Filling

1 x cup of tofu
1 x cup of mushed strawberries
1 x teaspoon of jam
1 x teaspoon of peanut sauce
1 x squeeze of lime
1 x glug of maple syrup
1 x jumbo serving spoon of peanut butter Step 1.

It’s easy to fall at the first hurdle with tofu by not squishing the shit out of it. Remember, it’s basically water-filled soy bean sponge, so you need to pump out as much liquid as you can from it before marinating. Once drained, chop into little pieces. Step 2.

Once chopped, put it all into a bowl with your mushed up berries, jam, lime and peanut sauce. Then drown it in maple syrup… like a lot of syrup. Don’t want it to taste of bath scum? Then drown it. Leave your tofu-berry barf to sit and soak up the flavors, ideally overnight. Step 3.

Meanwhile, you can be getting on with your gyoza wrappers. You can buy these from any AZN supermarket but they sometimes have egg traces in. So, if you insist on losing your shit over every single ingredient, it’s best to make your own. All you have to do is knead together the hot water and flour, then leave to nap under a damp dishcloth for an hour. Step 4.

Wet napping finished, roll the dough out as thin as you can and cut into rounds. Step 5.

By now, your tofu filling should be berry pink and have absorbed all the syrupy goodness.

Step 6.

Slop in a generous mound of peanut butter, the vegan fatty's best junk food friend, then stir until it looks like the fruits of a drained abscess.

Step 7.

Dump a teaspoon of the filling into the center of your wrappers. Step 8.

Wet one side and fold in half. You can try some fancy ass shit with a little decorative pleat on the side, or you can just squish them shut to look like mini Cornish pasties.

Step 9.

Heat a tiny bit of oil in a pan until it's major-kitchen-accident levels of hot. Brown the gyoza both sides.

Step 10.

If you listened to the part where I said “tiny bit of oil,” then the last step should end without you scalding the flesh off your face.

Throw about a quarter of a glass of water over the dumplings, slam the heat right up, cover, and let it bubble violently till there’s no liquid left.

Step 11.

Served with a side of maple syrup for dipping. You can now invite all your plastic-shoed, self-righteous friends round for a vegan (yet pleasant) treat.

Bone-appetit!

@FUERTESKNIGHT

Previously: Girl Eats Food - Blobfish Medley

Really fucking hungry? Check out Joanna Fuertes-Knight's (totally free) online cookbook! It's got every Girl Eats Food recipe ever in it.