Adventures at the Asian Wholesale!

Finally, our food friends and us made plans to do something besides cooking for each other and eating food. We went on a little adventure trip to the neighboring city (Oberhausen, in case anyone cares) to pick up some products we had learned about in our Thai cooking class. Mushroom sauce, for example!

We got our obligatory must-buy list:

• 3l of coconut milk
• new green Thai curry paste
• sesame
• woks
• julienne slicer
• 1.9l Kikkoman soy sauce bottles
• fresh lemon grass
• fresh galgant
• and squishy tofu (yeah, that's my professional cooking term for the type of tofu that is softer than the stuff I get at the regular supermarket)

But we also took the gamble of trying some other stuff. We mostly stay in the safe zone, but here is what we bought!

Adventurous Purchase "Veg. Chicken Chunk"

Ok. Looks like chicken. Smells like chicken. Hm.

Here is probably where I should take note of people who would like to tell me that I shouldn't want to eat chicken because I am a vegan. The thing is that I do think that animals are really tasty. I just don't like the consequence of them dying if I want to eat them. So I am perfectly fine with fake meat. It's like diet coke - you want the taste, but not the consequences. Ok. I don't want diet coke. But I also like an alcohol-free beer every now and then because I like the taste, but don't necessarily want the buzz. And this is why I like things that taste and look like animal flesh without the inconvenient factory farming, abuse of antibiotics, terrible conditions, and oh, yeah: death!

To be on the safe side, we just used the "chicken" for some fried noodles (here with snow peas, soy sprouts, carrots, onions, and spring onions). They were great! It's really close to the taste of real chicken meat, but you can still kind of tell it's not the real deal. But probably only if you know that it's made from soy.

It was delicious! And it was even more delicious because of the mushroom sauce we bought! We had tried this sauce at a Thai cooking class two weeks ago and figured it was an affordable thing to put on the "Must have now!" list. 

Adventurous Purchase "Vegetarian Mushroom Sauce"

 

It has a rich and savory taste - which is also due to the 4% mono sodium glutamate. I usually don't buy stuff that comes with this taste enhancer, but this was the only vegan option for this type of sauce, so I figured, I'd survive a tiny bit of MSG every now and then. :)

Summary: Trips to the Asian wholesale are fun and need to happen more often. Also, I need someone to pay for my trips to the Asian wholesale.