Freezer-friendly Vegan Thali
- Dec 12, 2017
- 3 min read
I am recovering from Thanksgiving break cooking and some bakes that preceded the holiday on several levels. For one, I have switched to "shred" mode to get back to my fighting weight just in time for the next holiday of amazing and excessive food (seriously, how about spacing that insanity out?). More importantly, though, my food sensitivities have reached a ferocity such that I am simply avoiding all dairy. Also, eggs. And, much to my dismay, the entire brassica family. This last part is devastating to any fiber-loving, calorie-counting, frugal locavore.
I never had any sort of food allergies growing up, nor as a teen or young adult (even returning to dairy after being vegan for a few years), but seemingly all of a sudden these food sensitivities arose spontaneously and worsened over the course of the past 2-3 years. Karma for making fun of my sister, who developed some of these more than a decade before I did? While I am hoping that accumulated stress and over-exposure to these foods is responsible for my heightened sensitivity of the past few months, I find it safest to avoid these foods altogether at the moment.
Thus, I present you with a gut-friendly (in more ways than one) spread of vegan "curries" in a Bangladesh-meets-Punjab mashup. The recipes will be posted separately at a later date.
This entire spread, not counting the oat fiber flatbread (I had 6), clocked in at 409 calories, 19.4 g fat, 44.6 g carbs (17.7 g fiber), and 25.5 g protein. I should have included a fork for scale - the plate on the left is a fairly normal-sized dinner plate (and yes, those are big chunks of tofu). The picture does not do justice to how much food, and how ridiculously filling, this was. I barely finished.
Calorie breakdown by component
Palak Tofu: 4 oz extra firm tofu (107), lightly seasoned and served with a lean and dairy-free version of my favorite spinach sauce (81)
Sukhi Masoor Dal #2: A dry dal made with split red lentils and, because I ran out, pigeon peas (toor dal; 144). I had some concerns about legumes but this went over well.
Enchor Torkari: Chunks of young jackfruit simmered with onion and tomato (I suppose you could call it Kathal Ki Sabji, except I went Bengali with it; 77)
Nate's version of this included steamed rice (176) and yogurt (43), which I missed in the spinach sauce - cashew paste next time! Lately he's been making roti (with actual flour, you know) to match my flatbreads, but not tonight. There's no way he'd have found room for that in his stomach, anyway.
Who the hell finds time for this stuff?
Normally any sort of attempt at thali at our house involves the thawing of an assortment of frozen things that have been accumulating over time. I reach for vacuum-sealed bricks of 2-4 servings of sauce for weekday curries and grab some single-servings of dal when Nate decides he wants pizza... And I let the rest accumulate until it reaches the critical mass for a feast.
Save the containers in which 6-10 oz mushrooms are sold! These are perfect to form bricks of concentrated stock, sauces, or plain roasted vegetable purees.
Today, however, I was procrastinating on some grading and out of everything I had prepped at the beginning of the semester. I made everything from scratch (except the AP base used with the jackfruit) and saved some for busier times:
- A double batch of the lovely Palak Whatever #3 sauce (total: 8 servings), keeping the fat to a minimum and leaving it purposefully light in spice and salt with the expectation of a quick tarka and yogurt/nut cream before serving with the protein du jour. This is how I proceed with most "mother sauces" I prep in advance. I have an assortment of masala blends, themselves left over from other recipes, standing by and waiting to be used to skew a dish one way or another and bind seemingly disparate elements into one meal.
- A single batch of dal (ran out of onion!) got a similar treatment
- The sabji was improvised with some leftover AP base used in a kadai chicken dinner. I am less keen on the idea of freezing vegetable side dishes, but even just having small amounts of the AP base set aside saves time... Not to mention it's handy when you use up all your onions making the rest of the thali. - I also made three batches of flatbreads while these the dal and sauce were simmering away. Separated with paper towels and slipped into sandwich baggies, these freeze and thaw quite well.
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