Creative Vegetarian

In my continued attempt to increase the vegetarian portion of my diet, I have been very inventive with my dishes - basically creating a dish out of anything and everything I have available at home.  Our typical meals have been one meat and one veggie dish.  Now I'm trying to make it 2 veggie dishes and one meat with a smaller portion of meat. 

Last week, I created two "new" dishes by combining ingredients that I have never put together before.  The first one - simple roasted red peppers and kale stir fry, nothing exciting but definitely tasted better than plain kale.  

The second - okra, red pepper, king mushrooms, egg tofu - all cubed, stir fried with half a teaspoon of chili bean paste to spice it up, was a success.  I love the combination of flavours, textures and colours.  The slightly chewy king mushroom went well with the crunchy okra and the soft but firm tofu.  In both dishes, the red pepper added sweet flavour and crisp texture, in addition to colour.  Next time, I might add some dried shitake to enhance the flavour even more, but it takes pre-planning to do dried shitake, since they usually require soaking for a few hours at least.  Fresh shitake isn't as flavourful.

Okra, king mushroom, red pepper and egg tofu stir fry

Kale and red pepper

It's amazing how a bit of red added to the colour of the dishes.  Compare these to the one below, which I did a while back.  This is a stir fry of brown beech mushrooms, enoki, tofu and lotus root - tasty, great textures, but dull-looking.  More greens would have brought up the colour and made the dish more enticing - something to remember for next time.

Brown beech mushrooms, enoki, tofu and lotus root with green onions.

I'm also slowly trying to increase my inventory of vegetarian dishes by exploring "new" ingredients - new to me at least.  More later.