Guest Recipe: Chinese Sauces!

Last night I had a KILLER homemade meal with some vegetables I have eaten but never heard of and some deeply serious sauces. I mentioned to the beautiful and talented chef that I wasn't really accustomed to eating Chinese food having begun this macrobiotic diet because the big macro recipe genres in my life are:

-Latin!

-Japanese!

-Italian!

I find that most Macrobiotic people from the South tend to go from cooking bacon & grits soul food to whatever Macro recipes they can get their hands on in a cookbook or at a potluck. Because, let's face it... it's pretty impossible to adapt the Southern diet to the Macrobiotic diet. You basically have to start fresh. At least the Greeks can still use chickpeas. There is really no place for ham hock in a food energetics spectrum... I think it's sulking somewhere on the yin-yang scale between blue cheese and crack cocaine.

Here's dinner:

Menu:

A Vegetable that I have narrowed down using my excellent Chinese Food About.com skills to Chinese Water Spinach/Kang Kong/Swamp Cabbage

Nutritional Yeast Tofu with Tomatoes and Onions and a Peanut Sauce

Plated Jasmine Brown Rice. That's right. I did say plated.

Here's how she did the vegetables. These are literally the butteriest vegetables I have ever had in my life outside of the context of actual butter.

BUTTERY CHINESE WATER SPINACH

1. Go to an Asian Grocery Store. Get some Chinese Water Spinach and some Fermented Bean Curd Chunks in Sesame Oil. This is the bottle we used:

It is amazing and I'm using it forever and ever.

Mince about 4-5 large cloves of garlic, take 1 tbsp. of the bean curd, and mash together to make a paste.

Heat oil in a skillet, add mash and cook until golden brown. Add water spinach and combine, cooking until dark green. Easy and SO GOOD!!!!!!

Peanut Sauce recipe to be forthcoming. I was already stuffing my face by the time she got to making the peanut sauce.

The thing that was interesting was that she was like "None of this is probably macro." ALL of it was macro. I think that because those of us who cook from the books are so accustomed to making--more or less-- the same 10 dishes over and over again, it can strike our friends and loved ones that macrobiotic cooking is a limited spectrum of dishes and methods of preparation. Her dinner was actually proof to me that there are SO MANY amazing dishes you can make that are vegan, gluten-free, and macro!