Birthday Blog Takeover #5

You guys have met my FPIC (foodie partner in crime) before…

As my bestie, Ethel makes HHH appearances on the regular.  Especially now that we are in LA together 🙂

Of course she visited us in NYC too.   And traveled to Spain and France with me.  These days I get to see her with far more frequency.  🙂  And now you get to “meet” her, too…

 

Happy Birthday to my Rubia! She’s been such a wonderful friend all these years and continues to be such a positive, encouraging, caring and inspirational person in my life and this is a twist from my Filipino background for her on her special day.

Ever since I could remember, anytime anyone in my family or family friends had a birthday, there was always pancit served. Pancit is translated to noodles in Tagalog and there are several variations of it. Like the Chinese, we too believe that noodles symbolize a long life. So when cooking it for a birthday, you don’t break up the noodles because you don’t want to shorten that person’s life. I come from the Pampanga region of the Philippines and most of the time, the version of pancit served is the one with thin rice stick noodles. Usually, this is made by boiling chicken and/or pork and using that stock for the broth, using the boiled chicken and pork in the dish for filling, some veggies and soy sauce. Fortunately, inspired by Elise, I decided to embrace this dish and turn it vegetarian friendly.

Vegan Pancit

Ingredients:

• Rice sticks
• Vegetable broth
• Tofu
• Carrots
• Tamari
• White onion
• Cabbage
• Celery

It was very important for me to make sure that the vegetable broth was MSG-free because I figured, what’s the point of making it Elise-friendly if it had MSG in it? Also, Elise had shared in the past that I should try using Tamari whenever I made my “fried” rice dishes because it was gluten-free, so that also got thrown into the mix. I was able to find the Organics brand from Vons for the veggie broth and tofu, which meant that I only had to get the rice sticks at the Asian market.  Fortunately, my parents live by a Filipino market, so it was easy peasy.

This dish isn’t too difficult to make. Plus, you can add other kinds of vegetables to it like long beans or snow peas and it doesn’t really change the flavor.

I sliced up the celery, carrots, onion and cabbage into thin strips and since the tofu already came cubed, no prepping there.

Since this was my first run at making this vegetarian, I had to ask my mama for help. We were both really excited because while it’s a familiar dish that we make a handful of times a year, not adding any chicken or pork was new. We decided to boil our veggie broth and add the tamari for taste. I can’t share exactly how much tamari we used because we did a taste test a couple of times to try to get that pancit flavor. So if I was guesstimating, I’d say about a couple or three tablespoons of tamari went into the boiling veggie broth.

Because the tofu was to replace our “meat” we weren’t sure how to get it to be flavorful except to sauté it with the onions in our giant wok with extra virgin olive oil.

Brown the tofu for some time and make sure the onions turn clear, before removing from the wok and tossing the rest of the veggies in.

I know that Elise likes the crunch in her veggies, so they were only in the pan for a bit before being removed and place on the side.

Now time to utilize the flavored broth and rice sticks. (Apologies for the blur)

Make sure you submerge the rice sticks in the broth and keep tossing.

The noodles end up absorbing most if not all of the broth after a few minutes and then it’s time to toss the rest of the ingredients back in.

Mix all of the ingredients thoroughly for about 3 to 5 minutes and then plate and serve.

To a happy, healthy and long life Elise! Maligayang Bati!

**Elise here again – Kyle is in BIG trouble now that I know this dish was for me (if you recall he claimed these “leftovers” for himself last week).  At the time, he claimed he didn’t know if it was vegan or not…turns out, he knew EXACTLY what it was since he orchestrated the whole birthday blog takeover surprise!!