Tempura pancakes, and happy Vegan Mofo

Four years ago when I started following vegan blogs (a year after going vegan), I noticed a trend going on in the Fall. Everyone was talking about "Vegan MoFo". At first, I thought it was just some catchphrase, like, yeah, vegan m****f****!!!! But no, it's much more classy than that--Vegan MoFo stands for "Vegan Month of Food"--sounds deliciously humane! You can read more about it here on the website, and look at a full list of blogs (we're listed on some of the category pages, but I think the overall list is still being worked on.)

So, this month, we'll try to post every day (or more often), with lots of photos, recipes, tips, and reviews all focused on vegan food. We don't quite have a theme, other than... feeding two on a vegan diet in DC. We'll accompany posts with a graphic like this, to show... solidarity? support? participation? all of the above:

Anyway, onto the post... tempura pancakes!

Vegetable tempura pancakes and miso soup

The idea for these tempura pancakes was drawn from the book Kansha: Celebrating Japan's Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions. I love this book, because it's all about making traditional Japanese food without using any fish products (which are hard to avoid in most Japanese food.) I also just really love when Japanese food is shown in all its (veggie-filled!) glory, rather than just sushi and ramen (though I do love ramen.)

For the pancakes, we deviated a bit from the vegetables the recipe suggested, and used some produce we picked up on a trip to H-mart and Yes! Organic Market. This includes orange sweet potatoes, zucchini, carrots, onion, eggplant, and we also threw some tofu in experimentally. We tossed the vegetables together in bowls somewhat randomly, with some mixtures involving all the veggies, and some with just a few.

I used this -awesome- Aritsugu Japanese knife to cut carrots and sweet potato.
It was a gift from two of my good friends, Yuri and Naoki, and I only use it for
special recipes! You can see kanji for my name, 梨亜, engraved on the knife.

The recipe then instructs dusting the vegetables with cornstarch prior to mixing them in bowls (it gives a particular order, which we didn't follow because we used different vegetables.) We mixed vegetables into three small bowls. Then, we made a batter with about equal parts cold water and all-purpose flour. We made too little batter initially and had to make more as we progressed. The batter should be the consistency of thin pancake batter.

We then poured canola oil into a medium-sized pot, about 1.5in deep. Once the oil begins to make small bubbles (we used long chopsticks and some batter to test it), you should mix batter into the first bowl. The batter should lightly cover all the vegetables, not too thick.

Frying instructions: Lower a "handful" (we used a spoon rather than hands) of battered veggies into the oil, and use chopsticks to make sure the vegetables stayed together once submerged. Let the pancake sit in the oil 30 seconds without touching it, unless you need to stick floating pieces back onto the top. After 30 seconds, flip, and wait another minute. Take the pancake out and let it rest on a paper towel-covered plate before eating. We fried one pancake at a time, but with a bigger pot you could do more.

We did this for all of the vegetable mixtures in all of the bowls, then sprinkled salt and togarashi over the finished pancakes. They were great! Miso soup with tofu was a nice accompaniment. If you want to use the actual ingredients for Heaven and Earth Tempura Pancakes, you'll have to buy the Kansha book, I won't spill their secrets here...

Enjoy Vegan MoFo 2013!