Mad Momo's

I realize this is the first post in a few months -- I'll pretend we have a valid excuse, planning a wedding reception takes energy! And a reception weekend where we plan on cooking for everything but the main event requires devoted recipe searching/testing energy, thus a diversion from posting. But - it will pay off next month, we will post about the reception for Vegan Mofo in September!

In the meantime -- I felt compelled to sing the praises of a great restaurant near our place, Mad Momo's. (It has a beer deck too - we haven't gone specifically for the beer deck, but how awesome does that sound right now, what with the mild weather this August?)

Dan and I have gone here four times by now - and every time I order the same thing, the vegan thukpa noodle bowl. We also have had the vegan momos, which I don't have a photo of, but they're amazing - not to be missed. 

Vegan tofu thukpa noodle bowl

There's a reason I order the thukpa bowl every time - it's really good. It has tofu, kale, carrots, lettuce, and some herby stuff that dissolves into the broth (sorry for my lack of adequate descriptors.) The tofu is crispy - I'm not sure how they fry it, but I want to learn! The broth has kind of changed each time I've been, from more on the green side to more dark brown colored, but it's always good.

Last time we went, Dan had the vegan naan-mi (there's a cultural mash-up for you...), which has tofu with a bit of slaw inside of a naan bread. With... tater tots? (It works...)

It's not as good as my thukpa bowl, but if I was going to cheat on the thukpa, it would be with this. And hey, the tots are pretty good...

Mad Momo's also has some good cocktails (I like the Get On the Floor) and beer/wine selections. They do half-price bottles of wine on Saturday, which is a great deal.

The restaurant is located on 14th street & Perry Place, about a 7-10 minute walk north of the Columbia Heights metro station. I recommend heading over to Lyman's Tavern afterwards & enjoying another round of drinks with some pinball. Enjoy it while the weather is nice!

Vegan ramen in DC (part two, kind of)

We previously posted a comparison of a vegan ramen shop in Tokyo (T's Tan Tan) compared to vegan ramen from Daikaya, which is in Chinatown, DC. We've also visited Sakuramen in Adam's Morgan, which has a vegan ramen. Both Daikaya and Sakuramen have pretty good vegan ramens, which are tasty in large part because of the awesome mushrooms included in the soup (if you like that kind of thing.) But today we tried out the vegan ramen from Taan Noodles, also in Adam's Morgan, and it's definitely my favorite of the three DC options we've tried.　本当においしいよ！

I'll lay out my reasons for giving Taan Noodles top place in vegan ramen below:

A Tale of Two Ramens

Ramen, one of the tastiest staples of the Japanese diet can be difficult to enjoy as a vegan, but if you look in the right place you can find tasty, guilt-free ramen in Japan and closer to home. I'd like to share two ramen experiences I've had in the past few weeks, one in Japan and one back home in DC.

Typically in Japan a ramen shop is not a friendly place for vegans to eat. Most ramen is heavy on animals, not only using pork and egg as a topping, but having thick, meat-based broth. Usually it's fruitless to ask for veggie broth and just noodles, because most places won't have non-meat broth on hand and they will have a hard time understanding why you're even asking for just water and noodles. That's why the one vegan restaurant I was looking forward to visiting the most in Japan was a specialty vegan ramen shop in Tokyo station, T's Tan Tan.

T's Tan Tan signs about the virtues of veganism

The entrance to T's near the Keiyo Street shopping section in Tokyo station

Vegan at home and vegan afar

We don't have any fun and exciting recipes to share, just some advice, I guess. I've been at home, cooking for one (which means hardly cooking at all; I'm not the type who's motivated to cook for only myself.) Dan's been in Japan, trying to find vegan food in three different cities (going on four.) So, I share with you, "How I eat my ramen noodles"... or, "The sad, sad life of a stay-at-home-vegan".

Ramen, with trimmings?

Spicy Peanut Sauce

What's the deal with broccoli lately? People kept mentioning it on twitter, and it made us hungry for broccoli with peanut sauce... so, last night we cooked up some rice noodles and vegetables in a pad thai. We always make a peanut sauce from scratch, and this is the first time I actually wrote down what I used! The stir fried vegetables and tofu are pretty standard, we sautéed chopped onion and mushroom for a few minutes, then added broccoli and tofu with some scallions, and added the cooked rice noodles with the peanut sauce. Nothing fancy there, but I'll share with you my recipe for a somewhat spicy, tangy peanut sauce that's great with pad thai or stir fry with rice.

What we eat

Here's some samples from the past few weeks of what we've been eating, besides pie. Maybe we can make this a weekly thing, if I can remember to take photos (Facebook friends probably think I'm heavy on the food photos, but that's probably less than half of what we actually cook/bake...)

Soba with greens and veggies

This is a soba noodle stir fry, with bok choy (or pak choi or what have you), peppers, onions, and carrots, mixed with a homemade sauce and topped with toasted almonds. This was a recipe from the book Wild About Greens, which was a gift from my mom. Bok choy is one of my favorite greens.

Wonton soup and scallion pancakes

We also made our own scallion pancakes (recipe; we subbed about 1/3 of the flour with whole wheat) and wonton soup last week. We made our own wontons filled with tofu, scallions, and ginger. The broth was made with soy sauce and some miso paste, as well as other seasonings. The soup and the pancakes were both really yummy but kind of labor intensive, but I'd make them both again. 

I made these cookies yesterday, the chocolate coconut cookies meant to resemble a certain Girl Scout cookie. These are from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, one of the most awesome cookie-cookbooks. These are really good and actually pretty easy to make. The cookbook has other good recipes as well, like peanut butter chocolate pillow cookies, which I've made many times...

We've also been eating some good food we didn't photograph, like caramelized cabbage and onions with macaroni and Daiya, sautéed squash burritos, fried zucchini sticks, and marbled vanilla & chocolate cupcakes. Unfortunately, we've also been kind of sick as of late, which means today my lunch was nuts and tea. Hopefully that will pass soon!