Breakfast of Champions

People have asked and asked and asked us how we manage to be vegan in a place like the UK.

For one thing: we’re not vegan. T.’s mother is vegan, we’ve learned how to cook and bake without any animal products and we try to limit our animal-related food consumption, but we don’t claim veganism, not at all. We are vegetarians, however, and no matter how it freaks some of our omnivore friends (“You’re just so hard to feed!” our friend P moans) it’s not actually as bad as you might think.

Anyone, anywhere, as long as they have access to an Asian market like our fave See Woo, or Matthew’s, will be just fine, as Asian markets are the obvious go-to places to source tofu, interesting seitan, textured vegetable protein, vegetables, and noodles. We were pretty shocked a couple of weeks ago to see how well stocked the Largs Morrison’s was, too — for a small town, they were beyond awesome — so the regular shops are definitely in on the act.

“So, what do people eat there?” is the other perennial question. (T. usually gets this from school-aged children, and to avoid further devolving a nation into stereotype, she has stopped even jokingly mentioning haggis. The average Scottish person eats haggis as often as the average American wears a tuxedo, which is maybe once a year. ) Because of this, we thought we’d show you …breakfast. This is T’s plate, of course, liberally doused with Cholula sauce, but it’s just grilled tofu, half an avocado, and a bit of cheese. Protein, a little fat, and a lot of yummy. Followed by a handful of nuts and some fruit (Or D’s celery and peanut butter) around 3 p.m., this is enough to take us through most of a workday.

The how-to on this is simple: place a sliced, rinsed tofu steak in a lightly oiled stainless steel pan on medium, fry it until you see brown coming up the sides… then turn off the heat, put on the lid, go take your shower, come back.

It will have sweated itself free of the pan by your return, and you can sprinkle some spices (like our Spice of Greatness) on the uncooked side, then flip it and essentially repeat the process. We take a single cake of tofu (the big ones that come sealed in a carton with water) and split it and that works out as breakfast for two. T., who silently moaned her way through scrambled tofu as a child, actually prefers this to scrambled, and actually loves this dish, which continually surprises her.

Once the second side is fried, we sometimes lay cheese on. If you choose that option, just cover the pan for two minutes while the cheese melts and you’re prepping the avocados. It’ll all be melty and ready when you are.

Weekends are another matter altogether. We found out that The Drake across the way has pancakes – real ones – with fried bananas and maple syrup. Now, that is the breakfast of weekend champions!