Shiitake Bacon and Tofu Scramble

Hello on the 15th day of the Vegan Month of Food! Today marks the start of Nostalgia Week, wherein I will be veganizing meals from when I was younger. I thought it would be fitting to do a vegan version of "scrambled eggs and bacon" today, seeing as how that was my favorite Sunday breakfast growing up. My family always went to the earliest possible Mass (7:30 a.m.), and if we didn't go out to breakfast afterwards, we often either had pancakes or bacon and eggs when we got home. 

Shiitake Bacon and Tofu Scramble

Several months ago, I tried making vegan bacon after seeing Vegan Tweeter's recipe. It sounded so easy with just the three simple ingredients of shiitake mushrooms, olive oil, and salt. I love simple recipes, so I gave it a try, and shiitake bacon is now my go-to vegan bacon (and I am rather finicky about mushrooms, so that's saying something). It has the same crispiness and saltiness that I remember liking about bacon before I was vegan, so I'm a fan. A quick note about baking time: I baked the sliced shiitake in three 10-min intervals and two 5-min intervals (flipping each time). Then I removed the smaller, crispier pieces and put the rest back in the oven for another 5 min. 

As for the "scrambled eggs," I did some research online and came across "Scrambled Tofu Revisited" on the Post Punk Kitchen (PPK). And then yesterday, I saw two fellow Vegan MoFo bloggers post about their tofu scrambles: 403 kitchen and Detroit Made. They both used this same PPK recipe, so I felt encouraged.

Full disclosure, though: I have only bought and cooked with tofu maybe two, three times before today. And each of those times has been a sad, sad failure. I'm just not a big fan of tofu. It looks creepy to me, all squishy and colorless and packaged in water. It just sounds gross and it looks gross. Now, why am sharing my negative thoughts about tofu during the Vegan Month of Food, of all times? Because even though I had my doubts about it, I went ahead and tried this recipe, and I ended up being thoroughly impressed that something as blah-looking as this:

Could be transformed into this:

Now, as I've mentioned before, I'm very stubborn with recipes. This one called for extra-firm tofu, but when I think of scrambled eggs, I don't think of them being "firm" let alone "extra-firm." So I bought soft tofu. And yeah, maybe I should have gone with the extra-firm (it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected for the water to cook out of it, and then to finally brown, but it all worked out in the end). I also didn't have any thyme, or garlic cloves, so those both got left out. Other than that, I made sure to follow the recipe. 

bottom to top: cumin, turmeric (gives the tofu scramble its nice golden yellow color), & salt

Once everything was prepared, I sat down to enjoy my "bacon and eggs" with a (vegan) buttered piece of toast and some milk (soy). 

The tofu scramble looked and smelled great, and it did not disappoint taste-wise either. 

After enjoying a couple bites of the scramble, I had to make the nostalgia complete by creating a mini bacon & egg sandwich with the toast like I always used to. 

I'm so glad I tried this recipe (and I have leftovers, hooray!); it's definitely something I'll make again sometime when I'm feeling nostalgic. 

Here is a picture of Mystery with the only "toy" that she's ever shown an interest in: an old ear bud cord pulled along the floor by me. 

Peace. :)