Welcome to our brand new foodie corner of The Peak! This column is a collaboration between two friends with opposing diets: a meat-eater (Jess) and a vegan (Gems). This serves as a way of critiquing food from opposite lifestyles, and we will be focusing on local, culturally diverse eateries in Vancity as well as unique recipes to bring you feisty reviews that we hope you will find useful and enticing.

This week’s recipes:

Spicy Mango & Avocado Rice Bowl from Love and Lemons, Rainbow Spring Rolls from Minimalist Baker, and Citrus Fennel & Avocado Salad from Foodie Crush.  

Preparing a vegan feast means one thing: chopping all the vegetables. All three recipes required a sharp knife and even sharper wits to avoid the mind-numbing boredom of chopping vegetables for over an hour. That being said, don’t let the long ingredient list scare you from trying these simple recipes.

The meat-eater (Jessica)

Of the three recipes, the most surprising was the Spicy Mango and Avocado Rice bowl, not only because I was initially skeptical of the idea of just things piled on rice, but also because of the baked tofu.

As a meat-eater and tofu-hater, I was prepared to hate the texture, flavour, and pretty much everything about it. I was pleasantly surprised by the transformation of texture and flavor of the tofu. I ended up not missing the meat in this dish at all, and that is something that I never thought that I would say.

The Rainbow Spring Rolls were incredibly fresh-tasting and the perfect side to accompany the rice bowl — however, the peanut dipping sauce included in the recipe was somewhat disappointing when compared to the coconut peanut sauce of the rice bowl. This one was too thick and pulled the veggies out of the roll when dipped. The freshness was emphasized by the fact that there was no rice vermicelli in the roll, which I appreciate as the vermicelli can overpower the rest of the roll.

The citrus fennel and avocado salad was somewhat disappointing, due to the addition of the avocado. I really enjoy the slightly licoricey flavor of fennel combined with oranges, but the avocado overpowered this combination with its heavy creaminess. The dressing also prevented the two flavours from melding properly in the salad, so while the bare bones of the salad were strong to begin with, the extra additions prevented it from being a truly enjoyable experience.

The vegan (Gemma)

The rice bowl was my personal favorite because it completely overthrew my expectations. The dish was unbelievably tasty and filling. The soy sauce baked tofu had a chewy texture and did not taste as bland as tofu normally tastes — the sauces from the tofu greatly complimented the fibrous texture of the brown rice. For something that we anticipated to be quite dull and mediocre, it was bursting with flavour, extremely filling, and nutritious. The coconut peanut sauce was simply beautiful: smooth and perfectly balanced between spicy and nutty.

The vegan salad rolls were fresh and light, but I couldn’t help but miss the usual heft and texture of the vermicelli noodles. I feel that as a side dish, though, it was better that it didn’t contain the noodles. The peanut sauce was really the main struggle to get the right consistency and taste, but we eventually settled on the coconut peanut sauce from the rice bowl, and it greatly animated the salad rolls.

I did not enjoy the fennel and avocado salad. I think this was mainly because the various juicy citrus fruits clashed with the attempt to make it a savoury dish. The juice from the oranges accumulated at the bottom of the bowl and when tasting it, it wasn’t necessarily impressive. I don’t even know what the avocado was doing in there. It became lumpy and strange in the juices from the salad. We did however make the salad the night before, so perhaps making it fresh would help it from ending up closer to orange fennel soup.