a vegetarian chinese lunch

At the latest Walk & Talk I walked and talked with a woman who has a pretty awesome business, she is originally from China and offers cooking classes in Chinese cooking but also Qigong, spa for smaller groups and organic skincare. Since I'd love to learn more about cooking tofu we talked a lot about that and then I was lucky enough to get an invitation for lunch.

And it was truly lovely! Pretty much as far as you can get from the greasy, deep fried, bland, too salty, curry or sweetsour food you get a every Chinese restaurant in Sweden. These dishes where simply flavoursome, fresh, fragrant and so tasty. The dishes were a blend of vegan and vegetarian.

Hopefully I'll be able to reasonably recreate them myself, tofu is a tricky ingredient to make justice of I think.


cold tofu salad with lots of coriander -
apparently you either love or hate coriander,
i'm glad to say i loved it. this was probably my favourite dish.

fried egg and fresh tomato with spring onions -
marinated tofu, black mushrooms and celery
(which i'm not fond of, but in this dish it was lovely) with chili and garlic.

i also got to taste the zongzi sticky rice dumplings (in celebrations of the duanwu festival),
the texture and flavour reminded me of the rice pudding we had in school,
but then served with a delicious apricot sauce.
to be honest, i think these dumplings would have benefitted from a fruit sauce.



The dessert was something not exactly Chinese, but really lovely just the same, home-made strawberry cheesecake icecream.

Water and green tea was the beverages of choice and a little sweet cracker jampacked with sesame seeds rounded off this more than excellent meal.

If you're interested in more information about Xia's business,
have a look at her business relaXia's website (only in Swedish)