Christmas dinner around the Western world is pretty meat-based, whether you look at the UK, Germany, France or the USA, just to name a few. We decided to come up with a fancy, festive AND vegan idea for a Christmas dinner. So, if you are vegan and celebrate Christmas, but don’t know what to make… We’ve got you covered!

We decided to go with rosemary potatoes as the base of our meal, because potatoes are amazingly versatile, easy to make and cheap. Rosemary is always amazing to use when roasting vegetables and is our Christmas go-to herb.

We’re really into all kinds of Asian varieties of tofu and decided to make baked Szechuan Tofu cubes with sesame seeds, because they are just amazing! Carrots and green asparagus fried with an orange ginger sauce on the side, topped with roasted walnuts are the finish of the meal.

This recipe takes about 1h in preparation and the ingredients are enough for 3 people.

INGREDIENTS

1 bag of baby potatoes

About 15 asparagus spears, roughly about 300g (5 per person)

1 handful of baby carrots

1 pack of Szechuan stir fry sauce (you can use any sauce you like to marinade the tofu!)

2 packs of tofu

1 pack of sesame seeds (200g)

1 handful of walnuts

1 orange

1 piece of ginger (3 cm)

1 bunch of coriander

3 stalks of rosemary

Soy sauce

Some flour (about 150g)

The most time consuming part of this recipe is pressing, marinating and baking the tofu, so you should start with that! You can bake the vegetables and the tofu simultaneously and fry the asparagus about 5 minutes before the rest is done in the oven.

PREPARING THE TOFU

1. Start by unpacking the tofu blocks, cutting them in half and placing them in a baking tray or any form that’s big enough to fit them. Put a cutting board on them and put a heavy object on top. Let it sit for about 10 min. for the weight of the object to press out the remaining water inside of the tofu.

2. After those 10min you can just use your hands to press the tofu some more, empty the water out of the baking tray and put the dry tofu back. Marinate it with the Szechuan sauce, some soy sauce and garlic powder if you like. Let it marinate for up to 1h.

3. When the marinating is done, cut the tofu into little cubes and prepare 3 cups: one with flour, one with soy sauce and one with the sesame seeds.

4. Take the tofu blocks and roll them in the flour, put them in the soy sauce and roll them in the sesame seeds afterwards to make the crispy coating.

5. Put the tofu blocks on a baking tray and bake them with the carrots and potatoes for about 30min at 200°C.

PREPARING THE CARROTS AND POTATOES

1. Wash the vegetables.

2. Cut the carrots into sticks and leave the potatoes as they are, because they are already pretty cute and tiny.

3. Place the vegetables in a bowl and mix them with some olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary.

4. Put them on a baking tray and add the remaining rosemary stalks. Bake them with the tofu.

PREPARE THE GREEN ASPARAGUS:

1. Wash the asparagus and cut off the wooden bits at the end which is about the last 3 cm of the stem.

2. Take a cup and squeeze the orange juice into it. Mixed it with 1 tbsp of soy sauce and 1 tbsp of flour.

3. Cut the ginger into very little pieces, also cut some coriander leaves and mix both ingredients into the orange sauce.

4. Use a griddle pan to fry the asparagus if you have one; otherwise a regular pan will do the job, too.

5. Fry the asparagus with some olive oil and the orange ginger sauce for about 5min on high heat until it’s soft and has black charred lines (if you’re using a griddle pan).

6. Use the same pan to roast the walnuts and sprinkle them on top of the asparagus when you serve it.

ENJOY!

Cooked and written by Katrine Jensen, Luisa Heisig and Michelle Pantke.