The vegetarian fare

A glimpse of what I have been taking being a vegetarian for the past 3 weeks.

I cooked spaghetti, using the tomato pasta sauce, and ingredients, capsicum, mushrooms, and mock luncheon meat (instead of the usual minced pork). When the sauce was added to the ingredients, you could not taste the difference at all.

Vegetarian Lor Mee. This is a local dish made of thick yellow noodles and which usually consists of ingredients in pieces of pork belly, fried fish, ngoh hiang, wanton, fried fish cake and with hot starchy gravy and a tinge of vinegar and chilli. For the veg version, they just replaced the ingredients with all the mock version. Not quite the real thing but palatable.

Veg HK noodles. This dish is usually fried thin noodles with some pork, egg and veg. The veg version uses lots of vegetables, mushrooms and mock meat. The taste of the noodles itself was nice, so no need for too many ingredients.

Paper Tosai. This is an indian dish similar to Roti Prata. The thin Tosai was soft compared to crispy Prata. It comes with 3 types of plain curries, one of which has brinjals and potatoes in it. It was full of kick, with the 3 types of spicy gravy.

Tahu Goreng. This is a malay dish. It is made of one huge chunk of fried bean curd, fried till the outer layer is crispy and soft inside. The sauce is usually made of peanut and chilli, and spinkled with cucumber slices, beansprouts and peanut powder. Wow it was a mean dish when the chilli was quite hot and mixed into the peanut sauce.

Veg Kway Chap. This was the first time I ate Veg Kway Chap. This dish usually has taupok (fried bean curd skin), braised tahu (fried beancurd), hard boil eggs, and all types of pig intestines, innards etc, and they go with a bowl of hot Kway Teow with its special dark soup. For the veg version, they replaced the intestines with mock intestines (made of beancurd skin) which was very nice.

Porridge. My usual simple plain porridge with potatoes, or beancurd, or braised peanuts, or fermented olive veg. You can eat anything with porridge, especially even if the dishes are salty.

I will be a vegetarian again sometime in end May, before Saka Dawa begins on 7 June, the month of "merits" celebrated by Tibetan Buddhists. Saka Dawa is one of the most important sacred Buddhist days, where Buddha had performed three most important deeds, his birth, attaining enlightenment and parinirvana. During the entire month, people place special emphasis on dharma practice like circumambulation of monasteries and stupa, prostrations, taking precepts, reciting mantras, offering mandalas, doing sadhanas and saving animals lives, etc. All the merits will be multiplied 100,000 times from our dharma practices.