Anna's Mothers Day Lunch

I followed my own advice and cooked bits of the menu for Mothers Day Lunch. This was slightly more complicated as I cooked most of the meal at my place, but then took it round to Mum's for the meal as my house is not suitable for guests at the moment.

I cooked the soup, the pork, the noodle pancakes, the Asian greens, and the poached nashi pears.

The soup was good and quick and easy. The soba noodle salad did not seem to add anything to the soup and I wouldn't do that again, but would do the soup again.

The Pork was good even if it did take quite a bit of time. The pancakes were dry and disappointing, but the Asian greens went well with the pork and were nice.

I was going to do the pudding, but ran out of time, so just poached the pears and had them with ice cream. They were good and I thought an improvement on Nashi Pears which I'm not that great a fan of.

Autumn lunches...

This is based on an item I saw on Stuff or the Herald a few months ago, sounded awesome, so I veganised it, but it works really well with a firm white fish too as I tried the same thing with fish for Dave. Sumac can be purchased from Mediterranean shops, possibly even Moore Wilsons, I got mine from a Lebanese supply shop that's now closed. :o(
This is really simple and is great for those wonderful warm spring / autumn days.
Sumac crust tofu serves 2 big - 4 light
1 pack firm tofu (the stuff I got from the market had 4 4inch square tofu blocks and I used 2.) 1/4 cup flour ( cornmeal can be used)
1/4 cup sumac (dried red berries ground into the nommiest powder)
1/4 teaspoon salt
pinch ground pepper (I used white)
Olive oil.

Mix the dry stuff together and put on to a plate. cut / break your tofu into nice portion sized bits, mine was already segmented so used the natural breaks. place tofu onto the sumac mix and leave each side to soak up the yummy sumac goodness. turn on your stove, heat your pan quite hot (have stove on highest setting and a cast iron frypan is best). Add splash of oil, heat the oil, drop temperature to midrange. then place in the tofu. leave to sizzle for about 2 - 3 minutes, then turn over. Drop temp to 20% and leave gently heating through for about 5 - 10 minutes. I served this with a salad of roquette / arugula, lettuce, tomato (all from my garden), capsicums / bell peppers and half a jalapeño chilli. Dressing was garlic mustard based vinaigrette. Fresh baked bread topped it all off. To make it look pretty, I cut the tofu on an angle and out the slices fancily on the plate.

This would also go well with beans and steamed potatoes (urenika would look pretty cool).

To drink, a glass of vegan rose wine, if being fancy.