August 7, 2015: vegan Friday

Rosa, my best friend, lived next door to us when I was a little girl, until we moved to another city just before I started kindergarten. Rosa was exactly six months, to the day, younger than I was, and we played together constantly. Her family was from Taiwan, where her mother had taught home economics. I always managed to be at Rosa's house around either lunch or dinner time, and became accustomed to steaming bowls of broth with rice noodles and plates of vegetables with scrambled egg mixed in. Her parents and older brother taught me to eat with chopsticks like the rest of the family, and by the time I was five years old I had even picked up a few words in Chinese.

Lucky for me, Rosa's aunt and mother agreed to come over and teach my mother how to cook a few Chinese dishes. One of my favorites has always been fried rice. I have no idea whether the fried rice Rosa's mother made for us was exactly what she would have made in Taiwan or how much she had adapted her recipes to what was available to her in Chicago; I just knew this was good stuff. Eggs were featured in just about every dish I remember eating at Rosa's house, so when I recreate vegan versions of some of these recipes, I often turn to tofu as a replacement for the eggs. A while back I found this recipe for vegan egg fried rice, and it reminds me of when I was four years old and eating lunch with Rosa in her mother's kitchen.