Today is going to be a stupidly busy day so I'm getting in early with my post for Vegan MoFo. If you've seen the picture, don't fear, I'm not going to give a step by step guide to making stir fry. Stir fry is the delicious lazy person meal and everyone should already know how to cook it. What I do want to talk about is sauce.
When I first became a vegan back when I was 15 I ate stir fry every night for dinner. Worst still it was without tofu and only with soy sauce as a dressing. This was a direct result of the fact that my mother can not cook and I was a teenager so didn't really know much about cooking either. Long story short: I ended up loathing stir fry.
Fast forward to my third year at university and I was living with my then boyfriend and he introduced me to all sorts of cool stuff like tofu and chili and sweat peas and baby corn. And he used to take me to a lot of restaurants in Chinatown where I started getting the idea that stir fry != soy sauce. (Yes, I just made a C joke. Someone kill me.)
Australia, and even the UK, are quite good at providing lots of different sauces for your stir fries. However, considering the very basic ingredients that they are made from, they are a little overpriced.
One of my favourite flavours is honey soy with chili. Of course actual honey is not very vegan of me (although some of you will know my fuzzy honey moral lines) so here's an alternative I use a lot.
"Honey" Soy Sauce with Chili
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1/4 cup of sweet chili sauce*
1 tsp agave nectar**
1 tsp cornflour
Add the first three ingredients together and mix thoroughly. Then add the cornflour making sure you stir all the lumps out. Add to your stir fry!
* You can, of course, make your own sweet chili sauce and I have done this before. However, most people should just have a bottle of it sitting in a cupboard so it's much easier to use that.
** Agave nectar is easy to get and quite cheap here in the UK. This is not the case in Australia although you can get it from health food stores for about $10. I only use it in this recipe because the sweet chili sauce is not that sweet here (and rather spicy!) so you could leave it out if you think the sauce is sweet enough or replace it with honey, rice honey or even golden syrup.
