January 19, 2023
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Veganizing “Friends”: It’s Pronounced ‘Nes-LAY Too-LOUSuh’
Oh, I KNOW you know this one! It’s “The One With Phoebe’s Cookies”!! We’ve got everyone exactly in their element: Phoebe being silly and a bit ignorant, Monica absolutely obsessing over getting something perfect, Ross making everything about him (remember “IT’S BATCH 16! BATCH 16 PEOPLE! GET OUT OF THE WAY!”). This episode also has a fantastic Joey & Rachel storyline on Joey’s new boat*, and one of my favorite cold opens EVER. But back to the most important issue – cookies! So, Phoebe’s grandmother had the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, and Monica wants it as her engagement present, so she can one day be the mother who makes the best chocolate chip cookies:
Monica: Hey, I know I what I want!
Chandler: What we want honey.
Monica: No, you don’t want this. I want to have your grandmother’s cookie recipe.
Phoebe: You mean the chocolate chip cookie recipe?
Monica: Uh-huh, yeah.
Phoebe: You mean the one that my grandmother made me swear on her deathbed that I would never let out of our family?
Chandler: Dying people say the craziest things.
Monica: I wanted it for years! I was gonna make cookies for my children.
Phoebe: Break my heart—Oh, all right.
BUT SACRE BLEU!!! Phoebe lost the recipe in the fire*!! She does, however, have a few cookies frozen that were made from that recipe. Monica, the amazing chef she is, is determined to reverse-engineer the recipe from the few finished cookies. She spends dayyyys working and reworking various methods of CCC construction, with dozens of batches both good and, like Batch 16, terrible! And then…and then…and gentlemen, and then…this happens:
All this time, this miraculous recipe was the one ON THE BACK OF THE BAG OF NESTLE TOLL HOUSE CHOCOLATE CHIPS!!!! (It warrants all caps.) My anger on Monica’s behalf is only lessened by the subtitles in the above video. (I love subtitles; I don’t know why.) To honor our dear Friends, we’re going to make the famous Nestle Toll House chocolate chip recipe found on the back of the chips! And we’re going to veganize it! Since I don’t buy NTH chips (do they even make any that are vegan?) I found the recipe online here. It’s pretty easy to veganize – vegan butter for the butter, and egg subs (I chose flax eggs) for the eggs! Let’s see if they are really the best. Do you think they could actually be better than Dreena’s Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookie? Or Isa’s, or Kelly Peloza’s? SUSPENSE.
VEGANIZED NESTLE TOLL HOUSE COOKIE RECIPE
INGREDIENTS:
DIRECTIONS:
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So wow, these puffed up like whoa! I think from the egg! Can you believe, the vegan version of the Nestle Toll House cookies are TOO EGGY! They were of course really good, and I particularly enjoyed how slightly salty they were. If you like your cookies puffy and almost cakey, you will love these!! I prefer mine a bit crunchier, so if I made them again, I would cut the egg in half at least. Also, wow they use a lot of butter for my tastes. Wow! So, they are really good, but I don’t think they are better than the above-mentioned 3 stars of vegan chocolate chip cookies. It’s too bad these other recipes didn’t exist 10 or so years ago, because Monica would have flipped out over them and avoided all of these dramazz. Oh well! If cakey and buttery is your thing, go make these yummy cookies!
Editor’s edit: These may be the only cookies that are 100x better hours after baking than they are straight out of the oven! So good, actually! Go make them!
Congratulations on reaching the end of VeganMoFo, for all of my fellow participants! Don’t worry, I will still be Veganizing “Friends” recipes – just not everyday! And if you have any requests, please let me know in the comments.
Giveaway Trivia: Last Chance!!!
Giveaway Trivia: Last Chance!!!
- What was the name of Joey’s boat?
- When out on the water, who does Joey yell at and call a jackass?
- What caused the fire in Phoebe’s apartment?
- In Chandler’s hilarious side-plot, what happens when he plays racquetball with Monica & Ross’s dad?
Philly’s Best Dim Sum at New Harmony, Chinatown
Philadelphia’s Chinatown is packed with vegetarian-friendly restaurants, and while they are uniformly decent, some stand out from the pack. New Harmony is one of those standouts. Specializing in vegetarian mock meats and seafood, as well as insanely good steamed buns and dumplings, this is one of the (very) few non-Szechuan Chinese restaurants I’ll go to excitedly. Owned by Ming, the nicest restaurant proprietor this side of anywhere, New Harmony mixes crazy good, greasy comfort food with a casual atmosphere and, on Thursday, a doughnut delivery from Vegan Treats. I know.
One of the best deals in town is New Harmony’s all-you-can-eat Dim Sum for $12 per person. You get to order from the pictured dim sum menu – but it’s not like ‘choose two measly items from section A, one from B’ or any kind of limiting crap like that. You can have every single item, and as much of each as you want. (Strangely, I’ve never actually gotten every item, or asked for more of something, because there is always so, so much amazing food. But…challenge accepted? No?) The dim sum menu is always so hard to pass up, because two of the restaurants best dishes – the sesame beef and the steamed pork buns – are on it, so there’s no reason to order off the menu. (Actually, there are about 60 other reasons…)
The sesame chicken tasted great and had a wonderful texture, like most mock chicken nugget-things at Chinese restaurants. But the sesame beef is the restaurant’s big deal. It’s crunchy and chewy, and it’s covered in a surprisingly mustardy cream sauce that just works even though it seems like it shouldn’t. So so good.
Next, we took a needed pause between the glutinous rounds with some standard steamed and besauced vegetables. More broccoli! Chinese cabbage! Good stuff. Then came my favorite part of any meal: the steamed buns and dumplings. Hooo boy, how great are steamed doughy things holding fillings? So great. We had a mix of pork buns, vegetable buns, spinach dumplings, shrimp dumplings, and vegetable dumplings.
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I’ve had the hot & sour soup several times, and it’s really great, as is the wonton. This time, I tried the vegetable and bean curd soup. It was nice and simple, perhaps not very exciting, but a good starter before all the heavier food. It was a little salty for me, which is my #1 gripe about Chinese food (actually, about restaurant food in general), and I would have preferred a thinner broth. But I’d get this again. It was nice to have broccoli before the storm hit.
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The two different kinds of buns were absolute perfection. Next time, I’d order all the buns and forego the dumplings. The latter are great, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t stand out from the standard veg dumpling scene. The buns, however, are tremendous. I want 20 of them now.
I also loved the final thing we got, the bean curd skin rolls. Okay, so bean curd skin (aka tofu skin) sounds disgusting, I’ll give you that. But it’s so strangely delicious. Over the past few years, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the stuff, in soups, in sushi rolls, in life. But I’ve never had it act as the wrapping in a spring roll-type of thing. |
The rolls were so interesting! Just like a spring roll, it contained a gingery, garlicky mix of stringy cabbage and what not, but instead of fried, greasy wonton exterior, it was the chewy beyond chewy tofu skin. Ok, it sounds gross, but it was really good!
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We were too full to order the dim sum menu desserts, and wayyy too full to order the absolutely mind-blowing specialty of fried cheesecake (from Vegan Treats, but fried in-house) off the regular menu. But Ming informed us that the Vegan Treats doughnut delivery had just come in, so we pretty much bought out his stock (to go, of course). Then, he kindly brought us little dishes of strawberry ice cream, which is sourced from Klein’s, the best soy ice cream maker. It was a nice way to end a deliciously indulgent, yet affordable, dinner.
NEW HARMONY, Philadelphia’s Chinatown
- Water speed: Doing Chinese restaurants proud
- Bathrooms: One shared, not the nicest but it works at least
- Service: Great. It may have helped that my companion is likethis with Ming, and he waited on us, but it’s usually great.
- Food: Comforting, rich, heavy but doesn’t leave you feeling sick
- Bonus: Copious amounts of dim sum for $12…and Vegan Treats!