Thug Kitchen/Bad Manners + Brief Cookbooks Update

5-Spice Fried Rice with Sweet Potatoes, Cold Citrus Noodles with Cucumbers & Carrots, Sweet Citrus Baked Tofu, Potato Leek Soup

Hi,

Well here we are three weeks into the New Year and it’s already been chaotic and challenging. First off, I just want to say that my heart is broken about the fires we have had in Los Angeles since January 7th. Altadena is very close to where I used to work and I know several people who live there who have lost everything — or who effectively lost the ability to live in their homes for the time being. I also used to work in the Pacific Palisades when I taught wee ones how to cook (one of my many previous jobs) and I really enjoyed driving out there because the views were so beautiful. Both Michael & I had several clients in the Pacific Palisades and many of them lost their homes as well. It just is so devastating to see such destruction in our city, but at the same time it is so energizing to see these two communities and the greater Los Angeles community come together to lift one another up and be there for each other.

Last weekend I joined my former cooking school instructor at my former cooking school and we prepared meals to be delivered to those in need from the fire areas. It felt good to be in that environment again, be able to use these skills I have to do something good & give back. The whole group said they wanted to gather again to cook - so I am hoping there will be more days like that in the coming months as we help to re-build our city and these communities.

Also, if you weren’t in Los Angeles on January 7th, you have no right to comment on this environmental disaster. The winds were Hurricane-level winds, nothing that we’ve ever seen here before, we are currently in a drought and have seen no significant rain for 8+ months, and this is all, 100% due to climate change & global warming.

Before the fires - I set my goals for the year with this project. I re-organized my cookbook spreadsheet, adding books to the “cooked from” pile, entering new books into the shuffle and re-randomizing the order. The first book that came up for 2025 is Mooncakes & Milk Bread by Kristina Cho. This book is amazing and I am going to make some delightful things from it for Lunar New Year in a couple of weeks - hoping to write about it then!

The second book that came up is Thug Kitchen - the official first cookbook inspired by the Thug Kitchen blog. After coming under criticism for their name and misusing/appropriating the term “thug” - they’ve changed their name to “Bad Manners”. The book has been re-branded as “Bad Manners” as well, but I have an original copy that still says “Thug Kitchen”. The concept is simple — Plant-Based meals with a dirty mouth telling you how to make them. So if you’re not a fan of F-bombs and generally crude language, this may not be the book for you. However, I had a lot of vegan and vegetarian clients when I worked as a chef, and I liked the idea of a vegan cookbook with a little bit of edge. I have cooked a LOT from this book over the years… it was even an early selection of my in-person cookbook club years ago. I think the recipes are really great and it’s a helpful load of inspiration if you’re trying to lean plant-based in your meal choices. Some of the tips and tricks for creating flavors that pop & using ingredients that you may not be used to using are great. I will say, however, that the blog is extensive - there are a TON of recipes on their website. So if you’re not ready to commit to a book, you can definitely find a lot worth making from their blog & newsletter.

When we flipped through the book to pick our recipes, I knew I wanted to avoid making things I had made previously. This year my goal is to live with intention & not rush into things - so we really took our time going through the book and making our shopping list. We also have a very full freezer, so we made a list of the items in our freezer and have been trying to use certain things up from there each week. I have to say that we cooked from this book straight after returning from a week-long vacation over New Years, and so our shopping cart was full at each store, and the cost of our groceries felt astronomical. I don’t think that is necessarily due to this book being plant-based recipes, although some would argue that those on plant-based diets don’t necessarily save money by not eating meat. Ultimately we worked all week to eat the foods we prepared, and with the fires starting on Tuesday of the week we cooked for this book and that throwing a wrench into both of our lives… I was glad we had done the meal prep.

Previously (over time) I’ve made from this book: Spiced Chickpeas, Sweet Corn & Green Chile Flautas, Baked Tofu, Baked Spanish Rice, White Bean & Rosemary Hummus, Grilled Peach Salsa, & Vegetable Pad Thai with Dry-Fried Tofu (this tofu method changed my life). We really love the flautas recipe, and I’m not lying when I said that their dry-fried tofu method changed my life… it helped me to cook enormous batches of tofu for my clients and I am so grateful to have learned it from this book.

We started out with the Cold Citrus Noodles with Cucumbers and Carrots, I felt this would be a good option for lunches for us topped with the Sweet Citrus Marinade Baked Tofu. I had some special noodles in the cabinet I had purchased last year at the Japanese market, they were a sort of Udon, dry noodles, but they had seaweed in them - so the flavor was a little bit briny but not in an overwhelming way. Both recipes were easy enough to follow, I doubled the noodle recipe and it made us lunches for several days, however the sauce really gets absorbed by the noodles and so we ended up making extra sauce and pouring it over before eating the dish.

The baked tofu method is different from the dry-fried, as this one is in the oven and a little more hands-on. You press the tofu to start - you can use a couple of plates and some food cans to press your tofu, I happened to invest in a Tofu Press a few years ago and I really love it, they aren’t sponsoring me but I use the Tofu Bud which I like a lot. I am not really a gadgets person, but I like that I can just pop my block of tofu in there and not really have to worry about it for a while. It isn’t the easiest thing to store in your cabinet - however, so I get it if it’s not for you. After the tofu is pressed, you slice it and marinate it for a while, then you bake it in the oven, flipping it a couple of times to get an even cook on it. The tofu at the end was really flavorful and very pleasant to eat! I can see adding this style of tofu to salads, grain dishes, and more!

We refer to our home as our “Ice Castle” in January as it really is that cold. Michael wants to turn the few heaters on in our house and I insist that we don’t need them and can just burrow under blankets. But some days I cave and let him turn on the heaters because it is really cold in our apartment. Ice Castle season is also soup season - so we decided to make the Potato Leek Soup. Not that this soup needs a breaded counterpart, but we had a loaf of bread that needed to be eaten, so we made some crostini to have with the soup when we ate it. Potato Leek Soup is one of those soups I kind of forget about, but why? It’s so easy to make, super filling and delicious — it’s basically as if mashed potatoes decided to relax one day and become soup instead, how can you go wrong! The recipe here came together quickly and easily, fed us for several days and we even put some in the freezer to save for a rainy day! I like the addition of chives at the end to sort of amp up the leek-y onion-y flavor of the soup in every bite. What are some of your favorite soups to make when it’s cold outside?

Lastly we made the 5-Spiced Fried Rice with Sweet Potatoes. I pretty much made the recipe as-is, with a couple of exceptions: instead of bitter greens I used baby bok choy, instead of peas I used shelled edamame, and I added water chestnuts & beef to the rice. Ok so kind of different…

We had some beef in our freezer that I didn’t have another use for, and it was easy enough to defrost it, dice it, sauté it, and add it to the rice. We liked the addition of the 5-spice flavor to the rice, it added a little kick and warmth to the dish! However, I really did not like having sweet potatoes in there at all. I know that sweet potatoes are often treated as a “main” ingredient for plant-based recipes, but to be honest I would have preferred any other plant-based “meat” alternative over sweet potatoes. The fact that we had beef in there may have helped me reach that decision, but I felt that the sweet potatoes were so out of place flavor-wise with the rice. Furthermore, even though I love my carbs, this carbs + carbs combo did not work for me. If I were to make it again (perhaps as written) I would have roasted the sweet potatoes with the 5-spice separately in the oven instead of sautéing them on the stove before adding the other rice ingredients - get them nice and crispy, and full of flavor like the baked tofu, then added them to the rice at the end. Maybe I’ll just make the baked tofu instead.

All in all, this book holds up. I know January is a time when a lot of people try to revamp their lives; diets, dry January, join gyms, purge their closets… but I think it should be a time to embrace the year and make it work for you - not try to use fads to change your whole life. If you did decide to not eat meat in January, this may be a good book/blog for you to look at for inspiration. Just don’t put sweet potatoes in your rice.

Love & Happy Spatulas,

Alyssa