Vegan Fried Chick’n Cordon Bleu!

In honour of James’ sixty-first birthday, I thought I’d adapt my vegan fried chick’n recipe and make vegan chick’n cordon bleu!

So let’s get started!

First, make this seitan chick’n recipe, but stop before you wrap the chick’n in rice paper. Before you place the seitan pieces in the broth, flatten them out a bit like this:

Next, make this vegan cheez sauce and these vegan bac’n bits. When you make the bac’n bits, make twice as much of the bac’n juice as required and save half for later.

Slit the pieces of vegan chick’n and insert the vegan cheez sauce and bac’n bits. Alternatively, you can press the pieces flat, spread them with the cheez and bac’n and roll them up. I tried both ways.

Soak the rice paper in the other half of the bac’n mixture and wrap each chick’n piece in the rice paper like a burrito. Continue with the breading according to the recipe.

Next, make this dijon sauce for topping the chick’n cordon bleu:

Dijon Cream Sauce

1 1/2 tbsp tahini
1 1/2 tbsp flour
1 1/4 cups almond milk
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
3 tbsp nutritional yeast

Blend in the bullet and then heat while whisking until the mixture turns shiny (an indication the flour has cooked).

Aaaaaand….here we go!! Roasted taters, cole slaw, freshly baked bread, chick’n cordon bleu, and dijon sauce!

And, in honour of my dad, who died last week, the song of the week is (weirdly) Liza Minelli singing “Mein Herr.”

My dad didn’t really enjoy music much, but the rest of us always had music playing. I remember listening to The Beatles with my brothers and mum in the early 1960s, and the minute my mum heard my dad’s car in the driveway, she’d run to turn off the stereo.

A classic joke in our family was that Johnny once asked my dad, “What’s wrong? Don’t you appreciate good music?”

And my dad said, “That’s just the trouble. I DO.”

However, I don’t remember him listening to music at all…ever.

Oddly, however, He LOVED musicals–and his favourite musical was Cabaret. When he and my mum used to babysit Emily, he would play her their VHS tape of Cabaret over and over again. My mum became worried about what she called “the rude bits” though, so my sweet dad actually edited the tape to cut out all the rude bits so Emily could just watch all the musical numbers.

Imagine my embarrassment when I went to pick Em up at the SFU daycare and the caregiver told me that Emily had entertained them all that day with her own rendition of “Mein Herr,” complete with chair and bowler hat.

So here’s to my dad….and his love of Cabaret!