Making Something That Looks Like Dog Food Palatable
The other day, Kim wanted “Something With Gravy” the other day for dinner. Her great-aunt Vera calls this kind of comfort food a “Brown Dinner”, a name which we find particularly appealing.
Our usual Brown Dinner is some shop-bought vegan sausages with mash and home-made mushroom gravy. However, the only meaty (read: excuse for gravy) thing in the house was some old TVP chunks. So I rehydrated some shiitake mushrooms, and rehydrated the soy chunks in the leftover mushroom water plus some vegetable bouillon powder. I fried up some onions, the shiitake mushrooms, then the TVP. I added some left-over broth, and threw in some peas and chopped tomatoes. I seasoned it with soy sauce and sesame oil, thickened it with some corn flour, and served it in the middle of a nest of mash. It wasn’t bad.
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The secondary point of this post is that when I got the leftovers out the following day, I realised that we had been eating something that looked, and even smelled, like dog food:
The primary point of this post is: look how much nicer it looks on some instant noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
It looks like dog food on noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds, which I think is a whole lot nicer:
I’m going to investigate more instant noodle topping ideas. It made for a proper good meal.

