I had the absolute pleasure of attending a lovely vegan dinner at L’Armoire Du Haut, an awesome vegan cooking school founded by talented vegan chef and dietician Dominique Dupuis, who cooked up a storm yesterday!
We were about 20 guests in Dominique’s loft, mingling and sipping on a delicious colada.
Before the first course was served, we were taught a few things about Ecuadorian culture and cuisine by our lovely host Emmeline. She was wearing traditional Ecuadorian garb for the evening, along with 2 Ecuadorian folk dancers who spoke more about Ecuadorian culture. It was so interesting! (Actually, it got me to search up vacation and adventure packages in Ecuador!)
Ecuadorian cuisine is apparently light on the spicyness but heavy on the salt. (Not a problem for me!) They use a lot of corn, and different areas of the country grow different types of corn. We were told that there is a small shift towards plant-based cuisine taking hold down there, which is great news!
The dishes were made to taste as authentic as possible, but entirely vegan. Dominique traveled to Ecuador in January to experience the culture and bring back some of its cusine and according to Ecuadorians who were at the dinner, the flavours were on point! I wouldn’t know, but it really was delicious and everything was well-balanced, fresh and organic!
I will let the pictures speak for themselves, but I can assure you that the meal was excellent from beginning to end. I don’t even know where that dessert found room to sit in my belly because I was so stuffed!
The picture above shows the menu for the evening and the signature drink, made up of naranjillas (little oranges which actually look more like tomatoes) and oatmeal. Our drink was made with whole organic oats but in Ecuador, it’s cheaper to make this drink with Quaker brand oatmeal, so people actually end up calling this colada “Quaker”.
Below was our first course, which reminded me so much of tamales! These are called humitas, which is corn meal and cheese cooked inside a corn husk. It was so delicious. It actually reminded me of the polenta my grandma makes.
The next course was a delicious mushroom ceviche with heart of palm and home-roasted spicy tortilla chips. The whole thing really had the texture of fish but then the taste revealed it’s vegan yumminess. The tortilla complemented the ceviche so well, with it’s subtle salty spicyness.
Our final savoury dish below was a guatita with rice. This is more like a stew, usually made with tripe, but in this case, Dominique use a soy-based protein which could’ve totally fooled a carnivore into thinking it was thin-cut steak. The stew has a very subtle peanut butter taste but it’s barely noticeable, being that “je ne sais quoi” aspect of the dish. I can’t even describe in words how delicious this course was. I actually mixed the greens, rice and guatita together to make one messy dish and the combination was even better. Total success!
Dominique is pregnant at the moment and due in November so there likely won’t be any other themed dinners till next year, but I’m already looking forward to it. If you’re in Montreal, check out the website to see more info on Dominique’s cooking school. You won’t regret it!
The Plant-Based Diabetic 