Inaugural No-oil Vegan Dinner Improv at Packsun

Tonight, Monday March 27th, 2017 we spontaneously had our first no-oil vegan dinner at Packsun. It all started with a conversation at Neerob Bazaar at 2085 Starling Avenue, with owner Khokon (Muhammad Rahman), and a few friends. He then simply said, let's do it right now, and with that he grabbed some ingredients, and our little group was on its way to the Packsun Restaurant, at  2160 Westchester Avenue, which he also owns.

There, inside of 40 minutes, Khokon whipped up a beautiful no-oil vegan dinner with basmati rice, whole wheat roti, and three vegetable dishes:

1. Sautéed spinach with onions, garlic and chili peppers.
2. Yellow lentils, tomato, onion, garlic, chili peppers, and some turmeric, salt and pepper
3. Water squash (this is a light green squash that is popular with the Bangladeshi community), eddo (a delicious tuber, the jamaicans call this white coco), tomato onion chili peppers, garlic, turmeric, a bay leaf and salt.

The food was too good, so I only took a pic of the last bit of #3

(bay leaf in the middle)

This was not a joke, people inhaled the food. Khokon himself was an inspiration, he had only just discovered the whole idea of oil-free vegan cooking recently, through our conversations, but he loves it now himself. So we have a motivated owner (and part-time cook).

In short, this experiment is off to a roaring start. All the ingredients can be found at Neerob Bazaar.

Neerob Bazaar

Asked by one of the diners what was the secret of his preparation, Khokon answered: "All you need to cook a good meal is heart." Now, that's my kind of cook, I'll go to his restaurant any old time.