New York, like all great cosmopolitan cities, I suppose, is a city of street meats.  In all sorts of parts of town (but especially those in which office dwellers in their daily dry-cleanables must descend by elevator onto swarming lunchtime streets that will one day give me a heart attack), men of assorted non-Western European ethnicities grill up all kinds of marinated beast on gas-powered metal carts.  I don’t eat grilled beast, of course, but damn if the smell doesn’t always make my mouth water.  The lines at these carts are often positively absurd, I have a friend who insists on going to a particular chicken-and-rice cart every time he visits, and I have no doubt that serious meatys coming from elsewhere in the country would have their minds blown to spend a few meals eating this stuff while leaning against some wall or fire hydrant.

So I get jealous.

And low and behold a shawarma spice mix called to me from the shelves at Sahhadi’s.  If you don’t know, shawarma (which Wikipedia defines as “a Levantine Arab meat preparation” but which is, etymologically, derived from a Turkish word for rotation) is one of those giant meat sticks you see turning next to a flame or heating lamp.  It’s like a gyro, basically, and I once saw someone shave meat from the spit using a circular saw, which was fairly cool.  And I figured I could do something veggie with this.

So boom: Tofu Shawarma with Garlic Red Cabbage and Roasted Tomatoes

• 1 block of tofu sliced into 1/4″-thick pieces
• shawarma spice mix
• 1 1/2 cups of red cabbage sliced 1/4″-wide
• 3 onions sliced
• 1/3 of a pint of cherry tomatoes
• olive oil and butter
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 3 tbs cumin seeds
• 4 ounces plain yogurt
• 1 lemon

Roll the tofu strips (this would work with tempe/seitan/etc. as well) in oil, then coat in the shawarma mix, sprinkle with salt, and press a few razor-thin slices of butter on top.  Bake at 400 degrees for an hour.

While the tofu is in the oven, mix up the yogurt, the juice of the lemon, and salt and pepper to taste and then put in the fridge to marinate.

Next, set the crushed garlic and cumin seeds in olive oil over low heat for four or five minutes.  This infuses the oil with the cumin.  Then mix in the cabbage, toss so that it’s coated, and cook on low heat for ten minutes.  Then mix in the onion and turn the heat up to frying level, stirring occasionally, for an additional ten minutes.  Mix in the cherry tomatoes, and keep stirring.  Remove from heat only after the first few tomatoes split their skins.

Set the cabbage-onion mix on a bed or rice, top with the tofu, and drizzle with the yogurt sauce.  Then eat some of the yogurt sauce with a spoon.  This recipe, with a side of chopped kale sauteed with garlic and za’atar, made enough for two dinners plus a third meal’s-worth of leftovers.