I love my cream cheese spread suuuper thick (like how I like my peanut butter), and this tofu cream cheese is super spreadable and packed full of protein!

We’ve partnered with Sunrise Soya Foods to create this recipe for y’all! We’ve been using their Sunrise tofu products for years and we are so excited to be working with them and sharing some of our favourite ways to eat tofu with you all!

Currently, I am in Hong Kong enjoying dragon fruit for breakfast, fluffy bread for days, and lots and lots of food fed by grandma. I would visit her home every day and she’d have plates of food just sitting on the table. One day it was pumpkin, another was some sort of green onion pancake, the next day was a tomato tofu dish, some beancurd mushroom dish, and so forth. The funny thing is, I would bring something to her place as well, so now her fridge is a big accumulation of food that neither of us can finish. She’d told me to stop bringing food over, so now we have like 4 dishes of leftovers to eat before I leave back to Canada. I’d say the worst part of going to flying to visit grandma is the last meal with her before I leave because she’d always end up in tears, and it’s so hard to see that because it makes me extra sad too.

Not that I’d miss the city itself, because it is way too populated and fast-paced for me. Other than their walking pace, the pace in which everything runs is a little too crazy; I feel like patience is really lacking in the city! I would stand on the side putting away my water bottle into my bag, and an usher of some sort would tell me to get out of the way and directed me back out into the rushing foot traffic. I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to stand on the side! How else am I supposed to put away my water bottle into my bag? Knowing me, if I tried to accomplish that while walking, I’d spill everything out of my bag onto the ground and it would be even of a bigger mess because there would be people trying to navigate all around, and trying to dodge all of the obstacles on the ground that I would have just dropped!

Anyways, I also wanted to mention all of the street foods and bakery around every single corner of every block in Hong Kong. I am a little wide-eyed at it all because if there is a bakery on every block, how much bread gets wasted every day? There is no way all the buns get sold on a given day, knowing there are quite literally 500 bakeries in given region. There is bread and all sorts of buns everywhere I look, and I wish I had enough stomach space to try them all. They all look so fluffy and interesting!

Yesterday, I spent the day wandering the streets of Hong Kong by myself because grandma was a little too busy for me. I wasn’t sure what to eat and my stomach was calling, so I saw this stall on the side of the street that had a picture of rice rolls for $9, which equates to around $1.50 CAD, so I was sold and asked the lady for some rice rolls.

And I thought she would give me a tray of some sort for me to eat on, but she quite literally whipped out a small white plastic bag, and dumped some rice rolls in, poured in some sauce, and gave me a stick. And so this marks the day I ate something saucy out of a plastic bag with a stick while standing on the side of a busy street. Thank goodness there wasn’t an usher outside the MTR station because I was just pretending I was waiting for a friend (non-existent) while quickly eating rolls out of the bag.

Time to head to my grandma’s place because I had dinner with the grandparents on the other side of my family yesterday, and it turned out my grandma called my dad asking where the heck I was that I wasn’t at her place for dinner. I really wish I could bring her something homemade that isn’t like 4 day old cookies that I brought on the flight with me, like this tofu cream cheese bagel or some homemade pizza (it’s her favourite food!!), but ingredients and facilities are limited so I can only show her the things I make through pictures like this and be real lame and buy some egg tarts or some other bakery item up to her place when I visit.

Alright, that’s enough about my current life in Hong Kong!

Onto the chive herb tofu cream cheese… I’ve always wanted to make a non-dairy cream cheese using soaked nuts and lemon juice, but I’ve had bad experiences making nut cheesecakes, so I decided against it and haven’t tried since. However, this garlic herb tofu cream cheese is absolutely divine and packed full of protein. I love that it’s full of greens as well because of all the herbs in it, which also makes it a really pretty green colour!

Aside from roasting the garlic, the whole process took me 5 minutes to make; it’s so simple and delicious that I think I’ll stop making hummus and start using this as my regular spread. If you’re roasting garlic, I recommend you roast a whole tray because roasted garlic is so versatile and useful to have on hand. You can spread it on toast for a quick garlic bread, add it to pastas, or even eat it straight up. I remember when my mom would roast a whole tray every week and spread it on our lunch sandwiches along with whatever “salad” she’d made for that week. Back when I wasn’t vegetarian (and when she would make my lunch), it would always be either tuna potato salad, egg potato salad, or chicken potato salad sandwiches. Yes, we love carbs on carbs in the Chew household hahahahahaha! We also love fats on fats (chocolate grilled cheese). It is one of my mom’s favourite things hahahah!

Now that my mom has stopped cooking for the family, it is my turn to make the food. She really enjoyed this tofu cream cheese bagel and had two, so you can say it has passed the mom test. Although you may not trust her tastebuds now that I’ve revealed her love for chocolate and cheese sandwiches… so you gotta try it yourself!