Spicy Buddha’s Feast

One of the classics of Chinese Buddhist cuisine is known as “Pure Meal of the Arhats”—pure meal being a euphemism for vegetarian dish, and arhats (or bodhisattvas as they are often called), referring to the bevy of Buddhas-on-earth who relinquished life in the upper realms in order to serve a nobler existence in the world of suffering below. In its standard form the dish includes soft ginko nuts, black mushrooms, tangles of hair-fine seaweed, and small wads of soy-seasoned wheat gluten, all