Fried Tofu Stir Fry

It's not like we don't eat, but I realize it's been a good while since I've posted a recipe.  When something awesome strikes, I'll write it up for you, but we've been eating stuff you'll find in past posts, mostly.

This is a recent stir fry with an illicit fall red pepper.  It was awesome, but not super-different.  I usually just stir-fry the tofu, but this time after I drained it, marinated it (mirin, soy, fish sauce, sriracha, onion, garlic, toasted sesame oil, rice vinegar) and drained it again, I tossed it in corn starch and shallow fried it (like the banh mi recipe).  I stir fried some chopped up veg - broccoli, onion, carrot and the aforementioned pepper - and added some of the marinade.  That's really it.  Dinner. 

Tofu Banh Mi Salad

I've had this salad stuck in my head for a while.  It's sweet and spicy and crisp and fresh and it mimics my all-time favorite sandwich.  I've proclaimed my love for the tofu banh mi pretty loudly on this blog. Nearly a year and a half ago, I wrote up the recipe for the sandwich.  One of my first posts was just about how much I like these sandwiches, without a recipe or anything, just "Hey, you know what's a good sandwich? Tofu banh mi."  

A banh mi is pickled carrots and daikon, cucumber, jalepeno, cilantro, a wee bit of mayo or vegenaise, maybe some sriracha and some kind of protein* which in my case is always tofu.  Sweet fried tofu.  

The good rolls from the real Vietnamese bakeries are made with rice flour and are crisp on the outside and soft inside and perfect for balancing the complex flavors of this salad.  

But something about it was calling for salad-ization.  Rolls are great, but lettuce works. And a soft, crisp-edged roll might interfere with the magic act that is sweet tofu with pickled veg and spicy peppers and cilantro.  That's a lot to work with and you want to taste it all. So it was time to make it into a salad. 

Let's call this Same Dinner, Different Day, even though the other day was in April of 2011.  Please don't hold on to leftover tofu that long. 

Barbecue Tofu

I didn't think dinner would be awesome enough to warrant a blog post. This was one of those meals where I was like, "Yeah, sure, I guess we could do barbecue tofu." So yes, they're phone photos taken on the couch. Because we're superclassy. 

But then, of course, we liked it enough to tell you about it. It's not rocket science, it's sauce on soy. It's not even grilled, it's just sauced. 

Ginger Peanut Tofu Stir Fry

 

It's spring, and there's no denying it.  It's been spring pretty much since autumn, but now, for sure, it's spring.  It's not just the short sleeves and outdoor dining that tells me, either, it's the new veggies and the flowering trees.  So it celebrate this unexpected yet totally happening seasonal shift, I bought pea shoots. 

Pea shoots are like sprouts, plus greens.  Here's a bit more information on them, if you're up for that sort of thing. 

I didn't go out looking for pea shoots, I actually went looking for flowers to plant. Because, you know, it's spring.  We took our first trip out to this year's CSA, Greensgrow (three CSAs in three years!), and they had some veg for sale.  They had some of the wintry veg I've become accustomed to in the past few months, but they also had scallions and pea shoots.  I should have bought the scallions, they'd have gone great in this recipe, but at least I grabbed the pea shoots.

At lunch they were used in a salad and for the next night's dinner, they were the star of this stir fry.  Also, yesterday's salad dressing became today's marinade.  You know what we call that?

Same Dinner Different Day: Bok Choy and Tofu Stir Fry

So the other day we had those bok choy and tofu wontons, and I made too much filling.   Today it's same dinner, different day. 

See, it's a thing.  It even has it's own logo.   


I've mentioned before that I'm pretty much not going to heat up yesterday's dinner for tonight's.  I'm going to make something else.  I'm not anti-leftover; I cook more than we can eat most meals so that we have lunches and freezer food.  But freezer food is for later.  Later, I can eat the enchiladasagna in the freezer.   Not the same week that I make it.  

But while I don't want to have leftovers for dinner, I'm perfectly happy to have same dinner different day.  That's different.  

Bok Choy and Tofu Dumplings

I just signed up for Winter Harvest, because I want the stress of CSA veg year-round.  It's a buying club, it's not like I'll end up with veg I didn't choose.  I like that it starts right when this farmshare ends, and goes through most of the boring frozen vegetable season.  Last year, because I had so much extra farmshare veg, I had a freezer full of fresh-frozen veg to get me through winter, and it lasted until about March.  This year, not so much.  So I'll have Winter Harvest, and then I'll probably end up farm-marketing for a few weeks until my next CSA starts.   Looking forward to not having much of a gap.  I'd like to go to the grocery store just once every month or two for olive oil and quinoa and junk food. 

On my list of things to do with farmshare veg at the end of the week:

Pizza

Quesadillas

Pasta

Salad

Frittata

Egg Rolls

Dumplings

Dumplings, wontons, pot stickers, whatever, this isn't an authentic version of any one of them, it's just that I had too much baby bok choy and it was losing it's crispness, and then these carrots weren't all that firm, and it was time to stuff it inside of something.

I had frozen some tofu a while back, because that helps the texture get more "meaty."  If you've been served tofu in a restaurant and asked yourself why your at-home tofu doesn't have the same firmness and substance, it's likely that the restaurant froze it.   Tofu masquerading as chicken tends to be frozen.  So, a while back (months), I threw half a block in the freezer.

When I unwrapped it, it looked like this:

Banh Mi Chay - Vietnamese Tofu Hoagies

One of my first blog posts was about this sandwich.  It is, in my mind, the best possible sandwich.  I read about it before I had it and said to myself, "this will be my new favorite."  And so it was.  Sweet tofu, fresh cilantro, pickled veg and jalepeno - what more do you need?  But I have a serious problem.  I can't find one I like around here.   There's a decent place in West Philly, but my favorite local place closed many months ago and I've tried most of the other joints and I'm not happy.   So I'm going to tell you how and why you should pickle your own veg days in advance rather than buy a $3 hoagie.   It's better.

Sweet Hot Crispy Tofu

So today I get to use the fresh local tofu I bought yesterday.

i know that glass cutting boards ruin my knives.