Friday, August 28, 2009

Tofu Part Two


Tofu and veggies are sort of the meat and potatoes of fast days at our house. We often have some kind of combination of the two, although we also eat many bean based meals or tempeh. Since I'm a vegetarian, I don't like to eat meat substitutes, chik'n patties, soy crumbles, and the like on fast days, though those can be quick and easy dinner solutions if you need something to fall back on.

In the summer, we love to grill. Or I should say, I love to chop things up and give them to James to grill. We mainly grill lots of fresh vegetables. I chop them up, marinate them in Italian dressing, and James grills them in a grill basket. I make my own dressing. I make a mix of dry ingredients and keep it in a jar in the cupboard, then I add it to the wet ingredients to mix up a batch as needed. I thought I'd post the recipe, but I looked at it and realized I don't use half the ingredients listed, so the next time I make the mix I'll pay attention to what I actually do and post it later. You can use any vegetables that you like. We especially love onions, cherry/grape tomatoes, and mushrooms. We typically do squash and peppers as well. Sometimes eggplant makes an appearance. Really it's whatever we've got from the farm share lately.

We recently tried a new (to us) method for grilled tofu. The twist here was I froze the tofu first. This changes the texture of the tofu, and makes it really spongy. This is great for grilling, since it really soaks up sauce that way. Here's what I did: I froze a block of tofu in its original package (which is a handy thing to do if you have some that's about to expire). At some later date, I took the tofu out of the freezer and defrosted it. I drained it, cut it into four chunks, and squeezed the water out of each chunk. Then I put the chunks in a dish with some barbecue sauce, squished them around and turned them over, so that they were well infused with the sauce. Then I handed them over to James, and he grilled them up.


It was pretty good. I'd welcome other sauce ideas. I always like barbecue sauce, but James isn't too crazy about it. He really liked the texture of this tofu, though.

6 comments:

  1. that's great. I need to try one of your ideas out! Thanks for this!

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  2. Let me know how it goes if you try one. I plan to keep posting them; I love to cook.

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  3. We're making this tonight. We tried the Tofu Fingers - couldn't get the kids to eat it but Ben liked it.

    I hope you do keep posting recipes because they've been a big help on Fridays!

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  4. Thanks for the feedback, Emily. Kid-friendly food is definitely not my strong suit! Hopefully I'll figure it out when we have some.

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  5. Wow, that was a great recipe! So easy! Kid-friendly...? Dominic ate some and even asked for more!

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  6. So glad to hear you (and Dominic!) enjoyed it.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts--I love hearing from you!