Chopity, chop

I truly started to wonder about my eating habits when I found myself heading down to the garage for an axe so that I could finish lunch.

I’m afraid you’ve been suckered into this blog post by the promise of drama, action and violence. Truth be known, I’m going to spend most of the time talking about tofu (although I promise to come back to the axe later).

Go on, be honest: would you have bothered even opening the blog if I was more upfront and started writing about the T word in the first paragraph?

I was a vegetarian for many years, during which time I ate a fair amount of tofu. Most of it was nice enough, apart from one cruel concoction I experienced at 20,000 feet.

I travelled a lot during my vegetarian phase and, despite having flown on most of the world’s worst airlines, the only inedible vegetarian meal I ever encountered was the scrambled tofu and parsley horror on an Air New Zealand red-eye flight to Wellington. What were they thinking?! To this day I’m convinced it was a ploy to punish their vegetarian customers.

I now eat meat, but my love of Asian food leads to frequent tofu encounters.

Earlier this week, on the way back from skiving off work to check out Sabatini’s knitwear sale, I saw the Wesley market in action and decided to stop and take a look. Even though I’ve lived near the market for more than a decade, I keep forgetting about its existence and have never been until now.

It’s only a small market – probably a dozen fruit and vege stalls, a couple of food stalls, and a few other bits and pieces. The only out-of-the-ordinary offering was a tiny stall selling a selection of home-made tofu products. Like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to take a closer look.

Here’s what I ended up buying:   

Marinated bean skin

  

Plain bean skin

The stall owner suggested a few ways to prepare these, as did the ever-useful Internet. So, come lunch time, I got cooking - with delicious results. The marinated ‘bean skin’ was particularly nice. I think it’s flavoured with five-spice and soy sauce. It was tasty on its own, and even nicer when included the salad recipe at the end of this blog.

Deep-fried tofu

 As for the axe, I felt like rounding off lunch with something sweet and, tempted though I was to offset all that healthiness with a big slab of cake, for once I exercised some willpower and resisted.

I had a drinking coconut in the fridge, from which I’d extracted the juice for a Nonya dessert I made the other night. I’d only managed to cut a little hole in the top, which was large enough to let the juice out, but my kitchen knives weren’t up to the task of carving larger hole from which to extract the soft flesh.

So it was off to the woodpile to get a better tool for the job. Trouble was, the chopping block and axe were buried under a mountain kitchen renovation detritus and other general crap in our garage. Too lazy to move it all out of the way, I burrowed my way through stacks of polystyrene underfloor insulation, a bunch of bicycles and bicycle parts, and rolls of carpet and attempted to cleave the coconut.

There was barely any room to swing the axe so all I could manage do without putting my fingers at risk was cut a slightly larger hole, just wide enough to accommodate a dessert spoon.

And that, I’m afraid, is all I have to report. Not very exciting, really, but not your everyday lunch experience either.

Cucumber and tofu ‘noodle’ salad

No matter what your foodie preferences may be, this simple salad hits the mark: sweet, sour, salty, crisp, soft, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, low-cholesterol. Most importantly, it’s really tasty! I made some more to go with dinner the next night and, to my surprise, the kids liked it - even fussy Rory.


                                                                                     Salad dressing

Bean skin strips stir-fried with chilli, ginger and garlic (left),
cucumber and tofu noodle salad (right).

Mix to taste:

Vegetable (or other bland) cooking oil

Chinese black vinegar

Salt

Sugar

A few drops sesame oil

You could add some chilli flakes and garlic for extra zing

Salad

Cut marinated tofu skin into thin strips and mix with peeled, seeded cucumber that has been julienned. Pour over the dressing. You could substitute any crisp, crunchy vegetable: lettuce, julienned or grated carrot, finely shredded cabbage, etc.