On a Monday lunchtime: Black pepper tofu
Serves: 2
Approx Cost: £7.01
This is fast becoming my new favourite recipe book. It must be because it made me want to try cooking tofu. Tofu for gods sake! The recipe looked pretty delicious, although the ingredients seemed strangely out of whack. 8 fresh red chillis?!?! Are you trying to blow my head off? Jeepers!
Again I decided to halve the quantities, no need to make so much food this week, still got loads of leftovers to speak of. Managed to halve this one fairly easily, still seemed like an inordinate amount of some things, but they just ‘worked’.
It was a complete faff to start with, shallow frying the tofu took quite a while longer than I expeeted, and crushing the peppercorns was almost impossible, but I stuck with it. After the faff of prepping the tofu an peppercorns the rest of the recipe was pretty easy peasy. This wasnt so healthy though, lots of oil and a hell of a lot of butter (even when I reduced it) made me think maybe i’d made a mistake. But oh no, as you well know, everything cooked in butter is gods work.
The chillis gave it an edge, but not too much surprisingly, the addition of soy and a little sugar to the sauce made it gorgeously gloopy, like a liquor, an elixir if you will. It made the tofu, taste, GREAT! I didnt even know that was possible.
My only let down was the peppercorns, the damn blasted peppercorns. I just didn’t have the strength to bash every last one to a pulp and as such they stuck out like a spare thumb on your fork. Other than replacing those for crushed ones in future, and reducing the amount of butter this recipe is a winner. Certainly converted me to tofu, and James’s reaction? “the best thing you’ve cooked so far”.
There we have it, win win.
