Honey (or Maple) Soy Baked Tofu

Tofu and I never used to get along.

When I was a child, tofu was a regular part of meals.  Hot steaming tofu in lovely flavoursome sauces, fried tofu, tofu in spring rolls, tofu in claypots, tofu in curries, you get the picture. 

I never really liked tofu.  To eat it, I had to dip it, drown it and drench it in a pool of sauce.  All I could hear was my mum saying “eat, eat, it’s so nice, so good for you”.  I just didn’t like tofu.  To me, it just tasted like water, water with a touch of metal. 

Then I grew up…sort of.

Now I love tofu.  I just can’t get enough of it.  The problem now is that my bad tofu karma has come to bite me on my behind.  My children can’t face tofu.  They just don’t like it.

In my desperate attempts to raise a tofu-loving family, I have been trying lots of different ways of cooking tofu.  A friend gave me this great recipe for baked tofu which I am completely addicted to!  A quick and simple marinade, pop it in the oven and voila.  Done.

Only 1 problem, my children still don’t like it. Oh well, at least I love it!

Egg-free Banana Muffins

Trying to eat healthily is just not in my nature.  By “healthily”, I just mean cutting down on sugary snacks (biscuits and CHOCOLATE!).  I manage to last about 3 to 4 days at the most without something sweet.  However, by the sugarless 4^th day, every hair follicle on my body is screaming out for sugar!

So, I decided to make some semi-healthy low-sugar banana muffins…with chocolate chips and a sugary crumble topping!  I suppose they’re not that low in sugar as there’s extra sugar in the crumble topping (I’m not counting the chocolate – it was dark chocolate!).  Well, the ‘good intentions’ were there anyway.

These muffins are not the prettiest, but they were very moist with a delicious crunch from the crumble topping.  They managed to satisfy my sugar cravings…for a day. 

Also, as no eggs were harmed in their making, the muffins are also good for people with egg-allergies!  This recipe was also handy in using up the extra apple sauce that I had as well as the mushy bananas on my counter. 

Tortilla du Fond du Frigo

Firstly, I'm going to just say that I’m never ever ever moving countries (except either back to France or Australia of course) ever again! I won’t share the gory details but let’s just say it has been a complete nightmare, what with the house hunting, the job hunting and everything else!

We’re currently living out of our backpacks and in various B&Bs in the lovely Surrey countryside, which actually sounds more exotic (and expensive!) than it actually is. On the bright side…we’ll hopefully be settled in…say…2 months!

Otherwise, moving enables you to develop creativity by trying to use up all the odd bits and pieces that are left in your fridge 2 days before you move out. (I don’t like wasting!)

Here’s what I chaotically put together with what wasn’t already green with mould in our Frankfurt fridge - a tortilla.

A Tortilla du Fond du Frigo (loosely translated to “Bottom of the Fridge Tortilla”) to be precise. I like to give my meals French names – it sounds much more posh and edible ;-)

Ingredients
1 spanish onion diced
1 medium sweet potato sliced (I microwaved the sweet potato slices in order to cook the tortilla faster)
½ a very wrinkly old red capsicum sliced
7 eggs
lots of minced garlic
bits of left-over, wilted “fresh” coriander chopped
½ tsp salt (or to taste)
pepper to taste
olive oil for cooking

There are probably a million ways to make a tortilla but I beat eggs in a bowl and added the cooked sweet potato, red capsicum, salt, pepper and coriander to the eggs.

I first gently browned the diced onion and garlic in a non-stick pan. I then added a little bit more oil to the pan and then poured in the egg mixture. The egg mixture was cooked over a low fire until it was pretty firm. Then the hard part, I flipped the entire tortilla over to cook the top-side. Do this carefully as if you have a big pan, the big omelette will break up into little pieces…though, this is still very edible!

And voila, 20-30 minutes later, you have a delish hot meal to sit down to!
ps.
Thank you to everyone for all your well wishes. Hehe! But after the move we’ve just had, you’re all obviously not wishing hard enough! ;-)

Slow-grilled vegetables on a bed of sweet potato mash

I’m still on a health kick but that doesn’t have to mean boring food! Well, not all of the time anyway.

I find it takes a lot of effort to plan fresh, healthy and interesting meals! For example, if I were to say, eat a relatively unhealthy meal…meat patty and chips. I’d just go to the supermarket, get myself a bag of frozen chips and frozen patties (or even fresh patties from the deli section), fry it all up quickly and call that a meal. OR, I could just hop over to the nearest fast food outlet!

A fresh and healthy (ie. full of vegetables) meal on the other hand means that I have to check to see if I have fresh veggies in the fridge, and also how to spice up the veggies and make them more interesting! If I can’t find any decent vegetables (that are still alive!) in the fridge, I would have to decide which vegetables I would like to have and what spices I would need. I would then have to head to the fruit and vegetable shop or the market, which is only open on certain days (more planning involved there!)!

I’ve therefore learnt to keep some basic vegetables always on hand, eg. courgettes (zucchini), broccoli, tomatoes, capsicum, mushrooms and sweet potatoes! The problem is not forgetting about the vegetables and finding out 1 week later that I have 10 black mushrooms and 3 mushy tomatoes with nice green mould on them!

Anyway, this brings me to my last concoction: Slow-grilled vegetables on a bed of sweet potato mash. Well, actually, the vegetables were just grilled not slow-grilled. Slow-grilled just sounds fancier! (I suppose if I turned the heat down, they would be slow-grilled!)

Sweet potato mash
2 stalks spring onions (green onions or scallions, however you call them!) chopped
2 medium sweet potatoes
1 tsp coconut milk
¼ tsp salt

I diced the sweet potatoes, boiled them then mashed them with a fork (I need to buy a proper potato masher). I then added the spring onions, coconut milk and salt to the sweet potatoes and mixed away. The coconut milk and salt nicely contrasted the sweetness of the sweet potatoes. I found myself sneaking little bits while mixing it up!

Grilled Vegetables
½ zucchini sliced thinly lengthwise
½ capsicum sliced
3 mushrooms sliced
a few florets of broccoli
1 tsp garlic roughly

I mixed the garlic in with the vegetables before grilling. You could even stir-fry the vegetables!

I also made a quick and easy light curry sauce (I love curry!) to drown the nice healthy meal in but I didn’t really need to use it.

Curry sauce
½ tsp chill powder
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground tumeric
1 ½ tbs ground coriander
pinch of salt
½ cup coconut milk
pinch sugar
1tsp tomato paste

Mix all ingredients together and heat until boiling.

Last but not least, spread your mash on your plate and top with grilled vegetables! The ingredients above were just right for 2 people.

I also decided to add a bit of protein to the meal and had some leftover store-bought smoked tofu (I didn’t smoke it myself!) so I plonked the tofu on top of it all.

I felt all nice and healthy after the meal!

Poivrons farcis

Ok, that’s just a fancy name for plain ol’ Stuffed Capsicum. I just wanted to make it sound more exotic by using French!

Anyway, it’s not easy coming up with healthy meals when all I want to eat is fat and carbohydrate-laden stir fry noodles and chips! Big fat golden chips glistening with oil and lightly sprinkled with salt…to be precise!

Basically, I had a bit of leftover rice and wanted to use it up, while having a healthy meal at the same time. So I dug out 3 whole red capsicums (or peppers – is that what you call it in the US?) that were starting to get a bit wrinkly and old (things get pushed to the back of the fridge and then I forget about them!), stuffed them and stuck them in the oven.

The result came out better than I thought! The only problem was eating them! There is no easy way to eat these things. No matter how you try, it ends up being a big (but yummy) mess on your plate!

Here’s what I used:

3 red peppers
3/4 cup cooked rice (I had leftovers!)
250g canned tuna
1 egg
1/4 tsp salt
1 onion lightly fried
2 tsp mayonnaise
1 tsp sweet chili sauce
1 tsp garlic
sesame seeds

1. Mix the rice, tuna, egg, salt, mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce in a bowl.
2. Lightly fry the onion and garlic before adding them to mixture.
3. Mix the ingredients well.
4. Remove the stalk, top and seeds from the capsicums. Also slightly trim the bottom of the capsicums to make the bottom level so that they stand up.
5. Oil a baking dish and stand the capsicums in the dish.
6. Stuff away with the tuna-rice mixture!
7. Top with sesame seeds.
8. Bake for roughly 20-25 minutes (or until cooked) at 220C.


Quick and easy!

Spicy Asian tofu burgers

While I did enjoy the German spätzle, I wasn’t too keen on eating it as a main dish, smothered by cheese as they serve in the restaurants here. So, inspired by Melting Wok’s tofu burgers and having just enough left-over ingredients, this seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the spätzle (or was the spätzle accompanying the burgers?).

These are extremely healthy (I’m still trying to be on a diet!) semi-spicy tofu burgers which are much easier to make if you have an electric mixer thing and not just a handheld fork powered by chocolate carrot sticks as in my case!

Ingredients
1/2 onion diced
250g plain firm tofu mashed
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp rolled oats
1 tbsp fresh coriander chopped
1 tsp ginger minced
1 tbsp garlic minced
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp red curry paste

I mashed the tofu with my handheld fork, mixed in all ingredients, shaped the patties and popped them into the freezer for 5-10 minutes. The wonderfully healthy patties were then grilled (with very little oil!) and served up with the not so healthy spätzle!

This dish probably best reflects my beliefs in yin-yang eating…combining the fat and not-so-fat on 1 plate ;-)

Ps.
I didn’t serve any buns with the burgers; I figured there were enough carbohydrates in the spätzle!

Vegetable-tofu bake crumble

I’m on a diet.

Well, at least I’m trying to be on a diet. But it’s not really working. Well, take last night for example. Having lots of carrots left over, I figured I’d make a low-fat vegetable bake.

So I started chopping away, carrots, a bit of broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, and garlic. I then lightly stir fried the vegetables to give them a little flavour.

I then decided I’d make it a curry vegetable-tofu bake. So I added curry power mix and about a cup-and-a-half of water to the baking dish. And then topped it all off with tofu. Only problem, I had only what was a sliver of tofu left! So the baking dish looked a little bare on the top.

Anyway, I decided to make a topping to make it look a little nicer. A crumble topping. I had wholemeal flour, butter and sesame seeds. I mixed the sesame seeds and flour, added a bit of salt and rubbed in the butter, then whacked the mixture onto the bake and stuck the whole thing into the oven. And there you have it: a vegetable-tofu curry crumble!

So much for my creativity as Hubs said it was just a curry that I stuck in the oven!
Taste-wise, it was yum although the crumble topping was a little weird. Sort of like eating pastry with your curry.

Calorie-wise, all that butter didn’t help my diet!

Ingredients:
Lots of vegetables!
Onions
Garlic
Salt

Curry Powder mix:
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbs ground coriander
½ tsp chilli powder