Lucky Chicken-Fried Tofu

I owe my friend Margie for this one. A few months ago she loaned me her copy of Miriam Ungererer's Good Cheap Food (sadly out of print, but definitely worth nabbing a copy if you can find one used), and I finally got around to reading it. Most of the recipes center around meat, which doesn't do me much good practically speaking, but I'm curious and Ms. Ungerer is an engaging writer and maybe someday I'll need to know how to cook veal kidneys, though I doubt it.

When I arrived at the recipe for "South Carolina Fried Chicken," I found a four-leaf clover that had been pressed between the pages. Taking it as a sign, I stopped and thought about fried chicken for a bit. I thought about how good it is, and what makes it so good, and about how I wished I could share how good it is with my husband, and how sad I felt about never eating fried chicken with him. Then I spent a good two or three minutes chafing at the bonds of my partner's unyielding vegetarianism. Then I thought some more. I thought, what really makes fried chicken so tasty? Is it really the chicken? Or is it the salty, crispy, fried crust that covers the chicken? I think you can guess the answer I came up with. (The crust.)

So I put the fried chicken crust on some "tofu fingers" and they were pretty awesome. The trick is to make the crust nice and salty, so you get an initial salty jolt, which contrasts nicely with the more bland tofu inside. We enjoyed them with stir-fried greens and roasted potato slices. Thanks, Margie, for the four-leaf clover. It really was lucky. (Readers, go check out Margie's blog, Fun Simple Food. You'll be glad you did.)

The only hard part about making this is planning ahead to put your block of tofu in the freezer overnight. Freezing and then thawing the tofu makes it a bit chewier, and also seems to significantly decrease the amount of water it exudes while cooking. I just put my whole unopened package of tofu in the freezer, and it was fine. The package expanded a bit, but did not burst its seams. The next morning, I took the frozen tofu out, and let it thaw on my countertop for several hours.

Chicken-Fried Tofu
1 package of extra-firm tofu (frozen, then thawed)
All-purpose flour
Salt
Pepper
Oil (for frying)

Remove thawed tofu from its package and squeeze it a bit to remove excess water. Slice the tofu into 12 rectangular "fingers" of equal size. Heat about a half inch of canola oil in a non-stick skillet. While the oil is heating, place about a half cup of flour in a small bowl, then add a very generous amount of salt and black pepper to it and mix it together. When the oil is hot, dip a tofu piece in the flour mixture and roll it around until it is coated, then place it in the skillet. Repeat for the other tofu pieces until you run out of room in your skillet. You will have to do this in batches. Fry the tofu until it is golden brown on the bottom, then flip the pieces over using tongs and fry the other side. Drain on paper towels, add more salt if you wish, and serve immediately. Use barbecue sauce, ketchup, Sriracha, or whatever condiment you think would work.

Too Saucy

I recently had a conversation about tomato sauce with my four-year-old. You see, she refuses to eat anything but butter and salt on her pasta, and I am having a hard time just letting it go. I give her pasta with sauce. "I don't like it," she says, her jaw set, head tilted slightly to the side, with the steely glint of certainty in her eyes that belongs only to four-year-olds talking about food they don't like. "But why?" I ask. She thinks for a moment. "Too saucy," she replies.

Unfortunately I am no molecular gastronomist and I don't have equipment like liquid nitrogen tanks and candy flossing machines at my disposal, so I can't do anything about sauce being saucy. (But maybe this is a future career for the four-year-old? Perhaps she will follow in the footsteps of Ferran Adrià, and make sauce that is in no way saucy at all, but instead is foamy, crunchy, or stringy, or gelled in the shape of a cube, or perhaps take it a step further, and make sauce that is merely an essence to be inhaled in a puff of air.)

At any rate, today I present you with a sauce that the four-year-old did eat on her pasta, despite its innate sauciness. After much struggle and cajoling, and some respectably convincing faux-gagging, we somehow overcame the initial hurdle of the first bite. After that, the rest was easy. In the words of her six-year-old sister, it is "double hundred million good."

This is a sauce I made with roasted cherry tomatoes and onions. The onions are mellow and much more subtle than garlic, and balance the bright acidity of the tomatoes. If you've ever tried Marcella Hazan's famously simple tomato sauce, the one that calls for a can of tomatoes, a halved onion, and a stick of butter, you know what onions can do for tomatoes. (Make them taste really good, that's what. I'm sure the stick of butter helps too.) After roasting, everything is emulsified a bit in the blender, so the sauce has a creamy texture despite the fact that it has no cream. Which is cool, because you get the benefits of creaminess without the unwanted dilution of the tomatoey-oniony flavor.

And, um, I know this is weird, but this sauce goes really well with sliced cucumbers. It's no molecular gastronomy, but maybe you should try making a cucumber sandwich with this sauce spread on the bread. Don't say you don't like it until you try it. Of course,  it's also very, very good on pasta with a little Parmesan cheese. Angel hair or spaghetti would work best.

Roasted Onion and Cherry Tomato Sauce
2 pints cherry tomatoes, washed and dried
1½ large yellow onions, chopped into inch-wide chunks (go against the grain of the onion)
A few glugs of olive oil
Salt
Dash of sherry vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 425°. Place the cherry tomatoes and onions on a large, rimmed sheet pan. Pour a few glugs of olive oil over them, then mix with your hands to ensure all tomatoes and pieces of onion are coated with oil. Spread the onions and tomatoes evenly over the sheet pan, and sprinkle all with salt. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast for approximately 20-23 minutes, until cherry tomatoes are done. The skins should be wrinkled and split, but not charred. Remove all of the tomatoes from the pan and set them aside. Return the pan with the onions back into the oven and continue to roast until the onions are fully cooked and soft, approximately 5-7 minutes.

Scrape the onions and any juices from the pan into your blender container, and add the tomatoes. Puree until the mixture is fairly smooth and emulsified, but still has some lumps. Pour the sauce into a bowl, add just a faint dash of sherry vinegar, freshly ground black pepper to taste, and more salt if needed. Serve with pasta (or cucumbers, if you trust me).

You Can Never Have Too Much Squash

It was Wallis Simpson who said, "You can never be too rich or too thin." She never did mention whether is was possible to have too much squash. My guess is that if she ever had her staff make squash bhajis for her, she would have appended "or too much squash" to her famous statement (and amended the "too thin" portion of it). But back then, there really wasn't much Indian food in England (my, how times have changed), so she probably never even tried a bhaji. Too bad for her – poor skinny rich girl.

A bhaji is essentially just a vegetable dipped in a chana dal (besan) flour batter and fried. (Chickpea flour would also work well, if that is easier for you to find.) I wrote about them back in February, and the formula remains the same regardless of choice of vegetable. My husband is the potato bhaji king, and even makes them for our six-year-old to snack on after school. She brings the extras to school in her lunch box the next day, with a little container of ketchup. Indian French fries!

This time of year, most people are drowning in squash, so I thought I'd just throw the bhaji idea out there. I made a cucumber yogurt sauce to accompany the bhajis. Just add peeled, grated cucumber to plain yogurt, stir, and salt to taste. I should note that in this batch I also did tomatoes and jalapenos. The tomatoes tasted good (and spattered in the oil a lot, so beware), but were a bit soggy. I think green tomatoes would work better. The jalapenos were delicious, but extremely spicy. If you do these, consume them with lots of yogurt sauce, and at your own risk.

Squash Bhajis
Slice squash (about three or four small ones) into rounds a little less than half an inch thick.

For the batter: *
Mix one cup chana dal flour (besan) with one teaspoon of salt, about 1/8 teaspoon of asafoetida, the desired amount of red chili powder. Add enough water to make the batter the consistency of pancake batter (it should cling to your vegetables). I used around 3/4 cup of water.

Frying the bhajis:
3. Heat about an inch of canola oil in a small saucepan or wok. Make sure the oil is good and hot before you fry the bhajis, or the batter will fall off the vegetables.

3. Dip a squash slice in the batter, drop gently into the oil, and fry until crisp and browned. Turn the bhaji to brown the other side if necessary. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon, drain the bhajis on paper towels, and serve fresh.

*You can use a little more or less asafoetida, or none at all. It gives a sulfurous, garlicky flavor which some people find a little strange at first. I happen to like it, but you definitely don't want to overdo it.

The Spice of Life

This past Labor Day weekend we drove 14 hours to Chicago in order to attend the wedding of my husband's cousin. Three days after arriving, we drove 14 hours back to Atlanta.*

Before heading off to the wedding in the 'burbs, we were able to spend a day in Chicago with some of the extended family, and I came upon a realization of sorts. There are two kinds of people in this world: Those of us who seek novelty in what we eat, and those of us who want to eat pretty much the same thing every day, and are just fine with that, thank you very much.

I have nothing more to say on that subject, but suffice it to say that not eating at [insert name of ubiquitous chain restaurant at random] led to a fine meal of beer, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and potato pancakes. The German half of me was very satisfied.

All of this is just to segue into a description of what we had for dinner tonight. I have a ridiculous amount of basil I need to use up, and am sick to death of pesto. Pesto is good, but at this point in the summer, a little creativity is needed, a little novelty, if you will. So I decided to mix things up a bit, and came up with this creamy basil pasta salad which doesn't use cream, so is vegan to boot. (Ironically, a bee flew over my boiling pasta pot, fell in and died, so a living creature was unfortunately harmed during the creation of this dish. I am not sure if that de-veganified it – one for the philosophers, maybe.)

The cashews provide the creaminess, and jalapeño pepper adds a subtle kick.  Lemon and tomatoes provide an acidic contrast to the creamy, sweet basil. It was good, it was basilly, and it wasn't pesto. (Needless to say, I highly recommend leftover sweets from an Indian wedding for dessert. For if you've ever been to an Indian wedding, you know there are lots and lots of sweets that must be eaten, enough to last you at least a month after the event takes place.)


Creamy Lemon Basil Pasta Salad
For the basil sauce:
2 cups cashews (plus soaking water)
2 jalapeño peppers, roughly chopped (more, or less, to taste and depending on spiciness of the peppers)
1 cup firmly packed basil leaves
1 or 2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 cups water
1 teaspoon salt (plus extra to taste)
juice of one lemon

For the rest:
One pound package fusilli noodles
Two tomatoes, chopped and salted
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1/2 cup cooked fresh corn, salted
Handful of basil leaves, cut in chiffonade (that means rolled up together and cut into thin strips)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Salt to taste
Lemon wedges

Soak the cashews in water to cover by a couple of inches for approximately five hours. Drain the cashews and place them in a blender or food processor, along with the jalapeños, basil, garlic, salt, and water. Blend until creamy and smooth, adding more water if necessary to reach the desired consistency. Stir in the juice of one lemon, and adjust salt to taste.

Meanwhile, boil a pound of fusilli pasta in salted water until al dente. Drain pasta, and return to pot.
Toss with enough basil sauce to make a rich, creamy mass of pasta. (I used about half of the sauce. You can freeze the rest or use it as a vegetable dip, or a sandwich spread, or make more pasta the next day. Or halve the recipe.)

Add the tomatoes, shallot, corn, basil, and black pepper to the pasta. Mix everything gently to combine. Add salt if necessary. Serve with lemon wedges to be squeezed over each individual serving. (Don't skip this: It adds a very refreshing lemoniness that you don't want to miss in combination with the basil.)

*Yes, this was insane, but cheaper than flying. And when all's said and done, I still prefer a 14-hour drive to a two-and-a-half hour flight, which is really longer than two-and-a-half hours anyway, when you factor in all the other nonsense you have to deal with. Driving allowed us to not only eat in Chicago, but in Louisville (with friends visiting from Seattle!), West Lafayette (Indiana, just off-campus from Purdue), and Chattanooga. We did the whole thing no fast food, strictly independent restaurants, though I was pretty bummed that the incongruously named 'XXX' Family Restaurant was closed for the holiday. I make fast food exceptions for restaurants more than 80 years old. Conversely, flying allows you to eat on an airplane. Blech. No thanks.

The Amazing Miracle Mystery Squash

After clearing away the brown wreckage of my month-long, mid-summer absence from my garden plot, I was left with one eggplant bush, two pepper plants, a few bedraggled bean plants that were being mercilessly attacked by Mexican bean beetles, a ton of insanely vigorous basil, a lot of empty space, and one tiny squash seedling that had somehow started to grow, despite the fact that I had not planted it. I decided to let it stay, and see what happened. That single vine has spread to cover half my plot, and threatens to entirely take over if the squash bugs and cucumber beetles don't kill it first. (They have quite a battle on their hands, because this vine obviously wants to live. )

I'm not sure what kind of squash it is. They are shaped like yellow crooknecks, but are smooth, and colored pale green, with faint white stripes. The flesh inside is a very pale, creamy orange. I cooked them with some onions for dinner tonight, and was delighted with how squashy they tasted. Sometimes when I cook summer squash, it just doesn't taste like anything. I think the key is to get young squash, with the dried up remnants of the squash blossom still intact on the end of the squash. Sometimes you can find them like this in the farmers' market, so if you do, go for it. That said, I do think these squash are unusually tasty, so if my vine does survive the Southern onslaught of insect pestilence, I'll try to let a few squash mature so that I can save the seeds and plant them on purpose next year.

Yellow crookneck squash stewed with onions is a traditional Southern dish. The traditional method cooks the onions and squash down to a tender mush. I believe mush has its place in the pantheon of vegetable cookery, but I wasn't in the mood for it, so I decided to give my squash and onions wok hai instead. (Check out the link – it gets quite esoteric. For my purposes, I'll just say the dish had the taste of the wok seasoning, and the vegetables didn't have the bejeesus cooked out of them. They were nice and firm. Sad to say, you really do need a wok to achieve wok hai, but if you don't have one, it's not the end of the world. Just do the best you can with whatever skillet you have, and it'll still taste good.)

 I then used the squash and onions in a dish I dubbed Three Sisters Tacos, which were corn tortillas filled with cooked dried lima beans (seasoned with onion and smoked paprika), corn, the aforementioned squash, chopped cucumbers, chives, chipotle pepper sour cream, and a dash of Tabasco sauce for good measure. (Oh, and in case you don't know, Three Sisters refers to the Native American agricultural triad of corn, beans, and squash.) The older daughter was skeptical about the squash, but ended up liking it and eating a full portion of everything, though not all on the taco. The younger daughter refused everything, and had leftover pizza. Ah well, she'll come around someday. And if not, one out of two ain't bad.

Wok Hai Miracle Mystery Squash and Onions
This is my general method. Put some canola oil in a wok and heat to very hot. Thinly slice half an onion, and add to hot wok, stirring frequently. Cook the onions for a few minutes, then add about three cups worth of squash chopped into one-inch pieces, and a generous amount of salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the squash reaches the desired level of doneness. I like it to be fairly firm. Add a few dashes of sherry vinegar, black pepper and more salt to taste if needed. Stir to combine, and serve. Go very light on the sherry vinegar; you don't want to taste vinegar, just brighten the flavors.