Monday, May 12, 2008

Fresh Vegetable and Tofu Stirfry


I had a container of tofu and a bunch of spinach and green beans in my fridge that were nearing the end of their usability period, so I decided to make a stirfry tonight. I actually did one the other day that was unreported in here, and found the tofu was a little bland (I only used sunflower oil and herbes du provence for flavour) so this time I marinated it in a pre-fab teriyaki marinade. I cut the tofu into bite-sized cubes, tossed them in a tupperware container, slathered them in the sauce and stuck it in the fridge for a couple hours.
I wanted to add a couple more colourful and chewable vegetables so I moseyed over to the grocery store and just browsed around for a while. I ended up leaving with a yellow pepper and a broccoli crown. (They had NO red peppers! Is it suddenly out of season?)
My stomach told me that I needed a bit more substance to fill me up so I started a pot of brown rice and went to do the dishes. By the time I was done, so was the rice but it stayed nice and warm in a covered pot while I cooked everything else.
I cut up the broccoli, green beans and spinach and put it all in the microwave (next time I'll do the spinach separately, because the others took much longer and I had to redo them). While it was cooking, I started heating up the pan and chopping the pepper.
I splooshed on an inexcessive amount of sunflower oil, and dropped in the pepper and the tofu, letting it fry for a few minutes before adding the broccoli and beans. Towards the end, I tossed in the spinach (but in the future, I'll wait until the last minute because it all shrunk and some of it stuck to the pan) and the rest was standard flip, stir, flip, stir until it looked done. Just before the end I sprinkled on a little of the herbes du provence which I though was risky because I didn't know how it would go with the teriyaki flavour of the tofu, but did anyway because I wanted an extra boost for the veggies.
I scooped half the rice into a bowl and topped it with half the stirfry, and we were off to the races.

It was delightful. The marinade ended up liiiightly flavouring the vegetables and the herbs actually tasted great. It was crunchy and smushy and *tasty* and filling. I didn't do anything to the rice so it was fairly bland but it went well with everything else and I don't think adding butter or other seasoning would have yielded a better result overall - this was healthier and what I really liked about it was the purity of the whole thing. Lovely.

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