So, now you have some Thai basil leftover from the previous recipe, right? And maybe you also picked up a package of smoked tofu at the Asian grocery store, and you’re like, “What am I gonna do with this anyway?” right?

Smoked tofu, by the way, totally rules. The package was on the floor next to the fridge as I put groceries away, when I was suddenly distracted by my ringing phone (or maybe it was a shiny object, I can’t seem to remember). When I came back I found Marley licking the package. I swatted him away, rinsed the kitty saliva from the plastic and stuck it in the fridge. I came downstairs about an hour later to find him licking the spot on the tile where the tofu had been. Of course, as you can tell, there is not very much that Marley won’t eat:

He’s not a kitty who misses many meals.

So anyway, it was Sunday afternoon, I had this basil, tofu, and a hungry manfriend—and thus, it was sandwich time.

You will need:
olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced (there are very few recipes on here that don’t include garlic. If you don’t like garlic, you can just go away.)
Half a package of smoked tofu, cut into strips the size of your index finger
1 large whole wheat pita, halved
Spinach, chopped
Red cabbage, chopped
Thai basil leaves, whole
Sesame seeds (optional)
Peanut Sauce (recipe below)

To make the Peanut Sauce, you will need:
2 TBS peanut butter
1 TBS soy sauce
1 tsp brown sugar
Squeeze of lime juice to taste
water to thin to desired consistency

Start by heating the oil in a skillet. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute, taking care not to burn. We really just want to warm the tofu and add a little garlic flava, so this part will be quick. Drop the tofu in the pan and cook a minute or two on each side, just to heat through. Remove from heat.

To assemble, carefully open the pocket of your pita and stuff half the tofu inside. Please also ignore my grody bass playin’ fingers with short nails and no use for polish:

Smear with half the peanut sauce:

Sprinkle with sesame seeds if you’re into that:

Add some spinach and cabbage for crunchiness:

Poke some basil leaves in there:

NOM NOM NOM!

P.S.
While I’ve already apologized for abandoning this blog during the semester, it was apparently worth it. I got a 4.0!

A few months ago, I posted a recipe that I tried to emulate from one of my favorite food places in Pittsburgh, Pho Minh. This is another that I have semi-successfully tried to adapt from a place in my neighborhood called Thai Me Up. This is one of my new favorite places in the city, because you can bring a 40 of malt liquor in there, and no one cares. In fact, if you linger over your 40 for long enough, the chef will bring you the most delicious almond-crusted cake you have ever eaten. Seriously.
Anyway, my favorite thing on Thai Me Up’s menu is Spicy Tofu with Basil and Rice Noodles. It is so good. So, I began searching the internets for a decent recipe, and ended up combining a few to recreate this deliciousness. It is certainly not as good as the original, but it’ll suffice.
The key to this recipe is absolutely Thai basil. I would suggest, if you can’t find Thai basil, that you substitute mint and go for an entirely different flavor—to use regular sweet basil wouldn’t do it justice. You can find Thai basil in most Asian groceries (for you Pittsburghers, I get it at Lotus in the Strip.) You can recognize it in a store or farmer’s market by its small, pointy leaves and purple stem. It tastes much stronger than sweet basil, with a slightly licorice-y flavor.

I also got some of these red Thai chilies for this recipe, the nice thin ones, but you could use regular red or green chili peppers from the grocery store for this as well.

You will need:
Oil (peanut would be great, I only had olive oil on hand)
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Chili peppers, de-seeded and de-ribbed, as many as you’d like
Half a block of extra firm tofu, cut into 1-inch(ish) cubes
About 2 TBS soy sauce
¼ cup of water or vegetable stock (or slightly less)
Large bunch of Thai basil
Rice noodles, cooked according to package directions

Heat a bit of oil in a wok or large skillet. Add the shallot and cook 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic and chilies, cook another minute.

HEY! HERE’S AN IDEA! DON’T RUB YOUR EYES AFTER CHOPPING THE CHILIES. Because I did, and it hurt like hell. I threw myself on the kitchen floor, screaming like a wounded animal and frantically trying to…I don’t know…rub the chili pepper residue from my eyes? With my tainted hands? I screamed to Rob, “GET IN HERE AND TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS SHIT, I’M GONNA BLOG IT!”
He respectfully declined.

Anyway, once you’ve dried the tears, add the tofu to the pan and stir fry until browned on all sides, to your liking. Add the soy sauce and water, stir fry another minute or 2, until the sauce is thickened. Add a big handful of Thai basil leaves, either left whole or chopped once or twice (you want big pieces.) Stir to wilt the basil and remove from heat. Serve the mixture over rice noodles with a Thai basil garnish—it’s too pretty not to!

Now close up!

Now far away again!

Tofu Spring Rolls

My favorite restaurant in Pittsburgh, somewhat regrettably, is Pho Minh on Penn Avenue in Garfield. It is a family-run Vietnamese joint with excellent food, and it’s BYOB. While I’ve always dined there without incident, I have heard stories of many insane things happening there. Here is the building. I did not take this picture.

My friend Matt tells a story about walking by Pho Minh with a friend of his, who was saying that she thought the place was shady. Matt responded, “Come on, it isn’t that bad,” just as someone was thrown up against the window inside. I really like Pho Minh.

But none of this is the point. The point is that they have some of the best tofu spring rolls I have ever had, and I decided to try to replicate them.

For this, you will need:

About a ½ pound of extra firm tofu
Hoisin sauce
Soy sauce
Spring roll wrappers
Mai fun rice noodles, cooked according to package directions and then chopped
Cucumbers, cut into very thin planks
Carrots, grated
Cilantro, chopped
Spinach
Sesame seeds (optional)

Start by pressing the tofu and cutting it into slabs about a half inch thick, a half inch wide and two inches long. You can always cut them smaller after cooking them; you just don’t want them to fall apart in the pan. Brush them with hoisin sauce and start heating a skillet—we’re going to sear them.

Once the skillet is nice and hot (it’s important that it be dry, so make sure to use a nonstick pan), throw your tofu pieces in and let them cook. This caused a ridiculous amount of smoke in my kitchen, so I turned on the stove fan. It didn’t help much, eventually Rob came down and threw the back door open and glared at me, shivering. Whatever, the tofu was good.

Don’t move it around too much, but flip after a few minutes. There’s really no science to this, just keep your eye on it. Once it’s all cooked, put the pieces on a plate and pop them in the fridge to cool.

Now, get a large bowl of hot water—not so hot you can’t stick your hands in it, but hot nonetheless. Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in the water until it gets pliable and sticky. Spread it on your work surface and top with a few tofu slabs, some noodles, cucumber, carrots, lots of cilantro and a few leaves of spinach, just for crunch. Roll the bottom part over the pile of goodness and then fold the sides in and roll all the way up. You’ll have to work quickly, as the spring roll wrappers might get a little gunky. This takes a bit of practice, but you’ll get the hang of it.

MMMHMMM.

Here is the inside:

For the dipping sauce, I just mixed hoisin sauce with soy sauce to my taste, and then added some sesame seeds for garnish. This was not nearly as good as Pho Minh’s, but I have no idea what is in theirs. I know, if I were smart, I’d have put it in a light colored bowl so you could see it. I really need some new dishes.

All in all, it was a good meal, although I couldn’t eat nearly as many of them as I thought I could. Rob (who also loves Pho Minh, but he digs the beef soup thing) gave it eight hot dogs.

Shrimp “Pad Thai”

I am disgusting about peanut butter. I’ve definitely caught myself absent-mindedly eating directly from the jar. I’ve also absent-mindedly been growing a bit of a pot belly. Anyway.
One of my favorite things to do with peanut butter is making sauces for Asian-themed dishes, like this shrimp “pad thai.” I put the “pad thai” in quotes because I really don’t know what traditionally makes a dish “pad thai” so I don’t want to be all, “Ooh, look at my pad thai,” while you’re all, “That is totally not pad thai.”

So, to make this pseudo-pad thai, the recipe for which was adapted from Cooking Light, begin by cooking a bunch of spaghetti as you normally would. I used whole wheat because it was all I had around, and it was fine. Reserve some of the pasta cooking water for the sauce. To make the sauce, whisk together and set aside:

1/3 - 1/4 cup teriyaki sauce
3 big globs of peanut butter (I used Skippy Natural, creamy-style because that’s my eating-out-of-jar preference)
A squirt of Sriracha
2-3 tablespoons of the pasta cooking water

In a big skillet, heat some sesame oil. Add a clove of garlic, because seriously, I can’t make anything without garlic. Sauté for a minute or two. Add some peeled, deveined large shrimp with the tails removed. Cook for about 2 minutes. Shrimp really don’t take long to cook, I think the problem most people have is overcooking them, and then they get chewy and gross. Add the sauce mixture and cook for another two or three minutes. After this 4-5 minute period, the shrimp should be just about done. This is, of course, for large shrimp. If you were using smaller, obviously reduce the cooking time. If you were using an even larger kind, you’re a sick human being because this is pretty horrifying!

Anyway. So your nice normal-sized shrimp have been in the pan for 4 or 5 minutes. Add the cooked pasta and some green veggies–I used snow peas. Toss really well and cook just long enough to heat through the snow peas—about another two minutes. At this step, you could really throw in whatever veggies you wanted. Broccoli and bok choy would also be awesome, but I’d pre-steam any vegetables that take more than two minutes to cook. Okay. At this point I think I added a few more shakes of teriyaki sauce and a few shakes of soy sauce, just to cover the noodles a bit better and encourage the sauce to spread around. Now, remove the pan from heat and add a whole lot of chopped cilantro. I really love cilantro, did you know that? Top with some peanuts, serve with limes for squeezin’, and voila, you’re done.

Rob really liked this, as he tends to like anything that seems like it could have been delivered to your front door in a paper bag. That’s just how he rolls!
8 hot dogs!

If you’ve ever read my other blog, you may know that Rob and I went on vacation this summer to Cape Hatteras, where we went deep sea fishing. Yeah. And caught this guy:

That’s a wahoo, which is a firm, dense white fish. I know, completely horrifying, right? What’s even more horrifying is the sheer amount of fish in our freezer that Rob’s stepmother passed off on us.

Fortunately, this past weekend we’d gone to the Pumpkin Festival at a local orchard/farm

and picked up some apple cider. So if you’re gonna get cider, you gotta get bourbon. And if you’re gonna get bourbon, you gotta glaze something.

Bourbon-Glazed Wahoo
(adapted from Cooking Light)
This would also work with salmon, tuna, or any other dense fish. Adjust the cooking time as necessary. Actually, you could probably use it on chicken or other meats too. It’s got a really sweet Asian flavor, so that seems like it’d be good.

In a Ziploc bag, mix (per fillet of fish)
1.5 TBS brown sugar
1.5 TBS bourbon (I used Evan Williams, because it’s cheap but doesn’t taste like it and it reminds me of swigging from a flask in places you’re not really allowed to have a flask)
1 TBS soy sauce
1 minced clove of garlic
the juice of one lime half
a good sprinkling of ginger and some black pepper.
Marinade these for about an hour or so, flipping the bag over a few times and really rubbing the marinade in. Yeah, rub that marinade in goooood. Mmmm–what? Anyway.

After the fishies are done marinating, heat a skillet on your stove until it’s good and hot. Dump the whole bag in, marinade and all. This wahoo took for-e-ver to cook, because it was thicker than my arm. I’d estimate it was about 8-10 minutes per side. If you had salmon, which cooks considerably more quickly, I’d guess about 4-5 minutes per side. Just poke at it a little, you’ll be able to tell when it’s done. Anyway, after the fish is done, drizzle it with the sauce leftover in the pan from the marinade. It’s so good. Sprinkle with sliced green onions and sesame seeds.

I served this with my go-to Asian side dish, Sesame Rice. I think this also may have originally come from Cooking Light too, but I’m not sure.
Quick fact about me—I cannot, to save my life, cook rice. It always comes out wrong. It’s always too sticky, not sticky enough, scorched on the bottom, whatever. I can’t do it. Thus, I resort to my only real cooking shortcut, the Walmart to my gourmet: boil-in-bag rice. You know, you can’t win em all. And I’m okay with that.
So, cook your rice and have it all ready to go. In a skillet, heat a little sesame oil. I prefer the dark kind, but the light would work too. Add to this a few handfuls of peas, carrots, broccoli, snow peas, whatever you want and some sliced green onions. The onions are key. Cook this all together for a few minutes, as long as it takes to get your veggies to a nice texture. Add a few shakes of soy sauce and some Sriracha. Mix well. Add the cooked rice and toss the whole thing together until it is well-mixed and well-heated. Turn off the heat, mix in some sesame seeds, and scarf.

Rob’s review:
8.5/10 hot dogs. He said it would have been higher had the rice not been so spicy (so, I MAY have gone a bit overboard with the Sriracha, but I liked it!)