The Smoking Kitchen

Tofu with Thai Curry Sauce

I almost always have tofu in my fridge for three main reasons:

1. It’s inexpensive.

2. I’ve been brainwashed by Big Protein.

3. I don’t have to take it out to thaw, thereby making it a contingency plan of sorts if I forget to take meat out during my pre-caffeinated haze before work.

Also, I kind of like it, and by “it” I’m referring to the texture, since other than sight, touch is the only sense it stimulates. Har, har, tofu is bland. But seriously, it is.

I usually get tofu recipes from my vegan friend, Melanie. She is, after all, vegan, although I’ve gotten recipes from her that aren’t based around soybeans, including a very simple, very good marinade for portobello caps that I just remembered.

This time, though, I consulted The Food Network’s website, which I like because of the search engine that refines the results by a number of categories, including ingredient, type of dish (main, side, etc.), and, most importantly, difficulty.

The reason I chose this dish is because it calls for coconut milk and curry paste, a combination that is not only binge-eatingly delicious, but that also makes me dreamily reminiscent of my former life as a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. I went to college there for two years, and then took a year off so I could soak up all that the city had to offer. Even though my year off consisted of working twenty hours a week at a coffee stand inside a grocery store and gigging once a month with various regional orchestras in northeast Ohio, I was able to squeeze in a dinner with my friends Chester and Rachel (now Mr. and Mrs. Chester). They brought me to a restaurant called Siam Cafe.

There are three things that I recall about the place:

1. It was located in a Beirut-like section of Cleveland. I’m not sure if that’s an apt analogy. Is Beirut still a war-torn hell hole? Well, the last time I was in Cleveland, it certainly looked like a war-torn hell hole. My theory about Cleveland is that if you drive in any one direction, you will sooner or later find yourself in a poverty-stricken, run-down, and quite probably dangerous area of town. For accuracy’s sake, I suppose I should update my measuring stick. Siam Cafe is located in a Cleveland-like section of Cleveland.

2. The building clearly used to be a fast food restaurant. Seriously – check out this image from Google Maps Street View:

You should see what it looked like inside. I think they still had the trashcans with the swinging doors.

3. The food was pretty good, particularly the Massaman curry. The Internet just told me Massaman curry is of Muslim origin, which makes sense: Massaman is close to Mussaman, which is an old way of saying Muslim. Massaman curry has all sorts of stuff in it – usually a meat, veggies, potatoes, peanuts. But most importantly, it combines the magical powers of coconut milk and curry.

My trip to Siam Cafe kindled a love affair with this coupling that continues with fiery passion to this day, so when I happened upon the recipe, I knew it was the one I had to make. That, and the website said it required five minutes of prep and fifteen minutes of cooking. Even taking into account the mathematical formula I’ve come up with to estimate cooking time -

Cooking time = Professionally estimated cooking time x 2, maybe 3

- I could still whip it up pretty quick.

Here’s the link to the recipe: Tofu with Thai Curry Sauce

Here are the ingredients called for:

Sauce:
1 cup “lite” coconut milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon red curry paste, or to taste (see Ingredient notes)
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Tofu & vegetables:
14 ounces extra-firm tofu, preferably water-packed
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 cups baby spinach (6 ounces)
1 medium red bell pepper, sliced (1 1/2 cups)

I bought regular coconut milk instead of “lite” stuff because there’s no quicker way to ruin a food memory than to substitute crappy lo-cal, lo-fat ingredients.

Hmm, I wonder if Vegan Melanie is even allowed to eat coconut milk? I used to ponder such unanswerable questions after my year off from college, when I transferred and became a philosophy major.

Speaking of which, the nice thing about making tofu dishes is that I get to put my degree to good use:

As you can see, I also studied music.

When I first began preparing tofu, I wasn’t aware that you had to squeeze the water out of it to keep it from disintegrating in the pan. I now remove the water, but I think there are two places with room for improvement.

First, I use a lot of paper towels. An unconscionable amount. I suppose I could use regular towels, but I’d still need quite a few of those, right? I have no solution for this.

Second, I could probably use fewer textbooks to squeeze the tofu. Tofu is pretty delicate, and I think less weight could get the water out without altering the integrity (which the above picture method did slightly, puffing out the sides and cracking).

Before I cooked the tofu, though, I threw the sauce together. This was about the time I realized this recipe is incredibly easy. See the ingredients I listed above? Well, put them in a bowl. Since the sauce was the whole reason I made this recipe, I took a picture:

 Mmm…Cleveland…

The rest of the recipe was just as easy. I fried the tofu until it was brown and very crispy, threw in the spinach, pepper, and sauce, and then I ate it. Here’s what it looked like in the pot:

And here’s the dish’s last moment, right before I doomed it and some jasmine rice to death by chewing:

RESULTS

Pretty good overall, though I wanted more sauce, as well as more flavor from the sauce. There was about a half cup of coconut milk leftover from the can, which I would use all of in the future. Also, I’d up both the brown sugar and the curry paste, although I’d do that while adding a little more salt since salt has some sort of hocus pocus in it that amplifies flavor.

The most successful parts of this meal were the bell peppers and the rice. Usually I chop vegetables at random, but I actually took some time to figure out how to cut and gut a pepper. The result was uniform strips of pepper. I felt like I was eating in a restaurant instead of in the kitchen of a child with ADD.

The rice turned out really well, too. I don’t know, I guess I used the right amount of water and cooked it for the right amount of time, not that I took any measurements of either. Oh well. I’m about to read the chapter on rice in my Alice Waters cookbook, so I’ll probably soon learn that I’ve been doing it all wrong. For tonight, at least, I made rice like a champ.

Most importantly, I got to eat coconut milk and curry and spend a lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.

I only wrote that last sentence because I wanted to see if my website was the only one that has the phrase “lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.”