Barbie Queue?
I knows it’s been a little while since my last update, but don’t think that I’ve been merely resting on my Danish laurels (more like eating them, really); I’ve been a bit busy getting ready to move out of this dismal corner of Maryland, and now that it looks like I’ve found a nice place in scenic (and hipster-filled) Somerville (with a newly remodeled kitchen!) I can get back to the serious business of cookbloggery. I did actually do quite a bit of cooking yesterday - a woman I work with was clearing out her pantry and gave me a couple of mason jars filled with chocolate chip cookie mix (flour, sugar, etc.) and a whole bunch of dried beans and spices, respectively, topped off with some cutesy cloth straight out of Br’er Rabbit - but nothing worth writing home (or the internet, for that matter) about since I was really just combining pre-assembled ingredients in slightly different containers. I had to improvise with the soup a little bit since I didn’t actually have a Dutch oven (nor, until I consulted wikipedia, did I have a really solid idea of what one was), so I settled for a non-Dutch non-oven (a pot) and, due to size constraints, substituted one-and-a-half cups of water for 5. Needless to say it all came out surprisingly stewish. Well, except for the cookies. They’re about what I expected.
Now that I have enough food to last me for a week or two I thought I’d take this opportunity to post some old favorites of mine. With the springtime finally starting to resolve its cruel and usual April moodswings into a more pleasantly manic month of May, I’ve decided to start with a perennial warm-weather favorite: beer-battered barbecue tofu. The most pleasing part of this dish is its contrasts: chewy vs. crispy, sweet vs. spicy, animal vs. vegetable, east vs. west, man vs. machine, and so on. In all, it’s a perfectly non-pretentious meal to enjoy with friends, bros, boys, brosephs, buds, beers, and brewskies (or, in StrongBadia, “cold ones”).
Ingredients:
- Tofu
- 2 cups flour
- 12 oz. beer
- Assorted vegetables
- Vegetable oil
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped
- 2 tsp. chili powder
- 1/2 tsp. chipotle chili powder
- 1 1/2 cups ketchup
- 1/2 cup vinegar
- 1 tbsp. lemon juice
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
Equipment: relatively deep frying pan (or deep-fryer), patriotism.
Music: Ho-Ag - The Word from Pluto
Instructions:
- Prepare the barbecue sauce by sauteing the onion, garlic, and chili powders in a pan with 1 tbsp. of vegetable oil until brown, keeping the heat low enough to prevent the chipotle powder from turning into tear gas/pepper spray. Add all remaining ingredients and allow to simmer for 15 minutes, adding salt and pepper to taste.
- Combine the flour and beer in a mixing bowl and stir until it reaches a pancake-batter-like consistency.
- Fill a frying pan with oil to a depth of about 1/2 inch and heat it on high.
- Cut the tofu into slices and dip them into the batter, then remove them and place them immediately in the frying pan. Cook them until both sides are crispy and brown.
- Heat vegetables in a separate pan until seared.
- Arrange tofu and vegetables on plates and drizzle with barbecue sauce.
Unfortunately, beer batter doesn’t hold up so well over the grill so this recipe doesn’t translate into outdoor cooking too smoothly, but if you cut the tofu into large (2″) cubes and prepare them as above then stick them on some skewers alongside a bunch of grilled vegetables you have a perfect meatless summer treat. You could even try undercooking them in the pan (just enough so that the batter forms a shell on the outside), then skewering them with the vegetables (not literally, more like “at the same time as” (but maybe sticking a carrot through them would work too)), basting them in barbecue sauce, and grilling them at the same time - I just can’t guarantee that they won’t burst into flame. Not that it wouldn’t be really cool if they did.
(This recipe is available in my most recent cookbook. Check out my posts below for information on where to find it, or look click on my profile for a link to download a printable version).
