Tofu satay this week! Another good ‘un from the Bikers 🙂
The marinade for the tofu was lovely and punchy — lots of lime juice — though I might have added slightly too much dried chilli, as there was an intense kick of heat after a few seconds when I tested it. In any case, eight hours of marinading the tofu cubes lent them a delightful flavour. I don’t actually have any bamboo or other skewers, so I couldn’t impale the tofu for grilling — I put the marinated tofu (plus the marinade; no point in wasting it) into a pie dish and put that under a medium grill while I made the peanut sauce. It worked pretty well 🙂
The peanut sauce is one of the best things I’ve gotten from the Hairy Dieters books! Smooth, delicious, just enough kick from the soy sauce, lemon juice and black pepper to balance out the smooth richness of the peanut butter. I used sweet chilli sauce rather than sriracha — personal preference — but this didn’t diminish the flavoursome aspects at all. I also had to use 50ml of semi-skimmed milk with a tablespoon of coconut powder stirred in instead of coconut milk, and the latter is rather expensive and it didn’t make sense to pay for 400ml of the stuff when I only needed one-eighth of that amount. The substitution worked out all right, though, and there was something incredibly satisfying about stirring all the sauce ingredients together and seeing the peanut butter slowly integrate with everything else 🙂 I’ll definitely be keeping this peanut sauce recipe in mind for other dishes — for example, a casserole of chicken on a bed of caramelised onion, with the peanut sauce poured over the top. Delicious!
The other Dieters recipe I’ll be doing this week is the artichoke and lemon dip. Not a meal by itself, admittedly, but it should go well with the last of the Jarlsberg twist bread (another Bikers recipe, this one from the Big Book of Baking) I made last Friday. It was soft, moist, delicious and rose like the devil thanks to some very lively yeast and the unseasonably warm day. I’ll be using artichokes canned in water rather than oil — nowhere to store the drained-off oil and I don’t want to waste anything — but that should be ok. Apparently the texture of the artichokes in water should be slightly mushier, which should help when it comes to combining the dip ingredients.
Bon appetit!