Daring Cooks Marinate!

Let me be clear: I am a terrible food blogger. I am here to confess my sins. Since moving to Rain City, I've barely posted and now I'm two days late with the Daring Cooks challenge for January! Life gets in the way sometimes, but for the late post I blame our new computer. It's a netbook and I love it's itty-bittiness, but I'm still getting used to not having all the programs I'm in the habit of using. The cooking was done on time; it's just the computer work that's late.

The January 2010 DC challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day.

The heart of this challenge was the marinade, a puree of onion, garlic, ginger, and other loveliness that could be combined with any meat or tofu. I chose tofu. I found that I needed two batches of the marinade in order to get good coverage. If I had been using a meat, I could have tossed everything into a ziplock bag and been good with one batch, but tofu doesn't love being squished around all that much.

While the tofu was bathing in the refrigerator, I made the second part of the challenge: a coconut milk and peanut butter sauce. I roughed this up a bit because I felt it was a little bland, but I don't exactly remember what I did to it other than simmer the heck out of the coconut milk with minced onion and garlic before making the rest of the sauce. As with a previous coconut-milk-based sauce, every time I tasted it, I kept wanting it to be a Thai red curry sauce and, of course, it wasn't. And for the same reason that the other one wasn't: No Thai red curry ingredients. Tricky, that.

Then it was time to broil! The options included grilling, but our rain made that a little impossible. As it happens, I'm glad I broiled because I've never actually tried broiling tofu before and I loved the result. I'll be playing with different marinades for a new future.

After it's visit with the fire (ok, fine, I don't really have fire because our Rain City house has a stooopid electric stove), the tofu was gorgeous and ready to eat!

We ate it with jasmine rice cooked with a little sauteed onion, steamed brocolli, and the peanut sauce. It was delicious. LittleGirl mostly focused on rice and peanut sauce with a few bites of tofu. Husband and I scarfed down the whole combo. He got the leftovers for lunch the next day. I'm very nice to him in that way because I know that it will mean that he'll get out of bed on cold mornings and light the pellet stove to warm up the house before I venture out of the covers. It's the little things.

Thanks to Cuppy for a delicious challenge!

Comments

  1. Tofu! You actually made tofu look good well done and yes I have a net-book also and I love it but it isn't a big laptop so needs extra love. Your charring on the tofu is superb. Great the little one loved the rice and the peanut sauce with some tofu LOL LOL. Yes I had left-overs for a week after making mine. Great effort on this challenge. Cheers from Audax in Sydney Australia.

    OBTW we are allowed a week's grace in posting so your are not late in any sense. Audax

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  2. Your tofu looks excellent! I've never broiled it myself, but will give it try based on your success. The peanut sauce recipe I use includes a good dose of red curry paste which you might like.... Thanks to Audax for news about the week grace period!!

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  3. Kinda funny, my toddler prefers the tofu and rice, sans peanut sauce..

    I almost doubled my recipe, too, but then I cheapened out and just decided to flip them every hour. :( I have no life. Your tofu looks beautiful and perfect, though. I'm glad you were able to make an enjoyable meal (and a lunch!). :)

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  4. This looks fantastic! The tofu has such great colour =D.

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  5. You make me want to eat Tofu! I'm bookmarking this right now to try soon. Thanks so much!

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