Cooking A Recipe From Vegetarian Times

Vegetarian Times is my favorite magazine. The articles are researched, timely, and interesting (to me.) The topics in VT are more about a healthy lifestyle than just veggie recipes, but you can be sure it's chock full of recipes. Some recipes, though meatless, would never appear in my kitchen. The recent issue, however, has the recipe for one of my favorite Vietnamese dishes: Lemongrass Curry Tofu and Broccoli. I HAD to try it. My pantry and fridge had everything I needed except the lemongrass and the serrano pepper, so I got up early, drove to my office to feed Moxie and then to Earth Fare to pick up a few items including the lemongrass. Unfortunately they didn't have the serrano pepper but I knew I could work around that.

After cutting the tofu into 1/2 inch cubes I began sauteing them.

The recipe called for broccoli, tomatoes, and carrots, but I had to add mushrooms. I LOVE mushrooms. I also had to wash some cilantro to add as garnish. I LOVE cilantro. You can also see the spices: turmeric, curry, and cayenne pepper (which I added to make up for the missing serrano pepper.) You can also see a can of coconut milk; I decided to use low fat coconut milk (big mistake I found out.) Ignore the bananas. :-)

The other flavorings were shallots (the purple things) garlic, ginger (the yellow pieces), and lemongrass (the four stems that you may think are green onions.) The dark green thing was part of a poblano pepper, to provide some pepper taste (it wasn't hot enough to sub for the serrono, which is why I added cayenne.)

The instructions said to form a paste with the food processor, but I found it made less than a paste despite many turns of the blade. I ended up with more of a chopped mixture but think that was perfectly fine.

Meanwhile my first pan of tofu cubes were nicely golden. I put them in a bowl and sauteed another batch.

With the pan still hot after cooking the tofu I sauteed the shallot mixture in half toasted sesame oil and half canola oil. Toasted sesame oil provides a nice taste to Asian food. After 10 minutes it was beginning to brown, which meant it was time to...

... add the coconut milk, turmeric, curry, and cayenne pepper. Water and the carrots were added as well. Now it was beginning to smell gooooooood!

My pan was getting full and I knew I still had lots to add so I put the curry sauce in a big pot and added the veggies and the tofu.

Of course I had started the brown rice earlier and it was looking pretty good.

The finished product!

Nooshi Joon!

So was it good? It was good-ish. The ingredients were yummy but it did not taste the way it tastes at the Vietnamese restaurant. I chalk it up to four things:

• My tofu is different than the one they use. Theirs is smoother; I think it's what they call "silken" tofu.
• I used low fat coconut milk. I think this was a mistake. There was very little "coconut milk" taste. I think next time I will have to use the real thing.
• It wasn't salty enough. The recipe didn't say to add salt and we rarely add salt when we cook, but it needed it and next time I will add some.
• This recipe was out of Vegetarian Times, not Vietnamese Times. It may have been missing a crucial ingredient like thái vuông con cờ. (just kidding!)

I think the bottom line is that it can be really hard to recreate something you get at a restaurant. But I am going to try it again. Remind me to use silken tofu, regular coconut milk, add some salt, and some of that thái vuông con cờ. :-)