Tofu

Marinaded tofu in stirfry

So, for a long time, I've had tofu issues.  I've been one of those vegetarians who is all defensive about tofu and wheatgrass shot stereotypes and enjoyed shocking people who assume the vegetarians eat nothing but tofu by saying, "I don't even LIKE tofu" loudly and annoyingly.  The other day, I decided that that was, well, a bit childish and petty and millions of people worldwide eat tofu and who was I to dismiss it without giving it a proper try?

So, I did a bit of googling - because it wasn't all affectation, I really don't know much at all about tofu, Gujarati food, I can do, Middle Eastern food, pretty comfortable with, but I'm really not much of a fan of East Asian food (with the exception of Korean food) so I know little about it - and discovered that the internet seems to feel that marinading is the thing.  This description of how to do it made sense to me - particularly the dry-frying of the tofu beforehand to dry it out a bit and make it more receptive to marinading.  I did this with a tasty marinade of soy sauce, chilli, ginger and garlic.  Then, after it had been left to marinade for an hour or so, I stirred it into a stir-fry of mushrooms and spinach and served with rice.

Much as I want to repent from my previous churlishness about tofu, I'm afraid it still isn't for me.  It's true all the things that people say about it, it does take on the flavour of the stuff you cook with it, but the thing is that I'd rather just have the stuff you cook with it.  My marinade was pretty damn tasty, I wish I'd just chucked it into a vegetable stir fry, I didn't feel like the tofu element added much.  It's not that it was bad, it was just..  blah.  I'd much rather have had water chestnuts or exotic mushrooms in the stirfry.  And, to be honest, most of the time, I'd rather just not have stirfry at all...  I feel like a bad vegetarian.

It looked pretty though.

Marinaded tofu in stirfry