Friday 23 January - Tofu

We set off in search of tofu a couple of weeks ago, and found it to be much cheaper in the Chinese Supermarket, as that's a bit of a journey for us, I bought several types and froze them for later use.
I got a medium one out to use, but felt it needed pressing, so we used our lovely cheese press to do this.
This tofu was to be used stir fried with shitake mushrooms and fermented black beans.

I also decided to make red braised beef with dried bamboo tofu, so the tofu sticks were put into soak.

The beef dish commenced by bringing cubes of beef to the boil in plain water - this was then drained off.

Some chilli beef paste was fried, and then in went the flavourings.

Followed by the beef cubes, and stock ingredients - chinese wine, a bit of ketjap manis (as I didn't have thesweet fermented sauce that the recipe called for), and it was all left to braise for a couple of hours.

To prepare the other dish, mushrooms and beans were soaked for a while, to remove some of the salt from the beans, and to rehydrate the mushrooms.

Once prepared the mushrooms were destalked and chopped and the beans were drained.

Some chopped flavourings were stirfried - chilli, spring onions, garlic and ginger.

And then the mushrooms and beans were added, followed by some soy sauce and rice wine to make a sauce.

Finally, the cubed tofu was added, and it was gently heated through to take on the flavours.

 

Now the tofu was ready, the bamboo tofu sticks were added to the braised beef , just for a few minutes - again to take on the rich flavours.

This was served with boiled rice, and some tea braised eggs - as our chickens have started to lay again following their lengthy winter break.