in which i eat tofu

I've been on a diet for the past six months (ish...) now and it's been going pretty well but I have so far avoided tofu, which has been highly recommended by the diet-gurus on high. So I picked some medium-soft tofu up when I was at the supermarket the other day. Two days ago I had some marinated in a teriyaki style sauce and then added to a basic veggie stir-fry. End result was okay but certainly nothing stunning and I could live without it. Happily. Today I wanted to try having it with a salad but because the tofu is quite soft, and bland, and very white, I wanted to do something more interesting with it. Crispy tofu with chunky salad. Mix a marinade with rice vinegar, galangal, tamarind paste, ginger, garlic, agave syrup (or honey, sugar, maple syrup, sugar etc.), lemon juice and light soy sauce. This is what my marinade consisted of but of course this can easily be changed for whatever you like! Cut tofu into edible chunks/slices as you prefer and plonk into the marinade, swishing it around so all of the lovely curdiness (not really selling it am I?) is covered. Slice up your salad. This recipe is really all about experimenting with tofu but for my salad I had apple (I used cox's orange pippin), pepper, mangetout, cucumber, de-seeded tomatoes and rice in really hefty chunks. Take the tofu carefully out of the marinade and lightly dust with seasoned flour. Heat a little light oil (nothing too strongly flavoured because of the mildness of the tofu) in a frying pan and add the tofu pieces letting the side furthest away from you drop into the oil last to avoid nasty oil burns. They take between a minute and a minute and a half to crisp up and cook. Take the tofu out of the pan and place on kitchen paper to dry any remaining oil. Drop on top of your salad. This is a nice way of cooking medium tofu and by changing the marinade, the seasoning in the flour and the salad there are oodles of recipe options. Vick. vclinde@gmail.com www.vclinde.co.uk @vclinde