Still Feeling Peckish

It’s coming to the end of the first quarter of the year and it seems like I haven’t had the chance to take a deep breath for the past few weeks! It’s not like I’ve stopped cooking but the recipes have been simple and no-fuss and have had to give me lots of space for juggling work and meetings.

Kid#1 recently had his second wisdom teeth surgery done. The first time was rather nasty as he had gotten a post-op infection and he had to have an extension of MC to recover from it. He was expectedly nervous about this second surgery to take out the remaining 2 impacted wisdom teeth and we had got a whole load of soft diet ready for him…cauliflower mash, jelly, ice cream and yogurt. But it turned out that this surgery went really well and he was bouncing and eating pork rinds by the third day after surgery. So when he spotted a packet of baiye tofu in the fridge he asked me to make it and so here’s the salad recipe I came up with. Baiye tofu low carb (1.5-2g carbs per serving). Being Asian our family does take a lot of tofu products in our diet; somehow the issue of phytoestrogens in tofu seems to bother us less than in the West. Like with most food fads I suspect that soy is neither as beneficial nor as toxic as some would claim. I like to think of soy as a decent alternative source of protein. Living in Asia means that soy products are easily available and to me are a great proteins source when you don’t want a rich and meat-heavy meal.

There are a heap of tofu products out there. I often use tofu in soup and braises. Last year I discovered baiye tofu (baiye 百页 literally means “a hundred pages”) which is a kind of bean curd skin or pressed tofu that when sliced into strips, is great for salads and stir fries. Some people even use it as a substitute for pasta. Preparing this is easy – it can be blanched in hot water or just stir fried.

In this recipe I also used another commercial product – fried crispy soy bean sauce. It was available, cheap and tasted amazing! But an alternative to using this is just frying up garlic chips and adding to the salad.

Kid#1 approved of this recipe. It was great eaten cold and had a fantastic crunch.