Stir-Fried Green Beans with Tofu Cutlets

My sojourn through the cookbook collection that inspired last week's stir-fry led to another adventure in wok cooking.

I picked up some reasonably priced green beans at the international grocery store, and that triggered a memory of a recipe from my copy of of Chinese Cooking, from the Time-Life Foods of the World collection.

It seemed easy enough, so to make the evening more complicated, I also cooked up some tofu cutlets inspired by everydaydish.tv.

So I sliced a block of frozen/thawed extra-firm tofu and marinated it in some soy sauce, water, nutritional yeast, and sage. Usually when you freeze tofu and then thaw it out, it gets spongy and firms up a little.

If you are a lazy cook, like me, you might try to get away with just freezing a whole block of it in the package without carefully draining out all the water to avoid big ice crystals from wreaking havoc on the interior.

This time, it turned out a little mushy. The flavor was good, and of course the crunchy-fried breading turned out good, but next time I make cutlets I'm just gonna use tofu straight out of the box.



I sliced up a pound of green beans into two-inch hunks, opened a can of sliced water chestnuts, soaked and sliced my last three dried brown Chinese mushrooms, and mixed up a little corn starch slurry - just a teaspoon.



While the vegetables were getting excited, I dredged the tofu slices in a mixture of one part nutritional yeast to three parts white whole wheat flour with a heavy pinch of salt, and then sizzled them in a pan with some sunflower oil until they were golden brown and delicious.



Because stir-frying is high-impact stuff, no images exist of the process, only the delicious conclusion: green beans and mushrooms fried for two minutes, then seasoned with a little sugar, fried for two more minutes, then deglazed with a splash of stock and stirred with the water chestnuts, then combined with the corn starch slurry and stirred until glossy and magnificent.

It turned out to be a pretty good way of cooking green beans - as a result of my unusual childhood, I can really only enjoy green beans when they are just crisp-tender, and stir-frying is a super-easy way to achieve this prized texture.

Next time I would try it with different mushrooms, maybe canned straw mushrooms, or even some fresh oyster mushrooms (although I might just eat those by themselves, in the dark, off of a gold plate, in some kind of special oyster-mushroom-eating room).



I plated a couple slices of tofu with some beans and drizzled with sriracha.

Tofu Stir Fry with Buckwheat

On Monday night I was thinking stir fry because I had a head of bok choy in the refrigerator. I chopped up four ribs, scrounged up a bell pepper, some scallions, an onion, and some cloves of garlic, and set out in search of some ingredients for a sauce.



I mixed a half-cup of soy sauce with two ounces of michiu and and the last tablespoon from a container of chogochujang I bought on a whim. I whisked in a tablespoon of corn starch and a tablespoon of sesame oil.

I was this close to putting some white rice in the cooker when I remembered that I had found some totally boss organic buckwheat groats in the natural foods aisle of my conventional grocery store. They cooked up to be as hearty and delicious as I imagined.



While considering the addition of some firm tofu, I remembered something about a package of extra-firm being somewhere in the building. Success! I like the dense texture and snap of extra-firm tofu, and it seemed well suited to being triangled and stir-fried with everything else.