Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Roasted, part II

Here is another installment of my adventures with roasting things for dinner.  Click HERE for the Roasted ", Part I" post.

I know that my cooking has been low lately.  Longer work hours, the threat of economy, and other unfortunate stuff has just wiped me out to the point that cooking is low on my list of things to do.  Granted, I HAVE been cooking repeats of stuff I've made before (e.g. red lentil dal), so I haven't been documenting it.

Anyway, onto roasting.  Here, I am pressing a block of extra firm tofu.  This process involves me putting the block between two plates, with some heavier gear on top of the top plate.  I pretty much always press my tofu before cooking it, as it gives it a better (chewier) texture.

Yellow zucchini + SMOKED paprika was my first roasting victim.  Smoked paprika tastes very different from normal paprika... I would say that it is a lot stronger/deeper but not more spicy, in my opinion.

I'm pretty haphazard about roasting things, so what I normally do is make sure everything has a light coating of oil (sesame or olive oil, depending on what I'm making) and then throw it in a 425-degree oven, tossing every 5-10 minutes or so.

Since I was in such a hurry to get these into the oven before "The Ukrainian" was ready for dinner, I didn't document the tofu part very well.  What I did was cut them into 1.5" pieces and coated half of the block in soy sauce, sesame oil, five-spice powder, veggie broth, and some sesame seeds.  The other half was coated in that Frank's Red Hot buffalo wing sauce (their slogan is: "I put that $#it on everything!" LOL) that is pictured in the first picture above.

Here is the completed plate, which contains some mixed salad with pickled cucumbers (which I prepared to marinate while the main meal was roasting).

I guess zucchinis roast pretty well, but I don't really like squashes too much.  The tofu was good, though next time, I will cut them into bigger pieces.  The five-spice ones (brown) were tender, while the buffalo ones were a little dry.  I think I left them in too long, but I really wanted a crispy exterior.

FYI, the plate above is "The Ukrainian"'s. When I show pictures of dinner, I usually snap photos of his plate rather than mine, since his often looks better -- probably due to more food on it. ;) We both aren't big dinner people and tend to kind of eat small portions in favor of the other meals (e.g., breakfast!).

1 comment:

  1. Roasted veggies! A classic favorite of mine. Actually had it last night for dinner.

    Thanks again for the heads up on going to the running store...they have one around here I can run into.