The gift that goes on giving

For lunch yesterday we had vegetable and tofu skewers. Apologies for the lack of photos, still having bandwidth issues that makes uploading them a massive liability. The vegetable content included tomatoes, mushrooms, courgettes and red peppers. The tofu (after dry-frying for AGES, if we had a tumble dryer I'd be tempted to put it in that!) was done in a slightly improvised barbecue marinade:

-Enough sunflower oil to cover the tofu pieces
-Three or four cloves of garlic, peeled and bashed to pieces with the knife handle. (You can extract the flavour more efficiently as it breaks the cellular structure in a way that cutting with a blade doesn't - I have a favourite knife for the purpose!)
-Tablespoon or so of maple syrup
-Dash of soy sauce (yes these two ingredients sound WEIRD together, but it worked)
-Chilli powder (the one I used has cumin in as well as chilli - I've only sussed this out recently!)
-Paprika

I left the tofu in the marinade for an hour or so while getting on with other important tasks such as drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Amazingly, despite the battering it went through in the attempt to shift the water out, the pieces held together when skewered. We had two skewers each with couscous and bean salad.

The leftover marinade proved useful when making chilli for dinner - I used some of the excess flavoured oil for frying the soy mince, onions, peppers and so on, and scooped some of the garlic in for good measure. We still have some tofu left as well, so I'm planning on doing that with roast vegetables for dinner today. The leftover chilli is going to be the basis of pasta sauce for lunch.

Incidentally, if you want to get chilli powder that is JUST crushed dried chillis (without anything added), the only brand I've found so far is Julian Graves - available in Holland and Barrett. Alternatively I've been using chilli flakes - Schwartz I think - which look like fish food but work well. Of course I tend to add cumin seeds anyway, being a contrary sort of duck.

On another note, I downloaded the kindle edition of Vegan Freak yesterday, liking it so far, watch this space...