Tried & Tasted: Monsoon Spice’s Sweet Chili Lime Glazed Tofu Served With Broccoli and Thai Red Rice

I meant to participate in Zlamushka’s Tried and Tasted last month, but with the surgery it just never happened. This month I am sliding in at the last moment with a recipe from this month’s T&T blog, Monsoon Spice.

Speaking of being busy, before I proceed with the recipe and post, let me share a few of the latest pictures of our house. I basically took pics from all 4 sides…

Facing the front of the house.

Inside the house, facing the garage…

This is facing the back of the house. The garage is on the right, and there will be French doors on the left.

This is the end of the house with the family room and living room, the garage is at the far end, which you cannot see.

That block of concrete in the dead center is the front porch.

Every month, for Tried and Tasted, I create a folder of bookmarks from that blog of recipes I would like to try (for what it’s worth this is what I do with Taste & Create as well–and then I have this great stockpile of bookmarked recipes). Primarily this month I bookmarked traditional Indian recipes–Sia has some really stunning ones to choose from, but then time got away from me, and I had to go with what I had around at the last minute, and so I made this wonderful Sweet Chili Lime Glazed Tofu which had jumped out at me the minute I saw it.

Like Sia (and Lolo, the blogger she got the recipe from) I was attracted to the recipe not just for the great flavors but for the idea of dry-frying the tofu. Or maybe I should say oil-free but wet frying, because the basic idea is that you use a nonstick or well-seasoned skillet, and then cook the tofu without draining it of any of its liquid. It takes about 10 minutes, pressing occasionally on the tofu, and while it is a little labor intensive while it is cooking, it goes by very quickly and is well worth the trade-off in terms of the lower fat. You then pour the prepared sauce over the tofu and let it quickly boil into a glaze. For someone like me who is not great at timing everything perfectly, I would advise adding some water to the sauce–my tofu got too dry (the tofu itself was moist but I lost the sauciness) while I waited for John and the kids to be ready for dinner. I think that extra water would help.

One of the rules of Tried and Tasted is to stay as close to the original recipe as possible, so I am really only counting the tofu, because Sia made her tofu with spiced quinoa and spinach, whereas I served mine with spiced Thai red rice and broccoli. I don’t really like cooked greens, whereas we could eats pounds of broccoli around here and I just could not wrap my head around quinoa with these flavors. Probably my loss I concede, but I am always looking for good recipes with Thai red rice and this certainly qualified. My 2 biggest changes were to leave out the mint leaves (I asked John to get me some but the store was out) and actually I used half soy sauce and half fish sauce.

Be sure to head over to Zlamushka’s Spicy Kitchen to check out the round up from this month’s Tried and Tasted of Monsoon Spice.