The Life and Times of the Mighty but Misunderstood Tofu

One week into my new year's resolution of learning to cook a Japanese meal a week and I failed! I had a legitimate reason though: I was flat-out broke. After our wedding and Christmas, we were just too strapped for cash to justify going to SeeWoo, filling our trolley, and making it rain like Drake at a peeler joint.

See the thing is, when starting to cook an entire culinary repertoire from scratch, you have to fill your cupboard with the essentials. And when it comes to Japanese food, there are quite a lot of basic ingredients you need: rice wine vinegar, mirin, soy sauce, katsuobushi and such. However, don't let that put you off - it's really not that expensive and you can get decent priced stuff in larger Asian grocery stores. Even grocery stores like Tesco are getting in on the act because I've seen Japanese products in some stores. Anyway, aye, the way I have ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in my fridge likewise, Japanese people have soy sauce, rice vinegar and such almost always on the go.

Armed with my "store cupboard essentials" list from Everyday Harumi, we headed out and loaded our trolley with everything from oyster sauce to tofu to gyoza wrappers to soy sauce.

It felt quite overwhelming, to be honest, staggering through the aisles trying to find foreign (well, to me anyway) ingredients. And when I did I starting questioning myself -"is this ok? Would Harumi-san approve of my choice of rice vinegar!? OHMIGAWD, I CANNOT LET HER DOWN". Overreacting? Maybe. Probably. It just brought back moments of when I first met my boyfriend/ now-husband's family, whom are all well-accomplished home bakers and chefs. More specifically, I was anxious about meeting his Japanese Mom. Man, can she cook and bake! I haven't always had the best of luck with my ex-boyfriend's Mom's either so I just wanted to make a good impression (hide the crazy!)

Anyway, here we go. I decided to just go for it and started off with a labour-intensive delicious pain in the arse classic: goyza!

I went with Maori Murota's Prawn/Shrimp, Fennel and Tofu gyoza recipe from her book, Tokyo Cult Recipes.The only real issue I had - apart from it being awkward, fiddly, and a "bit of a faff" - was that the instructions on how to prepare the gyoza's and pinch them together was a bit difficult to follow (and achieve). Nevermind! It all tasted amazing in the end, didn't it?

I had left over tofu from the recipe so made a simple tofu steak with soy/sesame sauce. This time loosely following a recipe from Harumi Kurihara's Everyday Harumi.

Look, I know some people in the UK are freaked out/ grossed out by tofu but y'all need to get over it. What's the big deal?! Freshly-made tofu (which the above is *not* - straight out of a tetra pak, it is) is absolutely delicious. Even in Harumi's book, which was translated into English for a British audience, she exclaim's her disbelief at how unpopular tofu is outside Japan. 

Anyway, tofu is good, ok? BYE!