NOTHING WRONG WITH TOFU!

That's right, nothing wrong with it!

This blog came about because of a "terrible" incident I had last year when we were visiting some friends up in Wollongong and I made the grave mistake of ordering a stirfried tofu dish in a Chinese restaurant. When the dish came, lets just say the rest of the table weren't impressed. True enough, the dish didn't look the best. In fact, the dish bore a faint resemblance to stirfried vegetables with pieces of washing sponge dropped in accidentally by the washing lady. That incident has haunted me ever since. How could I have single handed destroyed the reputation of one of classic Chinese ingredients that fed billions of Chinese people from Emperors right down the simple pheasants???!!! I shall now attempt to salvage the bad rapt that this humble food has copped.

Let's start with the origin of tofu. It was believed that tofu, like gravity, was accidentally discovered when some genius accidentally knocked some salt over into a pot of warm soybean milk. Because the salts contained calcium and magnesium salts, it caused the milk to coagulate into a firm gel like material, thus its other name, beancurd. The Western world has cheese, the Chinese have their tofu.

The inventive Chinese (after all, we invented spaghetti and built the only structure that could be seen from space) took this strange concoction and decided it was too good to just eat it as it is. They experimented cooking it with lots of different ingredients. At last count, a google search yielded 800 websites devoted entirely to cooking tofu. Of course, the Japanese had their hand in it too, but I'm not going do an Asian overload today.

Tofu contains high quality plant protein, and is especially important for people like me who are trying to dumb down and become muscleheads. It is also high in calcium, which great for your bones and low in saturated fat. All these explains why tofu is such a hit with lesbians. And it is cheap too! This is always a plus point for people who love indulging in cheap red wine from a cask.

Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have presented my findings for the much maligned ingredient. Its now up to you to pass judgment on it. I know how daunting it is to consume something so foreign looking, but I assure you the benefits will definitely outweigh the fear. If I manage to convince Keith that a yum cha restaurant is NOT a live abbatoir cluttered with caged chickens and screeching pigs, I'm sure I can make you believe that tofu is one of the greatest food ever invented by the human race.

As a famous (and dorky) Chinese chef from America, Martin Yan once said, "If you get bored in the kitchen, take a wok in the park!"

Here's how you cook it! (Its not me, so don't get too excited!)