02.08.07
Smoky Bacon with Smoked Tofu and Chiles; Smashed Cucumbers; Spinach with Ginger and Garlic Sauce
Another resoundingly successful meal derived primarily from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. We are fortunate to have a very good local smokery near us, Barbara Lahnstein’s Neopol Savory Smokery, and since we can get our hands on smoked tofu and some of the best and most lovingly smoked bacon it has ever been my pleasure to eat, the choice to try the bacon and smoked tofu dish was a no-brainer.
It is an intensely winter-appropriate dish, consisting as it does of bacon, smoked tofu, chiles (see ‘em all in there?), and green onion; it is also a dish that you really must not try to eat without rice or it is easily too rich to be pleasant. Because the bacon is steamed first, then stir-fried, it has a lovely texture and is not greasy in that unpleasant mouth-coating way that bacon can sometimes have. No element of the recipe is optional: the chiles give it body and important top notes that balance an otherwise bass-drum dish, and the green onions clarify the flavors beautifully and brighten the sweetness of the pork and the misty-smoky notes of the smoked tofu.
The smashed cucumbers are a marinated dish, also from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. They use a judicious dose of the chopped salted chiles that I made a week ago when this:
Was transformed into this:
And tonight they lent a lovely fruity-sour spiciness to this:
Lastly, I made a simple dish not in any of the cookbooks I am using these days, of spinach stirfried briefly with a goodly amount of garlic and ginger, and a simple 1:1:1 mix of dry sherry, sesame oil, and soy sauce. I had been thinking of a different hot vegetable dish but then I spied the spinach and realized that it needed to be used up sooner than some of the other veggies I had been contemplating. Fragility won over Chefly Idealism, in other words. I think that by preference, next time I make the bacon and tofu dish, I will make a spicy or vinegary cabbage or other brassica dish to balance out the unctuousness of the bacon/tofu. But the spinach worked too and it is always very tasty cooked this way, one of our favorite ways to eat spinach in this household — who cares if it’s mostly a vehicle for lots of ginger and garlic?
