Purple Potatoes, Purple Rice, Stir Fry, Tofu Scramble

This is a post with a few recipes, i.e. my dinner. This is pretty much how I eat most every night I cook during the work week. I use leftovers for lunch the next day. This meal should feed maybe 3 people, 2 if you eat like me. The stir fry may look like a "regular" stir fry, but thanks to one of my favorite restaurants' ideas back home, I now do a few things to the stir fry to make it better in my opinion, ha ha. For this meal, I first put the tofu to press (to give it time to let out some water, see recipe), then I washed, cut, and boiled the potatoes before any other prep work. Then I cut up all the vegetables for the other 2 dishes, and then poured the purple potato water in with the drained rice and pushed the magic rice cooker button. As the rice cooks, you can make the stir fry and the tofu scramble at the same time. Enjoy!



Dinner!



Purple Sweet Potatoes

Pretty basic. You can use any sort of cool colored starchy vegetable for this really. Cut up some purple sweet potatoes, put in a pot with water (no salt). Bring water to a boil, lower heat, then boil them until soft. Reserve the water for the following purple rice:



Purple Rice
Ingredients:

1 to 2 cups presoaked rice. I.e. washed, rinsed, and left to soak for a few hours.
Grains to add to the rice
Purple water from boiling the purple potatoes

Basically, pour out the soaking water from the rice, put rice in rice cooker, and also pour in the grains. You can usually find the 'add-in' special grains to add to rice in the same area of the store you find the rice in. My drug store even sells the grains, so they're pretty easy to find. That's what those little things that don't look like rice in the picture are.

Pour enough purple potato water to cover the rice, and push the magic button on your rice cooker. Start cooking the rest of the stuff now.



Vegetable Stir Fry
Feel free to use any sorts of veggies really, but for this recipe, be sure to have some sort of leafy greens (spinach used here).

Ingredients:

Oil for frying
Sliced onion
diced up ginger and garlic, as much as you like
Dried red chili peppers, seeds removed as much as possible, and cut into tiny little pieces
みりん, sweet fermented rice wine, about 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons, OR about 2 teaspoons brown sugar
Soy sauce, about 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons or more
Pepper to taste

A few bushels of spinach(is that what you call them?) or other leafy greens, washed and cut up
A few stalks of asparagus, washed and chopped up
Fresh broccoli and cauliflower, you guessed it, washed and cut up
Some mushrooms, any kind really, washed etc.
Bean sprouts, もやし in Japanese. 1 medium package (prewahed)

In a large pot, fry the onions, red chiles, ginger, and garlic over medium heat. When onions become a bit translucent, add the asparagus and continue to fry for a short bit. Add in the broccoli and continue to fry and mix so nothing sticks to pan.

Add the mirin (or sugar) and mix around. Sprinkle some pepper (optional). Lower the heat a bit and add the Spinach on top of everything. Pour the soy sauce over the spinach and cover the pot. Let cook covered on low heat until the spinach wilts a bit, about 5 minutes. Place bean sprouts on top of spinach, cover and continue cooking for another 3 minutes or so. If necessary, add a bit more soy sauce to keep everything from sticking to bottom of pan.

Mix everything around, and you're ready to serve!



Tofu scramble
Ingredients:

Oil for frying
A block of tofu (water pressed out, see below), a softer tofu works best
Spices. About 2 tablespoons perhaps. I used curry powder (mix of turmeric, cumin, coriander)
Nuts. I used peanuts, but I suppose any kind will do

Press out the water from the tofu. I learned this method from another blog:

Place the block of tofu on a flat plate. Then place a clean container cover (or something flat) on top of the block of tofu. Then put something heavyish, but not too heavy, on top of this flat surface (too heavy will make the tofu tear). I used a can of beans as a weight as was mentioned in another blog. Let sit like this for about 15 minutes or longer, draining the water out of the plate every so often. Hint: do this first before you start cooking or prepping so water is drained out by time you need to cook.

Once tofu is soaked out of water (mostly anyway), dice it up a bit. No worries about perfection, you're going to scramble it anyway.

In small pot, heat up some oil on medium heat. Once oil is hot, lower heat, and drop in tofu. Mix immediately and quickly to avoid burning. Let it all heat up and get all bubbly. Dump out any extra moisture that may be coming out too. Add the spices. Any spices you prefer are good, but I like the way a bit of curry powder and pepper taste. Mix and continue to cook.

There may be a bit of moisture coming out, but that's okay, you can just continue dumping it out. Keep cooking until all the moisture is gone or at least most of it. Use a large spoon to serve, and be sure to serve with as little moisture as possible. Add the peanuts to the served tofu, mix, and it's ready.

It may never be the texture of scrambled egg, but it comes close. You can also add broccoli to this recipe, it's delicious.

Happy Eating!!