Viet World Kitchen

Mustard Greens, Tofu, and Chicken Soup Recipe (Canh Cai Dau Hu)

On Monday, my husband had dental surgery and for his post-operation, recovery dinner, I made a comforting (read: easy to chew) tofu, shrimp, and peas stir-fry. The Trader Joe-san medium tofu came in a 1 1/4-pound (565 g) block and I only needed about a pound. I had a little block left.

What can you do with a chunk of leftover tofu? You can save it in the fridge, or in my case last Monday, I added it to a simple Vietnamese soup with mustard greens and a bit of chicken thigh sitting in the fridge.

Cooking and Life Lessons from Our Moms

Over the weekend our friends Diane and John invited us over for a Cinco de Mayo dinner. They have two little boys, ages 2 and 4, who are adorable, a little rascally but over all pretty well behaved. I don’t have children so I dig observing the parenting process.

A teacher by profession, Diane takes a kind-hearted educational approach to rearing her boys. While we were at their home, she got the older boy to fetch a step stool so he could stand at the kitchen sink to wash his dinner plate. We adults watched with amusement until we realized that there may be a knife in the sink. Diane let out a small cry, explaining to her son that sharp objects may be nearby, and ran over to check. No knife present. Disaster averted.

It’s hard to know what kind of impression that situation made on the four-year-old but parents do their best. Lord knows I’ve asked myself a zillion times whether or not I’d left a knife at the bottom of a sink full of dirty dishes. I don’t think I figured that one out from my mom but here are five cooking and life lessons that she did teach me. (By the way, the vintage photo at the top has Mom in center and on her left, 5 1/2-year-old me looking grumpy.)

Spicy Basil Chicken and Tofu Recipe

The Hmong farmers have returned to our weekly farmer’s market with a wealth of Asian produce. Last Saturday, they had gorgeous Thai basil and I swooped down upon a couple of bunches. Basil discolors quickly, its shelf life under refrigeration is just a few days. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste and thought of Thai chicken and basil, a simple stir-fry.

The thing is, I didn’t want to make the dish with all chicken so I worked in some tofu. I substituted 10 ounces (300 grams) of extra-firm tofu for 8 ounces (240 grams) of the chicken in the original recipe, which called for a pound. That’s one of several strategy for using tofu for low-meat dishes.

The keys to this dish include (1) washing and drying the basil leaves (keep them whole) and (2) seasoning and panfrying the tofu.

To seal in the moisture in the chicken, I lightly coat it with cornstarch and soy sauce; it’s typically added to the wok as is, only to be embellished by flavors during the cooking process. Dark soy sauce adds color but the black soy sauce is semi sweet. With so little used, I suppose you could use kecap manis, if you want. 

 You can make this dish with mint or Italian basil but for the real deal, Thai basil’s warm spice note is magnificent. If flowers are present on the sprigs, use them!

How to Use Tofu for Low-Meat Dishes

I like to eat meat, but just not in large quantities. I’m a low-meat eater, having grown up in a household where animal protein was never presented at the table in the form of entire roasts or birds. No Normal Rockwell images at the holidays. Food was offered in bite size pieces to (1) make it easier to pick up with chopsticks and (2) feed our family of seven on a budget. We consumed a lot of vegetables via canh (soups), lettuce and raw herbs, stir-fries, and noodle dishes. We regularly ate tofu too, usually seasoned with fish sauce and/or cooked with meat in various Vietnamese preparations. Yes, you can have your meat and eat tofu too!

I didn’t know of vegetarian tofu scrambles, tofu steaks, and tofu blanketed by cheese sauce until I moved to Santa Cruz, California, in the late 1990s. A bastion for natural living, there were and still is a vegetarian restaurant named Dharma’s. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Hindquarter Bar and Grille, whose motto is: “where the elite meat.”  

I live and eat between those extremes and tofu plays a key role. If you want to consume less animal protein and/or save money, you don’t have to forgo meat altogether. Having tofu in your diet is not about deprivation, or some kind of monk-like existence. Without sacrificing flavor and with a little help from tofu, you can turn many meat-filled dishes (e.g., stews, curries, stir-fries, dumpling filling, meatballs and meatloaf – not roast beef) into low-meat ones. Here are some ideas:

Finding Dan Dan Noodles’ BF: Ya Cai Preserved Mustard Greens

Sometimes things are right under your nose and you don’t know it. For the dan dan noodle recipe that I wrote about in the Wall Street Journal last week, I needed a specific seasoning ingredient – Chinese preserved mustard greens, called ya cai (“yaah tsai”). I went to my Chinese market and perused the dried vegetable and canned vegetable section. Nothing. I’d read about the ingredient in cookbooks but none of them told me how to find the stuff – where it may be located or how it’s packaged.

Then, while I was in the refrigerated section looking at tofu (what else) and noodles (for the recipe), I turned around and saw a bunch of boxes filled with index-card size packages of something. Remembering that my friend Victor Fong told me how his family often ate some super salty Chinese pickle with their rice, and that the salty pickle was sold in small packs, I took a look. Lo and behold, there were boxes of ya cai – the good kind made in Yibin in Sichuan province. I’d read in Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop that the ya cai from that city was famous and prized.