Saturday, August 3 Sunflower Seed Crusted Tofu with Squash Sauce, Corn and Tomato Rating: 4.5

There was a Vegan Drinks meet-up at Urban PL8 a while back, and one of the specials was tofu crusted in sunflower seeds served with a summer squash sauce. I’ve wanted to try one of my own for a while and finally decided to go for it. We had a pattypan squash in the fridge from the CSA, so I planned to use that for the sauce. I hunted and hunted for a summer squash sauce recipe and it’s harder to find one than you’d think. I finally found this one, which is really for a pasta sauce, but seemed close enough. (Ignore the dead sea life she suggest serving this with.) Even though the recipe didn’t specify to do so, I soaked my cashews for a while before putting them in the blender – it just makes a creamier sauce. The recipe is really easy, and I subbed some chopped, sautéed yellow onion for the green onion. I used fresh basil from the plants Seth is growing in the kitchen window. I used the Vitamix to make quick work of the sauce. It came out thicker and frothier than I expected, but I imagine if you were mixing it with pasta that would break it down a bit more. There was also a lot more of it than I expected, so I’ll need to get creative with leftovers for that. It tasted really good, although I think that extra clove of garlic I threw in was a bit too much. 

For the tofu, I kind of mashed up a couple of recipes. The one I used for the crusty outside didn’t call for marinating the tofu at all and I though just the sunflower seed crust might be too bland with un-marinated tofu, so I sort of used the marinade from this recipe. I say sort of because I had to modify it a bit: I didn’t have wine so I used beer and I didn’t have any tomato paste. Or orange juice. Whatever. It was just to add some flavor to the tofu – it’s not an exact science. The acutal process of getting the seeds on the tofu is pretty simple too - just dredge it in the flax egg and then in the seed mixture. The tofu turned out really well, although I ended up using more oil than I would have liked in the pan. We both would have liked it a bit firmer as well. The next time I make this, or something like it, I’ll bake the tofu so it gets chewier. I kept the rest of the meal really simple – grilled corn and sliced tomato in balsamic vinegar from the CSA.