Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Chinese Mustard Sauce, Asian Marinated Smoked Tofu and Soba Noodles

Sunday, March 9

Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Chinese Mustard Sauce, Asian Marinated Smoked Tofu and Soba Noodles

Rating: 4.75

So we had some baby bok choy from our weekly Vegetable Husband delivery and I wanted to do something other than a stir-fry with it. I was flipping through the Vedge Cookbook and found a recipe for Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Chinese Mustard Sauce. Oh hell yes. It looked simple enough and sounded amazing. The sauce was made from items we already had on hand – mainly hot Chinese mustard, vegan mayo and rice vinegar – and it took about 5 seconds to make. The bok choy was also crazy easy. Just toss it with sesame oil and plop it on the grill, or in our case, the grill pan, let it get slightly seared and you’re good to go. The tofu was also really simple. I have an indoor smoker, which I kind of forgot about. I love it, and when I first got it, I was using it a lot, so I set it aside just to keep from overdoing it. The smoke flavor is really prominent in the tofu so it would be easy to grow weary of it. My apartment smells like hickory smoke for a few days afterward too, even though the smoker really doesn’t make the house fill with smoke as you’d expect. While the tofu was smoking, I made a really simple marinade from tamari, rice vinegar, grated ginger, sriracha, garlic, a little sesame oil, and a splash of mirin. Once the tofu was smoked, I sliced it into 8 slabs and let it marinate for about 2 hours. When it was time to cook dinner, I grilled the tofu first, then put it in the oven on 200 just to keep warm while the noodles cooked and I grilled the bok choy. The noodles were really simple. I had some leftover Almond-Chili spread from the Shiitake Bahn Mi I’d made for lunch on Friday, so I mixed some of that into the noodles along with a few drops of sesame oil and chili oil and some chopped green onions. The noodles were ok, and tofu was really good, but the real star of dinner was the bok choy. I can’t wait to make it again.