Garlic Tofu Broccoli Stir Fry

Being in college, I'm always on a quest to find quick/easy/cheap/somewhat healthy meals to prepare when I get home from a long day in studio. Especially this month, after rather expensive series of events.

Stir-fry is a great answer to this problem— and this one turned out awesome!

Start by cooking the tofu. Add firm or extra firm tofu, cut up, into a dry nonstick pan and fry while pressing down until you get a nice browned color. Remove and set aside.

Fry up some onion and garlic (two big cloves) on low heat in olive oil. Add some red pepper flakes (I made this one pretty spicy.)

When the onions are clearish add a bunch of broccoli, cut into florets. Add some water to the pan and cover with a lid for a minute or two to steam them. They should turn bright green.

When the water's gone, add the tofu and lightly brown everything. Add some more olive oil if you need to. Finish it off with a bit of soy sauce and sesame seeds. Serve with rice, or maybe pasta?

Cupcake Experiment

I wanted to make cupcakes the other night after reading the recipe for Smitten Kitchen's new chocolate whiskey and beer cupcakes but found that I was missing the ingredients. Still, I decided to improvise on the recipe and make chocolate espresso cupcakes with Kahlua-flavored icing.

I substituted soymilk for regular milk, margarine for some of the butter, and yogurt for sour cream. The original recipe called for melting stout and butter together on the stove and then whisking in cocoa powder; I mixed a good amount of instant espresso powder with soymilk and used that instead of stout— it worked well enough but the whole mixture didn't stay together and kind of turned into lumps. Still, everything whipped up into a pretty good batter.

For the buttercream, I just used Kahlua and some instant espresso instead of the Bailey's.

The cupcakes turned out delicious, but a little dense. Clearly I should just stick to the recipes for a little longer until I can really improvise with baking.