Tofu Tuesday - Steamed Tofu With Mushrooms & Prawns

Tofu Tuesday is under way. As much as I'd love to make agedashi tofu again (seriously - I'm craving it) it wouldn't make for very interesting blogging. So I ploughed on with a new recipe.

Having a google around, there weren't many tofu recipes I found particularly interesting. Many of them are vegetarian recipes which uses tofu as a protein element. I'm not against vegetarianism, far from it in fact, but I wanted to use tofu as a centre piece, rather than using it to replace something else. Since I deep-fried last week, I also wanted to use a different method of cooking it. I combined some ideas from this recipe, and also a recipe Josh from Cooking The Books sent me, to come up with this.

Steamed Tofu With Mushroom & Prawns

To serve one

5 raw shelled prawns

5 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 1/2 an hour.

1/2 box of firm silken tofu - I use this brand

1 spring onion, sliced on the diagonal

1 red bird's eye chilli, sliced

1 inch ginger, grated

2 tbsp oyster sauce (or to taste), loosened with a little hot water.

1 tsp sesame oil

Slice the tofu very carefully into 5 slices. Layer on a plate to fit in the steamer with the rehydrated mushrooms and prawns, alternating. Scatter the ginger, chilli and spring onion on top. Steam for roughly 10 mins, or until the prawns just turn pink. Once cooked, drain the juices from the plate and pour the loosened oyster sauce over the tofu and drizzle the sesame oil on top.

I served this with white rice and choi sum stir-fried in chilli, garlic and ginger. The tofu was lovely - really clean-tasting and quite refreshing, not at all heavy. The contrasting textures between the soft tofu, the succulent mushrooms and the slight crunch of the prawns was very pleasing; the tofu did it's job well.