Chilli fried rice with tofu and cucumber cashew salad

I’m very bad at resisting buying any new vegan cookbook that comes out. All the time I make myself promises that I won’t buy new cookbooks until I’ve seen them in the flesh, so that I don’t get disappointed. I should know by now that of course Amazon is going to recommend any book with the word vegan in the title, and it’s no guarantee that it won’t be pants. I won’t name them here but I’ve sometimes nearly cried in disgust at some of the books that have turned up in an exciting looking brown Amazon box….

However, the most recent cookbook I bought is called Asian Vegan Kitchen and on this occasion I’m really pleased I went with my instincts. The book has chapters from 9 Asian countries – some such as Indian and Thai I’m fairly familiar with, but I know nothing at all about Burmese, Korean or Indonesian cuisine.

I made my first meal from the book today. As so often it was inspired by something that came in my veg box – in this case, a huge cucumber! I picked out the cucumber and roast cashew salad to try, and flicking through the book, I saw that the author recommends serving it with this chilli fried rice, which also used up my tofu. Perfect.

The rice has chilli, onion, spring onions, tofu, thai curry paste and other things in it, and the salad had a really spicy chilli, garlic and lime dressing, which lifted the rice and made for a lovely fresh meal which had a great chilli kick to it.

I’m looking forward to trying out more from this book!

Advertisement