Vine and Dine – Chile grilled tofu with avocado tomatillo sauce

This was our second pick from Candle 79 and another very successful recipe choice. I can’t get tomatillos here but fortunately the salsa in my fridge was made up of similar ingredients to the sauce so I just blended the salsa with some avocado to create a very similar version.

I’m not sure about the average size of guajillo chillies but mine were huge. I also used the chilli soaking water for the water suggested for the sauce, so my sauce had a nice kick to it – not evil hot but nice and balanced. I didn’t serve it with the suggested quinoa because of the corn hater in the house, but rather a tweaked version of the Mexican rice from the first Horizons book.

Obviously, using the salsa was a shortcut but the dish came together very quickly, and just like the first recipe we tried from this book, it tasted like it had needed far more work than it had actually taken.

Once again the book suggested a white wine, and once again Matthew ignored the suggestion and chose red. Here’s what he had to say:

The wine we chose was a Novas Pinot Noir, 2010, from the Casablanca Valley in Chile. This is a terrific basic level new world Pinot, and a great bargain at £8.99 from Vintage Roots, new in the last couple of months. The wine has everything you would expect from wine of this origin and price level: strawberry and other summer fruits, a bit of raspberry and plum, with a little hint of chocolate, medium bodied and completely gluggable. The hint of sweetness that you get with the Pinot Noir is for our money one of the better flavour matches with spicy food like this: sweet and spicy to go with the salty tomatillo sauce and the sourness of the avocado and lemon juice make it a well-balanced wine-food combination. That said, this dish did have a lot of citrus flavours, and any red wine would struggle to some extent. A young one like this had a better chance, but for my money you could get away with whites of similar character also – tofu needing not to be overwhelmed by more full-bodied reds. A Novas Viognier, same price and supplier, with its lime and honeysuckle, would be worth a try.

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