i have a shocking confession for you, my dear internet readers. i hate broccoli. detest it, really. ok, maybe that’s not so shocking. but i love vegetables, and broccoli is one of only two vegetables i dislike.
after making tofu skewers a couple of weeks ago, i found myself staring at a little mason jar full of peanut sauce, unsure of how i wanted to use it. i strongly dislike throwing things away – it feels so wasteful to throw out perfectly good food – so i knew i had to come up with something to use up the last of the sauce.
ok, so i know we’re all fully into bbq season, right? these long, warm summer days are practically screaming at us to light up a grill and cook our food outdoors. but what do vegetarians grill? most of my life, i’ve bought pre-packaged veggie dogs and burgers for grilling season, but i inevitably get very, very sick of them after two or three bbqs.
ever since mike and i began avidly cooking and subscribing to vegetarian times to obtain new, delicious recipes, we rarely repeat a recipe. if we do repeat a recipe, it’s usually over a span of a month or two, while the produce it utilizes is fresh and available – but that recipe rarely makes it to the next year when the season rolls around again. this recipe, for honey tofu and couscous, is one of the rare exceptions to our constant desire to try new recipes and experience new flavor combinations. we stumbled across this recipe shortly after thanksgiving, when nothing sounded good to eat because we were still reeling from our veggie tday feast. we made it once, then the next week, then the next one after that. and before we knew it, we were both making it for our respective family’s christmas celebrations.
after a fun and food filled weekend, mike and i decided to make a hearty, healthy, vegetable-laden dinner to start out our week and counterbalance the weekend’s excesses.
we made this recipe for the first time a couple weeks ago (it was in last month’s vegetarian times), and it was printed as a two part recipe – the first being a mango teriyaki sauce on grilled tofu and the second part brown rice. the mango sauce, which is salty and sweet and very bright tasting (unlike the bottled stuff), is the most amazing part of the recipe, and i think it would lend itself well as a topping on all sorts of other concoctions. we LOVED this sauce and its juxtaposition with the aromatic and nutty flavored rice so much that we decided we had to make the whole dish again, but this time add lots of vegetables and make it a stir fry instead of grilled tofu over rice.
so the recipe i’m giving you has three components – rice, sauce, and veggie/tofu stir fry. while typing out the recipe, i became a little worried that you, dear readers, might think that it’s a little daunting. but i assure you, we completed the whole meal in less then 30 minutes of hands on time (we started the brown rice in my trusty rice cooker before heading down the hill to new leaf), and while there are a lot of components, each is pretty simple.
