The first thing we made is Vietnamese spring rolls. These are a little different than regular spring rolls as they are not fried, but are made with rice paper wraps that you simply soak in warm water.
When the wraps were softened we filled them with thin rice noodles, saute'd shitake mushrooms, avocado, fried tofu, basil, shredded carrots etc… you can pretty much fill them with whatever you want, we put shrimp in Andre’s instead of tofu. Then you wrap them up like an egg roll and serve them with a Thai peanut sauce for dipping.
The next thing we tried was fried sesame tofu with Thai sweet chili sauce. Andre and I have never, ever liked tofu but this recipe definitely changed our minds. These were delicious!!!
You are going to want to purchase Extra Firm organic tofu for this recipe. When you get it you need to drain all the water out of it and pat it dry. Now because it was soaking in water you need to press it, I put a paper towel on the top of it followed bye some heavy textbooks then let it stand for about 15 minutes. Soak up all the water and then wrap the tofu in some paper towels and put the books back on for another 15-45 minutes. You really want this tofu to be dry.
You are going to cut the tofu in to small one-inch cubes.
While the tofu is being drained of its water you can mix the other ingredients together.
So in a bowl mix together
5 Tablespoons of sesame seeds
4 Tablespoons of corn starch
4 Tablespoons of rice flour
½ a teaspoon of salt
½ a teaspoon of sugar
After that is mixed together you are going to coat each individual cube of tofu in the mixture, coat it extremely well so that it is completely covered with the powder.
Take out a large nonstick pot and pour about 1 ½ inches of canola oil in it, then turn the heat to medium. After the oil is heated drop about 5 of the tofu cubes in the oil and wait a full minute before pulling them out with some highly heat resistant tongs. (We used silicon tongs, which stood up to the oil well.)
Put the fried cubes on some paper towels so that they can dry, then repeat with the rest of the cubes.
When they're are all done serve them with a Thai sweet chili sauce which can be found in the Asian section of any grocery store.
