Entries from June 2008 ↓

I was always a bit squicked out by tofu. Back in high school, our home ec teacher tried to get us to make tofu by coagulating soy milk. And let me tell you, the soy milk available back in the early 90s in small-town Australia was pretty dire, so it was bad from the start. Nobody wanted to try the gluggy mess, and nobody had any idea how to cook with it anyway.

I avoided tofu for a long time. Even when it was in laksa and smelled pretty damn good. And even when I was vegetarian for a few years a while back, I still never ate it. But now, my palate and attitude to food has matured somewhat and I decided I might as well give it a try. Except, how to not make it slimy? All hail the internet, for it threw me a page with some fine instructions on how to cook tofu. All you have to do is drain and slice and press, then dry fry, then marinate and add to your dish. The texture ends up quite like cooked meat patties.

So, last night I cooked with tofu for the first time and the result was, if I do say so myself, rather good. Here’s what I made! Note: Always use the best, freshest ingredients you can afford. Nom.

Chili ginger tofu noodles stir fry

• 250g/1/2lb block of firm tofu
• 3/4 cup tamari or soy sauce
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tsp mirin (rice wine vinegar) – use lemon juice if you can’t find any
• 2 tsp finely chopped or minced ginger
• 2 small hot red chilis, finely chopped (this is reasonably hot, use more or less as you prefer)
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 tsp high-heat veg oil – peanut, sunflower, canola, etc. Not olive.
• 4-5 cups assorted chopped vegetables – a mix of texture and colour is nice, for example: broccoli, carrot, baby corn, red capsicum (bell peppers). I used what looked nicest at the supermarket: green beans, broccoli, carrot and snow peas. Other suggestions: red cabbage, onion, bok choy, Chinese broccoli (kai lan), cauliflower, Chinese or Japanese mushroom, etc.
• 200g/(7oz?) pack of Hokkien or rice noodles

1. Prepare the tofu as instructed.
2. While it’s cooling, mix up the tamari, water, mirin, ginger, chilli and garlic in a medium bowl.
3. Place the tofu in the marinade and let it soak for 30 or more minutes.
4. Chop the veges while you wait! The best way involves thin slices that don’t need long in the wok. Carrot can be julienned or sliced on the diagonal, separate broccoli into small florets, snow peas and baby corn can be left whole.
5. Prepare the noodles according to the packet. Usually this is just covering them with boiling water and leaving for a minute then draining.
6. Heat up a large wok, electric or whatever is fine, as long as it can get really hot! Or a very large high-sided skillet can substitute.
7. Add the oil and brush it around the sides of the wok, letting it get really hot too.
8. Add in the hardest vegetables first – carrots and broccoli, followed by the softer ones like mushrooms and capsicum/peppers. When you stir-fry, you should keep the ingredients moving around the wok – traditionally with large cooking chopsticks but I find kitchen tongs work just as well. You can pick stuff up and toss it around. If you’re talented/a risk taker, you can flip stuff by yanking the wok around as chefs do.
9. The vegetables probably only need two minutes, tops, then add in the noodles and toss them about too. After about 30 seconds, add in the tofu and all the marinade sauce.
10. Keep tossing everything around until it’s well-coated with the sauce and the tofu is heated through. The actual cooking should be over in a total of about four minutes.
11. Serve in bowls, and eat well!

Serves 4 regular or 3 hearty meals. This reheats in the microwave reasonably well, but don’t freeze it.

The Australian federal government has set up a Preventative Health Taskforce. It’s to make recommendations on preventative strategies to combat the ‘burden of chronic disease currently caused by obesity, tobacco and the excessive consumption of alcohol’.

It will allegedly ‘provide evidence-based advice’ on the above. Just putting fat next to smoking and binge drinking and it’s an EPIC FAIL right at the start. (see note at end for more on this)

The experts chosen to make up the Taskforce have short biographies available on the Taskforce website, but I’ve compiled some other important information the public might like to know:

Professor Rob Moodie – mostly involved with anti-drug and alcohol campaigns and global health. He is currently not a member of or involved with any organisation or company that’s notably or specifically with an anti-obesity focus (that I can find), but he has written articles like this one, Obesity – a market success, full of the usual OMG fat kids are reducing life expectancy! panic. As Chair of the Taskforce, he recently said “there should be five-yearly check-ups on Australians’ obesity rates, activity levels and nutrition”. WTF mate.

Professor Mike Daube – again previously mostly invovled with anti-drug and alcohol abuse policy, but also on the public record as getting all agitated about Too Many Fat People and thinking a ‘junk food tax’ will fix it.

Professor Paul Zimmet – involved currently and previously with a long list of think tanks and health policy organisations, etc, mainly to do with diabetes and obesity. Calls obesity an “insidious creeping pandemic” and “international scourge“. Pandemic. I do not think that word means what he thinks it means, what with it definitionally requiring a transmissible disease. More importantly, Professor Zimmet is also a currently a board member or scientific advisor for pharmaceutical companies that are developing obesity and diabetes drugs: ChemGenex, Apollo Life Sciences, and Dia-B. He is a member of Monash University’s Centre for Obesity Research and Education (which states ‘obesity’ is a disease) and several other organisations whose continued funding relies on the continuation of the idea that being fat is a horrible deadly disease.

Ms Kate Carnell – not much to add about Carnell beyond what’s on her bio there, but interestingly when she was CEO of the Australian Divisions of General Practice she stated the ADGP (now the AGPN) had decided that banning junk food advertising was not a practicable idea because the definition of ‘junk food’ was not clear. Has made general obesity-bad statements.

Dr Lyn Roberts – Can’t find any blatant commercial interests, but here’s an example of her (fairly standard, mainstream) stance on fat and health. I find it interesting the difference between the way she talks about fat and health compared to the dramatic language used by Zimmet: by no means fat-friendly but not using fearmongering as an argument technique.

Mr Shaun Ramsay – a senior manager at HCF, a private health insurance company. Previous to that, he was an executive for a large private hospital company. Is on the board of Research Australia, an organisation for strategic health research funding. RA is supported by a great deal of vested interests.

Professor Leonie Segal – A health economist. Not much to add, is on record with similar views as Dr Roberts above.

Dr Linda Selvey – a standard smattering of appointments to public health statutory bodies. Similar mainstream views on fat and health.

So there we have it. I suspect some people might say that well, pharmaceutical companies provide research funding! Where else are researchers supposed to get it? Sure, but it’d be nice if these interests were fully declared. And it would have been nice to see an eminently qualified researcher and academic on the Taskforce who was a proponent of Health at Every Size (yeah right, in your dreams) or at least had heard of it. They’re out there but they’re not one of the cool kids.

Not happy, Kevin and Nicola.

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Note: Interestingly, people are all handwringing over a supposed epidemic of binge drinking (especially amongst young people) here. The available evidence on binge drinking shows that there’s been no real increase in binge drinking and alcohol-related violence is not rising. However, polls do show more people are worried about binge drinking and its effects and there’s been an epidemic of media sensationalism over those naughty naughty drunken teenagers, particularly those nasty slutty teenage girls/”ladettes” (how dare they try to have a good time). Sound familiar?

Also note: I don’t think that demonising smokers and heavy drinkers does any good. Teenagers drinking well beyond their limits on a regular basis even if it’s not an “epidemic” isn’t a great idea, but I think there are overarching societal problems that need fixing, not slapping taxes on alco-pops and various knee-jerk responses. You get the idea.