asian noodle salad + fried tofu

My sister, Erin, and I both love to cook, so naturally we also like to talk about food a lot. Seldom do we have a phone conversation where one of us doesn't mention something we've made, something we want to try, and even recent "flops" (kale chips anyone?) Whether it's meal planning, new recipes, food ruts, new healthy treats we've tried, and not so healthy ones, or our not so little dream of opening a healthy "fast food" restaurant, we just love to share our findings with each other.

(Miss you, Erin!)


One of our recent conversations revolved around finding meal-type salad recipes that we can make up ahead of time and keep in the fridge for several days and nibble on. Obviously these aren't of the green tossed salad variety as they wouldn't keep. Since I'm currently working my way back through a lot of Cynthia Lair's recipes, I made the Asian Noodle Salad with Fried Tofu this weekend. Great simple recipe!

Unfortunately, not a bit made it to the refrigerator for the intended purpose of having leftovers. I had a very little bit of it before running Sela off to her tennis match. I returned to the big serving bowl completely empty and sitting in the sink with just a few drops of dressing left :( Turns out both Zig and Rollin liked the salad, a lot. I was both bummed and happy at the same time. This salad had kale, red cabbage, carrots, red & yellow bell pepper, zucchini, cilantro, sesame seeds, radishes, and TOFU! Rollin apparently had a huge bowl and and a second helping. So I couldn't be too dissappointed, but I was hungry.


Just the veggies. pretty huh?

Now back to the tofu. None of us are fans of tofu, especially the kids, but I gave it another try and prepared the marinated pan fried tofu and it was delicious. For real. This is definitely the way I will prepare tofu in the future. Sometimes chicken just sounds so gross and fish doesn't work in the recipe so it's really nice to be able to have a way to use tofu. And the tofu is lightly fried in coconut oil, need I say more?! (Plus, if you have little kitchen helpers around, tofu is really fun to cut up into little squares.)



I made the salad again the following day because we had lots of veggies and because I wanted more than two bites. When I make this salad, I loosely follow the recipe, I don't measure anything, and I add lots more veggies than are listed in the recipe, but I know it's also great just exactly as written. Since I doubled the recipe, kind of, I needed a little extra dressing at the end so instead of making another round of dressing, I just used a little soyaki that we had in the fridge, and that worked just fine. We've been eating if for the past few days, took some on a day trip to San Juan Island, and I'm pleased to report, this salad keeps very well. Add that to the list, Erin!

And here it is, Asian Noodle Salad with Fried Tofu.