Sunday was a fabulous food day – our friend, Ruth, made us lunch. Despite what this girl says about not knowing how to cook, she did an awesome job and I am drawing on her tutelage for today’s food tip:

Tip #8: Add pan-fried tofu to salads for a filling meal.

As Ruth showed me, pan-fried tofu is as easy as it sounds. Simply slice the tofu into patties, heat some olive oil in a pan, and cook the tofu on both sides until it is brown.

The beauty with tofu in salads is that there’s no need for pesky marinades because the salad dressing adds enough flavor on its own. And when it comes to dressing, anything goes. Ruth surprised us with a bottle of Nando’s medium-spicy “Peri-Peri Sauce”. This stuff is usually used on chicken, but Ruth ingeniously used it on the finished tofu, which she then added to a salad of rocket, tomatoes, mint and spring onion. The mint, by the way, was bad-ass.

I can see other dressings working well with this: hoisin sauce, balsamic vinaigrette, honey mustard dressing… the sky’s the limit here.

Ruth also noted that she usually adds quinoa to the salad, but for some reason our quinoa turned out a bit creamy rather than fluffy, so we ate it on the side which worked just as well.

The tofu/quinoa salad lunch was pretty light, leaving us with plenty of room for after-lunch tea and biscuits. Ruth rolled out some weird savory biscuit things called “Dorset Knobs” which were like a small, dry bread roll. They are typically eaten with blue cheese, but we made do with butter. I don’t think these “knobs” are really my thing. I think they’d be better crumbled in soup.

We also had some chocolate Cantuccini (basically Italian biscotti) made by The Organic Collection. These were delicious. As I always say, why bother with knobs when you can have biscotti and tea?

Sunday Food Diary

• Breakfast: Bircher muesli with Greek yogurt and rooibos tea.
• Swim. 30-minutes freestyle and backstroke.
• Coffee (decaf) @ Cafe Z
• Cycle. Not sure how far it is to Ruth’s but it only takes about 15 minutes.
• Lunch @ Ruth’s. Rocket salad with mint, tomatoes, spring onions, tofu, and Nando’s peri-peri sauce. Plus quinoa on the side. Dorset knobs and chocolate cantuccini for dessert. To drink, green earl gray tea and black tea with milk.
• Cycle. Another 15-minutes home from Ruth’s.
• Dinner: Scrambled tofu with greens and corn. Really good tofu scramble today – I had some fresh basil and parsley which I added to the tofu, along with a diced red chili, diced carrot, red bell pepper, kale, onion and nutritional yeast flakes.