It doesn’t feel like summer is coming to a close with days in the 90s still lingering here in Colorado, but indeed, summer is coming to a close. That means I’m frantically taking in the coldbrews while the chance is still there.

 

This was another sample from Friday Afternoon Tea that I got when I restocked some of my favorites. I threw about half of it in a pot for a hot brewing and the other half in my cold brew container, and then ran it through a nitrogen infuser.

 

The thing that came out was round, almost floral, and crisp in a way that reminded me of lemon without tasting anything like lemon. It was the perfect end of summer drink on a hot day.

You can get Golden Monkey from Friday Afternoon Tea here.

I realize that I had made vague, handwavy promises to bring back the tofu on a fairly regular basis. It has been a WHILE, and there’s no good reason for it except that I’m a goofy perfectionist and I don’t want to give you a recipe without perfecting it. Nonetheless, this week I’m going to bring you one of my current breakfast fads: tofu noodle egg stir fry.

IS THIS EVEN A TOFU? That is a philosophical question, because it’s made with soy sheets aka soy skin aka tofu skin aka yuba. The origin of these sheets is that when you make tofu, you have to heat soy milk, and a skin forms on top. If you pull the skin off very carefully, you get these. It’s made of exactly the same ingredients as tofu. Is it tofu itself, or is it a byproduct of tofu that they now start producing in bulk because it’s awesome? Who knows. 

 

You can get them dry, but then you have to reconstitute them and that’s a whole extra step which sometimes derails the entire concept of meals. I buy them in the refrigerated section of H-Mart.

If you do not like the texture of tofu, this is something that reads VERY non-squishy tofu. They are closer to very thin rice noodles in texture: chewy and absorbent of flavor. Unlike rice noodles, they have both protein and fiber.

 

Anyway, a simple breakfast goes like this. Scramble however many eggs you want, seasoned however you want. I usually do salt, pepper, and MSG, and yes, I think MSG is fine, particularly if you’re using it in small amounts. One per person is fine, two if you like eggs and like more protein.

 

Drop the eggs in a bowl. Now take your pan (don’t bother washing it, it’s fine). Give it a spritz of olive oil, set it on low heat, and add veggies. I like color, so I used purple cabbage, edamame, and red peppers. Stir fry these until they’ve cooked a little bit but are still crisp. Season with salt, pepper, and MSG while you’re doing this.

 

(If you want to know my rule of thumb for MSG, it’s use about half as much as you would salt. It makes everything taste very good. If you think you’re MSG sensitive, but you’re fine with eating Doritos or KFC, good news: you’re not MSG sensitive.)

 

Anyway. While those are cooking, open up your soy skin. These sheets are very, very thin, and you have to kind of carefully peel them back. I peel off somewhere between 2-4 of them and then pile them in a heap, before slicing them into finger-width noodles. Or whatever width you want. It doesn’t matter.

Throw these on the pan and cook a little, stirring when you remember to do so, until they start caramelizing just slightly. Then add about a capful of shaoxing cooking wine (around 1-2 tsp). The pan will steam; wait until all the liquid evaporates. Add around a teaspoon of black vinegar. Again, the pan steams; again, you wait until the liquid is absorbed into the noodles. Finally, add about 2 tsp of soy sauce, and stir one last time. If you want, add as much chili crisp as your heart desires before you do that last stir. Cook for another minute, and then dump it into the bowl with the egg. Mix together, and voila: soy noodle stir fry with egg!

 

As a note, you can make this slightly more easy by not scrambling the egg, and just cracking the eggs on top of the veggies and soy noodles. This makes it more omelette-like and less stir fry. I tried it like this for a while, but my main complaint is that the soy sauce means the eggs don’t show up as a brilliant yellow, and that’s not as pretty.

So I read this book a while ago, and I’ve been sitting on my hands trying not to squeal about how great it is for a very, very long time. Let me tell you something about this book: it goes so hard.

 

Here’s the premise: Rae is a very big fan of her Very Favorite Series. Unfortunately, Rae gets cancer and is dying. Normally, I shy away from people using cancer as a plot device, because it always ends up both too real and not real enough all at once, but this is something I trusted in Sarah’s hands because, and this is important, if you know Sarah, you may be aware that it has been a long time since she published a book, and the reason that is the case is because she had cancer. In any event, I do need to warn you that the cancer part of this book is extremely real and feels like it was written by someone who knows.

 

So here Rae is, dying in the hospital, when a woman walks in and offers her a bargain: she will send her into her Very Favorite Series as a character, and all she has to do is pluck a very particular flower from a very specific garden within a specified time, and she will live. If she fails, she’ll die, but she’s going to do that anyway.

 

So Rae takes the bargain, and finds herself catapulted into the very first book, in the body of the villainess who is about to be put to death. This does not leave her with many options, but Rae needs to survive, and she is going to do it.

 

This book is both funny and incredibly serious; both an absolutely crack pot plot and something that starts to piece together little tiny things until you’re shouting and pointing that OH MY GOD IT ALL FITS TOGETHER. This book will make you weep at least once, and probably twice, and my god, I cannot wait for the sequel.

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