Vegan Recipe: Can the Real Peanut Sauce Please Stand Up?

It's that time again: The Vegan Recipe of the Week by our lovely contributor Martina Martinez. Get jiggy with some peanut butter and tofu over the long weekend!


A rich peanut sauce poured over a shitty meal will make you want to dip your fork in it, atop a mediocre meal will make you sing and streak, and, if coupled with something delicious, might just melt your heart. If flat beans sound a little too healthy, you can substitute them with pretty much any veggie you like, though they add that vibrant green and needed crunch to it all and are in season: so, easy and cheap to get.

Stuff you'll need:
1/2 cup rice
1 shredded carrot
1 cup flat beans (Oyster mushrooms cut into stripes work magically as well, but, unless you don't mind chewing away your teeth, stay away from the stringy snow peas.)
1 package of tofu
pinch of salt
vegetable oil for frying (Peanut oil works nicely.)

For the glaze:
1 tbs mirin
1 tbs soy sauce

For the peanut sauce:
1/2 cup peanut butter (The crunchy kind spices up the texture.)
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs soy sauce
heaping tsp of crushed ginger
juice of 1 lime

Adding flavour to your big white tofu:
1/3 cup mirin
2 tbs tamari
1 tbs vegetable oil (Sesame or peanut works well.)
chunk of ginger, diced
2 cloves smashed garlic


If you're short of time or effort, feel free to skip the marinating bit, though, you'll like yourself more if you let the tofu swim, even if just for an hour. So, basically, all you have to do is cut up the tofu into 2cm cubes, mix the marinade ingredients and immerse your very-white and still-bland tofu in it, flipping it every 30 or so minutes.

Get the rice cooking! Cut the beans into thirds and shred that carrot. Boil some salty water and blanch the beans, boiling them for just about a minute and then running them under ice-cold water.

Meanwhile, you can put together that aaaah-mmmmm peanuty concoction by, well, blending the six ingredients.

Once the rice has done its time, just fry it for about 5 minutes on high heat, adding the carrot and frying for another 3 or so minutes.

Afterwards also fry the tofu, marinated or not, for about 3 minutes on each side until golden. Once the heat is off, throw in those crunchy flat beans and the mirin-soy sauce glaze. Just toss it around for the flavours to blend.

The climax, then: Plate the fried rice, layer with the tofu-bean mix, and top with the peanuty sauce.