Heads up for yet another tofu-standing-in-for-fish dish! Tofu really isn't fooling anyone when it comes to fish, and I'm okay with that. I mostly use it because it's roughly the same color and can be cut into similar shapes. I have seen some interesting versions of "fried fish" using oyster mushrooms or hearts of palm--maybe something to look into for future posts!
It's hard to avoid fish when you're cooking food for island nations. It makes sense that seafood would be their main food source. It was especially hard to find recipes for Micronesia. A lot of food is simply boiled and mashed starches like taro.
One of the blogs I've used as inspiration for this project was sent a recipe by someone from Micronesia for a quick and easy marinade for for proteins (mainly fish.) The core ingredients are grated ginger and lime juice.
To the juice and ginger, I added lots of black pepper and some minced garlic.
Then equal parts soy sauce to the lime juice.
I readied my tofu in slabs--unbaked this time, hoping the marinade would soak in a bit more.
I then marinated my tofu for several hours, turning over every now and then to make sure it soaked in equally.
I then baked the tofu until it was nice and crispy on the edges. Although simple, the marinade was quite tasty. You get the nice tang of the ginger and lime paired with the saltiness of the soy sauce. I served the tofu with just some roasted potatoes since I happened to have some I needed to use.
I also decided to make a dessert based on a recipe I found for bananas covered in coconut milk called uhtin ruk. The grocery store was out of coconut milk when Chris went shopping, so he came back with this cream of coconut, which is definitely not the same thing. This stuff is basically coconut flavored sugar, and is best for adding to piña coladas.
However, it ended up working okay for its intended purpose, just a lot sweeter than I'm sure the original recipe would be.
I ended up adding some almond milk to try to get it to at least look like how the recipe looked. It worked for a few seconds, but the syrupy nature of the cream of coconut took over.
I served the bananas sprinkled with some cinnamon and shredded coconut to try to add a more complex flavor than sweet on sweet. I always forget how much I like cooked bananas as a dessert. I don't know if the original recipe would have been eaten as a dessert--something tells me the bananas found on the various islands of Micronesia are probably a lot starchier and less sweet, so I can see it as simply a side dish to a piece of grilled fish.
Recipes Used: Ginger Lime Marinade // Uhtin Ruk
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