Agedashi Tofu

  

  
There is a cart at 10th and Alder that does a fantastic job of making this dish. I still haven't got the method right for the crunchy/chewy batter they do, but this is close.

I had to look up what agedashi is, and apparently, 'age' means fried, and 'dashi' is broth or stock. So, fried tofu in broth. Which doesn't explain what it tastes like at all. The brown sauce is indeed based on dashi, but it isn't the watery bland stuff the english word 'broth' leads you to expect. In this case, it is an intensely flavored sweet-salty-savory condiment.

1 lb tofu
glutinous rice flour
oil for deep frying

1 cup dashi
sesame seeds
fresh grated ginger

You may be able to buy dashi ready made, but I don't know. I went to Fubonn and got a box of these things that say they are 'katsuo dashi packs'. What they are is a thing that looks like an extra large tea bag full of dried fish and kelp flakes. The box has instructions for making the broth- in this case you throw a bag into 3 cups of boiling water and leave it for 5 minutes. Take out the bag, add 1/2 cup light soy sauce and a tablespoon of sugar. Simmer it for a couple more minutes and that's it.

Heat about 2" of oil in a pan until you can see the convection currents moving the oil around.

Cube the tofu and roll the pieces in the rice flour until they are thickly coated, then carefully drop them in the oil. Fry them until the outsides are crispy- they won't get very brown. Drain them briefly on paper towel, then serve them on rice  topped with a generous splash of dashi, grated ginger and sesame seeds.

What's about the beans? I just battered some green beans and fried them. I figured that if i was going to have an almighty mess in the kitchen with the frying oil, and the rice flour, and whatnot, I might as well make some tempura to go with my fake Japanese food. Mix about equal parts flour and cornstarch with enough water to make a very light batter, add a dash each of salt and pepper and dunk in the beans. Fry them until the batter is crunchy and as brown as you like.

You know, this turned out all right, and I'll probably make it again to see if I can improve it, but rather than fuss around with my sketchy instructions, you should just go to 10th and Alder get an order of it at the cart called Samurai. It's really quite amazing.

Rush job

  

  
Lately, dinner has been an un-photogenic, ad hoc sort of affair. There have been a lot of nachos. There was a pretty tasty chicken and chick pea pottage, but pottage does not look as good as it tastes. Lots of fried tofu. One time we ate grilled cheese and carrot sticks. It was delicious.

But! I did make a noodle salad the other night which I got a photo of before we ate it.

1 lb tofu
1 T dark soy sauce
1 T fish sauce
dash of sesame oil

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup light soy sauce
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1T sesame oil
1T sesame paste
dash of cayenne

chinese noodles
2 cups broccoli florets
salt

sesame seeds
cilantro
yellow bell pepper slices

Cut the tofu into 1" cubes and press it firmly to squeeze as much water out as possible.  Toss the tofu in a bowl with the next 3 ingredients and let it sit.

Combine the next 6 ingredients. This is the dressing. Mix well.

Boil the noodles in salted water. When they are about 30 seconds from being done, toss the broccoli florets into the pot with them to blanch. When the water comes back to a boil, drain the noodles and broccoli together. Run cold water over them to stop the cooking and remove extra starch from the noodles.

Toss the nooles, broccoli and tofu together with the dressing, then decorate each serving with sesame seeds, pepper slices, and cilantro if you like it. I like it a lot.

"It works perfectly!" he said.

So, what the heck have I been doing all this time? I made a scarf. An epic scarf. 2 months and 55,000 stitches of knitted scarf for my brother's 40th birthday. After I dropped it off, I thought maybe I should have gotten a picture of it, but I was basically sick of looking at it.

He sent me this picture of himself modeling it. Pete's One Scarf rules them All.

What makes it stir-fry, anyway?

  

  
A few things.

1. Temperature. Hot. Like oh wow aggravate my anxiety disorder hot stove hotsie hot.
2. The order things go in the pan. Think about what you're cooking. Does it take a while to be done, or do you just need to show it to the frying pan before you eat it?
3. Keep it simple already!

I have sat around watching my co-workers at the staff cafeteria swilling that revolting pap they call 'stir-fry bar' once too often. A morass of leathery meat bits, celery, onion chunks, mushrooms, carrots, cabbage, baby corn, pea pods, and bean sprouts weltering in a steam tray accompanied by uncle ben's minute rice and four basins of liquid which differ in color and viscosity if not in flavor is NOT STIR FRY. If it was ever stirred, I can't attest to it, and it sure as hell was never fried. I don't give a crap if it isn't authentic, but for chrissakes, that isn't even food.

Take a look at my dinner. Tofu and baby bok choi stir fry. 2 ingredients. That's it. I do distinguish between seasonings and ingredients. Ingredients are what you make the food out of. You make a stir fry because you have one or two good ingredients and you want to know what they taste like together. Ingredients are what you've got that's worth eating a meal of. Seasonings are what you use to spruce things up a bit, that's all. Seasonings are the little whatevers you put with your ingredients that make you go 'Oh, hey, tofu is good. I could really fancy me some stir fried tofu for dinner. Seasonings are not for covering things up with, and ingredients are not made better by throwing a lot of them into a kludge and reaching for the viscous brown/yellow/orange stuff.

Ingredients: half pound each of tofu and baby bok choi
Seasonings: oil,onion, ginger, salt, pepper, sesame oil and soy sauce.

You don't need a wok. I hate those pseudo-woks with flat spots on the bottom anyway, but that's a whole different set of problems.

Use a fairly large, heavy, frying pan. No non-stick pans!  I use cast iron.  Put 2 or 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil in the pan, along with just a dash of sesame oil for flavor. Turn the burner on to medium high and when the oil shimmies in the pan a bit, salt the pan and set about a half pound of tofu cubes in it. Ignore it while you mince a teaspoon of fresh ginger and cut half an onion into very thin slices. Chop up the baby bok choi a bit too.

By that time, your tofu should have developed a nice brown on the bottom. If it hasn't, the burner isn't hot enough. Turn it up a little. When the tofu has browned on one side, flip it over and shove the chunks over to one side of the pan. Add a little more oil if necessary, then put in the onions and ginger. Stir the seasonings around a few times until the ginger looks a bit brown but not burnt.

Add the greens, stir everything up and then sorta poke the greens down into the pan. Stir and poke for about a minute, and add a tablespoon or two of water if the greens are too dry. Add a few shakes of pepper and a splash of soy sauce. It's done when the dark green parts are wilty and the light green parts are just going transparent around the edges.

There's fried rice in the picture. Fried rice is a kind of stir fry, folks, so apply what you just learned.

Ingredients: Stale cooked rice, an egg.
Seasonings: garlic, salt, black bean sauce, oil

Hot up your pan with some oil and salt. Crush in the garlic to brown it for a second, then stir in 2 cups of rice and a tablespoon of bean sauce. Cover the rice for a minute, until it is hot through and developing crusty places, then crack in the egg. Stir until the egg is cooked.

I think I've only made one post about stir-fry before because it just doesn't seem very complicated to me, you know? It's really just pan-grilling a few things, and throwing some marinade stuff in the pan with it like a lazy-ass. Stir fry was what there was to eat in my house when I was a kid on the nights when there wasn't soup. It wasn't exciting by any means, but I do remember thinking that mostly it was pretty good. So then I grow up, and there is the staff cafeteria, and it just irks me to see people eat such nasty stuff, thinking that it has anything at all to do with stir fry.

Ma Po in the Microwave

I admit, I even like the americanized versions of this dish that you get at chinese restaurants. You usually see it as bigish cubes of tofu in an orange colored, garlicky sauce with red pepper flecks in it. There's no secret ingredients here, but I did manage to make it in the microwave. Less cleanup, and slightly less garlic fumes in my house.

You will need a microwavable casserole dish with a good lid.

1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/2 an onion, sliced thin
between 1/2 and 1 teaspoon of hot chili sauce
a generous tablespoon fermented black bean sauce
about a tablespoon of light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1 lb firm tofu
1 teaspoon cornstarch

Cube the tofu and put the chili sauce, bean sauce, soy and sugar on it. Stir it well and set it aside.

Put the onion, garlic, ginger & oil in the casserole and microwave, covered, on high for about 5 or 6 minutes. Periodically stir the onions to keep them from burning. When the onions are translucent and are developing little brown places, add the tofu and stir it up. Microwave until it starts bubbling. Stir from time to time so it heats evenly. When it's bubbly, mix the cornstarch in half a cup of water and add to the tofu. Stir, and continue to cook for a minute or so until the starch thickens and goes transparent.

There is very little that could go wrong with this recipe, but here are a couple things anyway-

1. As with all microwave cooking, times here are highly approximate. A lot depends on the wattage of your appliance, the temperature of your ingredients, dishes, and house, etc etc. Don't worry about time.
2. Really the only thing that you need to be sure of is that the cornstarch is cooked. It has to be brought to a boil or it won't thicken. Don't worry, it happens quite effortlessly.
3. Feel free to improvise. Lots of recipes for this have a green thing in it, usually peppers. Some of them call for ground beef. (Why?) I bet it would be great with broccoli and water chestnuts, or baby bok choi. I usually just cook some greens to go as a side dish, so I don't bother putting them actually in the tofu.
4. If for some reason you do want to make this on the stove you can, of course. Use a heavy pan, brown the onions garlic & ginger in oil first, then add the tofu & seasonings, then the starch & water. Pretty simple.

Dad told me something about this dish. I don't remember if he claimed to have met and dined at the house of the original Ma Po, but he did say that "real, authentic" ma po tofu is a very different thing than this. For one thing, it should be volcanically hot. Pepper hot, that is. For another, tofu in cubes is not the correct format.

Tofu is made a lot like cheese, initially. You soak dried soybeans for a day or two, you grind them into a slurry with water, drain out and discard the solids, then curdle the proteins in the liquid. The curds are pressed together to make the bricks of tofu you get at the store. To make authentic ma po tofu, you should take the loose curds and use those in the dish rather than the pressed blocks. I imagine that it would have a very delicate texture.

Magic Soup 2

  

  
Some of you may remember my first set of instructions for magic soup. It isn't really a recipe as much as it is an assembly outline, but it makes a tasty, attractive looking, light meal very quickly.

2 cups soup stock
1/2 block tofu, cubed
1/2 a dried kaffir lime leaf
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1/4 lemon
a couple slices of ginger

simmer everything together for maybe 10 minutes, tops. Throw out the lemon. Serve topped with:

minced cilantro
green onions
a few sliced sugar peas
a couple little tomatoes
a pinch of toasted garlic chips
sesame oil

a couple things-

1. I used firm tofu. Soft is fine, but it tends to disintegrate with boiling.
2. You can use all sorts of veggies, but since you aren't actually cooking them, stick with delicate varieties. Sugar peas, mung bean sprouts, jicama, red or yellow bell peppers, these all have the same sweet/crunchy combination which is a good contrast to the tart soup and the soft tofu.
3. I used a spoon of broth concentrate for stock. It's totally legit, in my book.
4. You could probably do this vegan. Use veggie stock and swap soy for the fish sauce. If you do though, don't skip the garlic, and probably not the tomatoes. Both those things have high concentrations of amines which will give you a more satisfying flavor in the absence of meat protein.
5. Fresh herbs! 

This soup was brought on by remembering vietnamese hot & sour soup at Dalat. They put pineapple, bean sprouts, shrimp, mushrooms and other stuff in it, which sounded perfectly horrid the first time somebody told me about it. It's delicious though. I suspect that they use white pepper to season their soup, which I don't have, so I skipped the spicy thing this time around. Don't let that stop you though, if you likes the hot, go for whatever strikes your fancy.

Girl Food

Tofu is girl food. If you're not a girl, go 'way, I'm not talkin to you.

Ladies, you all know that I am an omnivore, that I love many foods made of other animals. But it's not exclusive, nor is it a prerequisite for my enjoyment. And I'm not talking about the stuff you decorate the edges of your meal with. For me, tofu is sometimes an object in itself.

Here's the thing though: I think have yet to meet a man who didn't feel that to be fed tofu as a main dish was somehow unmanly, and not altogether fair. Even oriental men. Meat is for men, not, as dad said, "that cheating stuff" (Imagine expressive sneer). And yes, even the vegan men I have talked to. Not one of them ever gave me the impression that giving up meat in favor of actual tofu was something they contemplated- no, they would go to great trouble in order to acquire the most suitably manly, highly processed, meat-esque, soy-derivative pseudo-food. Men will subsist upon plain Ramen with earth balance margarine and Jif and Smuckers sandwiches before they will voluntarily make one of these wraps for themselves. Oh, they will eat one if you make it for them. They might even grudgingly admit that they like it. But then they'll say "...but it would be so much better with cheese, or chicken, or Tofurkey smokey mystery nubbins instead ..." Lordy, yes, then there's the sprouts. The only manly things about this recipe are 1- you eat with your hands, and 2- sriracha. Dudes like the sriracha.

These are chewy, crunchy, salty, spicy, earthy, and full of umami goodness.

Marinated Tofu Wraps

1 block firm tofu, cut into 1/2" slices and drained as much as possible
2 teaspoons nutritional yeast
1/8 teaspoon each garlic powder and onion powder
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
2 T balsamic vinegar, use a rather sweet kind
2 T soy sauce
if you use light soy instead of dark, add a generous pinch of salt
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Lay the tofu in a single layer in a baking pan. Whisk the other ingredients together well, pour over the tofu and refrigerate overnight. The next day, flip the pieces over to get them evenly covered with the sauce and bake them at 325 until the marinade has condensed and is quite thick but not burnt. I recommend letting it cool before eating it, the texture is better. I wrapped mine in homemade tortillas with a generous amount of mixed sprouts, whole grain mustard, avocado and sriracha. You can steam the tortillas for a few minutes to make them softer, if you like.

Fish-sauce Tofu

Okey-Dokey. I've had enough holiday eating. I love some holiday eating, but now I want something less fancy. This is quick, light, and is primarily flavored with fermented ingredients. It's a little stinky; don't try it unless you like thai fish sauce. A lot. This takes about 10 or 15 minutes and makes exactly one serving.

1/3 block firm tofu
1/2 cup water
1 T fish sauce, more or less. It's very salty!
1 tsp minced onion
1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger. Powdered will not do. 
dash of light soy sauce
rice seasoning for garnish, bell peppers too, if you like.

Put the water, fish sauce, onion and tofu in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Braise the tofu, turning every once in a while, until the liquid is about half gone. Then put in the ginger and soy sauce, continue to cook until the liquid is reduced to a tablespoon or two. Serve over rice, decorate with such things as suit your fancy. I like peppers, I would have put on a little cilantro or green onions if I'd had any.

Odds an' Ends

Because I have no car, and it is winter, I am more than usually averse to shlepping myself to and from the grocery store. I hate dragging my ass home with a load of heavy soggy bags at the end of a day. This leaves me with some strange combinatons sometimes. The good ones end up here, the other stuff I pretend never happened.

Delicata Squash with Tofu and Spinach Stuffing
(served with some other stuff to make it interesting, like.)

On the right there is the cous-wa again, that's old hat. The raddiccio is mostly for color, although the bitter crunchyness goes well with the rest of the stuff.

The tofu stuffing came about because I have these enthusiasms for an ingredient, and have to go and get some to see what its like. The peedan was one I actually knew what to do with; those blessed tomatillos were another story... This time it was bacon salt.  Somebody (Dawn) mentioned it and I thought, wow, bacony goodness without having to cook any bacon! Yep, I am that lazy.

Well, I found one thing to do with it: I put it in my do chang. But then what? Attempt to make fake bacon out of tofu, obviously. Not a success, obviously. But I did get a curiously satisfying marinated tofu good for sandwiches. Then I ran out of bread, and besides, I was bored of sandwiches. Some time ago, Cynthia gave me a dinky little squash, and there was pretty much nothing else left in the kitchen when I got home today. This gave me a reason to have the oven on for an extra hour, which is a good thing around the solstice.

1 block super-firm tofu
bacon salt
nutritional yeast
olive oil
some ground toasted flax seeds
bear with me.

Cut the tofu into strips about 1 inch wide and at most 1/2 inch thick. Coat them generously with a mix of the dry ingredients. You can go moderately heavy with the bacon salt, it seems to be mostly composed of garlic powder and paprika. Put it in a tupperware thing and add a slosh of olive oil and shake it around to get the oil distributed. Then leave it in the fridge until you feel guilty about not eating it, which was about 5 days for me. Maybe longer. Then decide that you might as well combine it with that other thing you feel guilty about not eating, and locate your squash.

Mine was a particularly small squash, definitely a one-person size. To fill it, I used:

2 strips marinated tofu
2/3 cups frozen chopped spinach
a toasted heel of bread, torn up very small
salt and pepper

To assemble the squash, cut the squash in half to form 2 little cups, and scoop out the seeds. Put the tofu and spinach in a bowl and microwave it just until it's all hot, then smash up the tofu with a fork. Stir in the bread bits, taste for salt and pepper, and if it is very dry add a spoon of water. Mine had all the leftover olive oil from the bottom of the tofu batch, so it was pretty moist. Cram the stuffing into the squash cups, put them in a pan with a little water in the bottom to keep them from utterly drying out, and bake them for about an hour. The time will vary depending on how big your squash is, and if it's very large, you may want to cover it for the first half of the baking or it will burn on the outside before it gets done through.

Tofu Quickie

I like this method of fixing tofu because it doesn't require frying. Not that I don't like fried things, lord knows I do. It's just that when the weather keeps me from opening all the windows, anything that gets fried in my open floorplan apartment hangs around in the air for days. The kitchen vent fan is just for ambience.

Also, this dish requires exactly 2 cooking implements- one spoon for scooping & stirring (and eating), one covered casserole to cook and store leftovers in, plus a microwave. Awesome.

1 lb firm tofu
1/2 bag frozen chopped spinach
assorted condiments to taste. I usually use a mix of:

black bean sauce (master or comrade brands are my faves, but dragonfly is good too.)
oyster sauce- definitely Dragonfly brand. Read the ingredients.
trader joe's pad thai sauce.
sesame oil
sriracha- just a dab usually, more if I have a cold

and sometimes I use fish sauce too.

Drain the tofu and roughly chunk it up into the casserole. Throw on some good sized scoops of your chosen seasonings. Go easy on the fishsauce if you're using that, it's basically just stinky liquid salt. Top with the spinach, cover and microwave 3 or 4 minutes at a time until the spinach is as done as you want it to be. Poke the ingredients around gently between sessions in the microwave to get the flavors well mixed. Taste as you go along. Tofu is powerfully bland. If it's not sweet enough, add a dab of oyster sauce, if it's not salty enough, add bean sauce or fish sauce. If it's too salty, oh well, you're gonna eat it on rice anyway, it'll be fine.

I wish I had a bottle of sake with this...

Yeah, so, I set the smoke alarm off...

Ever see a smoke alarm in a chinese person's kitchen? Me either. Authentic stir fry is dangerous. Not that this is all that authentic, but I wish I had pictures of the grease flash that caused the smoke alarm thing...

Beet Greens & Tofu in Spicy Oyster Sauce

1 large bunch of beet greens
1 onion
1 block firm tofu
oil for frying
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 T black bean garlic sauce
1/2 tsp crushed chili paste
1/3 c oyster sauce
a pinch or 2 of salt

I had been avoiding buying beets at market for a while because I couldn't think of what to do with the greens. I like them southern style, but that makes them up as kind of a side dish and even a small bunch of beets comes with a large mess of greens. Then they kick around in my fridge until they die. Hence, the chinkabilly stir-fry.

Wash the greens well, separate the stems from the leaves and chop each, keeping them separate.
Chop the onions & add to the pile of stems. Drain & cube the tofu. Big cubes is good. Mix the seasonings in a little bowl.

I guess a wok would be good, but I used my cast iron frying pan. Put a tablespoon or so of oil in the pan and over pretty high heat. The oil should be shimmering and smoking in the pan. Sprinkle a little bit of salt in the pan and put in the stems & onions. Fry uncovered, stirring enough to keep from burning them, for about 3-5 minutes, or until the vegetables have begun to caramelize. Pour them into a dish and reserve. Rinse the pan out, then repeat the process with the leaves, rinse again and put a slightly larger amount of oil in and get it good and hot before putting in the tofu. Wait until the bottoms of the tofu bits have developed a good crust before turning them over, brown on all sides before putting the vegetables back in the pan with the seasonings. Heat everything through, mixing well. Serve with rice. Fried noodles would be good too.

Now, here's the thing: you can use roughly this process with everything, but the 2 key steps are to get the pan hot and keep it that way, and to add a pinch of salt to the pan before the vegetables. Salting the pan draws the water out of the veggies, and the high temperature does 2 things: 1) it caramelizes any starches that come out of the vegetables really fast, so that you have both the fresh veggie taste and a hint of maillard compounds. 2) the heat causes some of the cooking oils to oxidize and polymerize which is what that magic "stir fry" taste is.

Of course, high heat also causes oil to vaporize. And throwing a bunch of wet tofu into a puddle of hot oil causes steam. Which creates a rapidly expanding cloud of tiny oil droplets mixed with the ideal ratio of oxygen packed in little water molecules to make for a very exciting wooHOO! moment when it hits a red-hot burner. As a child this was a regular, but always alarming occurrence at my house. Nowadays I just run around cursing and flapping a towel at the ceiling, I swear I'm gonna pull the battery out of that wretched thing.

Yup, Still Asian

I checked.

You can go to the trouble of making this yourself, or do what I do- go to trader joe's and buy a carton of the organic unsweetened soy milk. That's all it is.

I have many thoughts about this dish. Dad used to make "bean milk" from scratch when I was a kid, and sometimes tofu. I didn't like it. Soybeans have a strong earthy taste, and I only started to enjoy earthy flavors as an adult.

I think that in the late '70s and early '80s, there was no really good source of tofu and soymilk in Michigan, and dad always had a swath of mad scientist in his personality anyway so it suited him to make it himself from time to time. Family legend has it that dad was the guy who taught the first reliable hippy outfit in Ann Arbor how to make decent tofu to sell at the food co-op, but there is no evidence for this that I know of.

The procedure for making soymilk is to take your dry soybeans and soak them overnight to 24 hours in about a double volume of water. The beans puff up a lot, which you'll have noticed if you've ever cooked any other kind of dry bean. Then you put the raw beans in a blender with enough water to cover them in the pitcher and grind them as fine as possible. It takes a long time, is really noisy, and makes a mess. The finer the bean particles get, the better. Once the beans are all ground up, strain the slurry through a cloth bag (dad used an old t-shirt) and reserve the liquid; that's the soymilk. Throw away the mass of gunk left over. I don't know what the ideal proportion of water to bean is, alas. Also, I can't remember if you grind the beans in the soaking water, or throw it away and use fresh. Probably the latter.

You have to cook the soymilk before eating it of course. Bring it to a boil, then turn it down to a simmer and let it get some skins on it from condensation. The skins are a key part of the whole bean milk experience. To serve, put it in large bowls and throw in any of the usual chinese flavored things, according to taste: green onion, bacon bits (not chinese I know, but that's what was in it at my house) cilantro, spicy pickled radish, sesame oil, fresh grated ginger, szechuan pepper-salt, soysauce, hot chili pepper sauce or slices. Good for breakfast.

Supposedly, this should be served with chinese beignets. I never liked them, but I do appreciate their authentic chinesey-ness.

Also, you need to drink green tea with this. I always forget that I like green tea. Don't fool around with any bagged crap though. Get the real stuff. I've been hoarding some excellent green tea for a while, it has a sweet, floral, grassy taste to it. Very zen, makes me feel extra oriental, as if the bean milk wouldn't do it. Here's what real green tea should look like. Sorry, I have no brand names to give out, I have no idea what this is. It came out a mylar bag given to my sister by some of dad's minions before I moved to NYC. Which tells you that it keeps really well.

So, how do you get tofu out of bean milk? You need to curdle it, then strain and press the curds, again with your cloth bag/t-shirt aparatus. The way to curdle it is, you throw in some magnesium sulphate. Yeah, that's what I said. A very dilute solution, of course, but I swear that's what dad used. I told that to a guy I had a crush on in college, and he was repulsed. He said something like 'ohmigod! Thats the the stuff my mom puts on her feet!'

Hey, I'm asian. What do you want?

I'm Asian, Part 2

I remember dad making some stuff like this, also liking an iteration of it while living in Taiwan. It's supposed to be a side dish, I think, but it makes a good snack.

Tofu, whatever style you like most for just eating, cubed

In a small bowl, mix the following, all minced pretty small-

thousand-year-old egg (peedan)
several types of hot pepper, both red and green
green onion, chives are what I had
cilantro
enough soysauce, vinegar, and sesame oil to cover the other ingredients

muddle everything together and pour over the tofu.

also good in addition or as substitutes are: grated ginger, fresh crushed garlic, chili sauce or sriracha, oyster flavored sauce, char siu, finely minced yellow onion, asian style pickles...

you get the idea.