Making homemade croutons is easy (or, at least, easier than you might think.) It takes about 10 minutes, and they taste so much better than anything you’re going to buy out of a box (you’re not going to get all the interesting flavors that come out of a box, but with a little experimenting, you can duplicate those with some judicious spicing. Besides, do we really want to know how they make that orange powder “cheese” that we’re all so fond of?) Method the first, which I’d been using for awhile, is to bake them (I usually use the toaster oven). However, somewhere on the blogsphere (I wish I’d remembered where), I’d read about someone frying their croutons in a pan. At first I thought it was going to be too much trouble, but I gave it a try last week.

It turns out to be remarkably like making fried tofu, only with less oil, and easier, because it takes less tending. Slice up your stale and old bread or buns or whatever. Pour just a touch of olive oil into a small to medium skillet, depending on how many croutons you’re making, and tilt the pan to coat it with the oil (I’m pretty sure I used less oil this way then when I bake the croutons, since I tend to douse them with olive oil when I do that.) Toss the bread cubes into the pan, spice to taste (lately, I’ve been sticking to pepper, salt, and garlic powder.) Let them sit for a couple of minutes; they will start to toast. Once they’ve toasted to your desired color on one side, stir them around and let them cook some more. I think mine cooked for about 10 minutes, and I stirred them 3 or 4 times, which meant that I could do dishes or work on other things for dinner.

In my opinion, these turned out better than the oven baked ones; they were crispier, which is one of the marks of a good crouton for me. They did require a little more tending than oven baked ones (though not much) so if you were making a meal that took a lot of attention, or needed all the stove burners, the oven would be the way to go. But, for me, given the choice, I’ll be sticking to making them on top of the stove.

This isn’t exactly a post about dinner on Monday night - we’ve have various combinations of tofu, salad, and twice baked potatoes before - but instead a post about tofu.

The first time we did tofu in barbeque sauce, I sliced up the tofu into squares, put it into a baking dish, dumped the sauce all over it, and baked it for 20 minutes or so. The results were decent - mostly because of the great quantities of sauce - but less than thrilling. The tofu was pale and bland - everything the anti-tofu camp normally charges it with. (Something I should state upfront: I am fervently in favor of tofu. I love tofu.) So, Monday night I fried the tofu and we dipped it into the sauce, and it was much, much better than the previous effort.

Frying tofu turns out to be much easier than I’d thought. I’d tried before, and all I’d gotten was something that was still pale and still bland, and just a little more oily. That was because I was trying to stir-fry the tofu, pushing it around in the oil in the pan, and that didn’t work. If you want nice brown crispy tofu, like you would get in a restaurant, it has to sit in the oil. I added about 2 tablespoons of oil to a pan on medium, let it heat for a couple of minutes, then added the tofu. (I also pressed the water out of the tofu - putting it into an 8×8 baking dish, putting a plate over it, and putting a couple of cans of tomato sauce on top of that - and that helped quite a bit too.) I let the tofu sit in the oil until it started browning and puffing up on one side (3 or 4 minutes) then flipped the squares onto another side, and repeated the process. In the end, after about 15 minutes, we had tofu that was brown, crispy, and puffy on the outside, and creamy on the inside, just like restaurant tofu. (This process would have gone much faster if we had deep-fried the tofu, but I wasn’t interested in using that much oil.) This also didn’t add substantially to the calorie load of the meal - at 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, we each got about 60 extra calories in our meals, which was acceptable. All in all, it was extremely tasty, and not that hard to do.