Good morning! Today we have for you:
Tofu musubi? Yes, please.
I don’t have a ton of dedicated kitchen tools and gadgets; like a lot of home cooks, I find that between my knives and my box grater I can get most prep tasks done. There are two notable exceptions, though: my cherry pitter, which also does a bang-up job on olives, and my Spam musubi mold. I actually have two Spam musubi molds: the one my mom gifted me and the one I bought in a panic when I thought I lost that first one. That’s how much I love Spam musubi, a Hawaiian staple and a standby of so many of my family’s potlucks and parties. A little twin mattress of soft white rice for a teriyaki-glazed plank of salty Spam, wrapped up in the shiny snap of nori. Perfection. The good news is that you don’t need a musubi mold to make Kristina Felix’s smart new tofu musubi — you can make one out of the plastic carton the extra-firm tofu comes in! (Here’s a nifty video that shows you exactly how to do it.) Once that’s set up and your rice is cookin’, you make a teriyaki-ish glaze for your tofu slices, which you’ll sear to a nice golden brown before coating them in your sauce. Kristina adds (optional) pineapple slices for dipping in the extra sauce or tucking into your musubi; my family always layered cucumber slices between the rice and the protein. By the way, these musubi are great to make with kids — spoken as a former kid who really enjoyed making them. (I still do.) Featured Recipe Tofu MusubiMore (not-hard) kitchen arts and craftsChicken salad slaw with peanuts and nori: Crumbling nori snack sheets with your hands has to be one of the most satisfying things to do in the kitchen, and that’s exactly how you finish off this quick, crunchy salad from Ali Slagle. And, like so many Ali recipes, it’s very flexible: Trade the chicken for shelled edamame, baked tofu or cooked whole grains. Eggplant involtini with fresh tomato sauce: This Hetty Lui McKinnon recipe is a great use for late summer eggplants, yes, but also any tomatoes that are starting to slouch. The latter get grated to form a bright, garlicky tomato sauce for those browned eggplant slices rolled around spoonfuls of lemon-enhanced ricotta. A lovely make-ahead recipe for Sunday supper. Warm cherry skillet cake: Remember that cherry pitter? It’ll get some good play time for this new Kayla Hoang skillet cake, which can also be made in a nine-inch round cake pan or baking dish. You can also use frozen cherries, which you’ll want to thaw first (the tip says to discard any liquid from thawing, but I’d probably add it to my seltzer). Either way, maybe don’t wear a white shirt when preparing this cake. For a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started.
And before you goSpeaking of little ones in the kitchen: Here are the easy yogurt muffins that the professional chef Clare de Boer likes to make with her kids, emphasis on easy. “Short attention spans and the need for instant gratification are not usually to be catered to,” she writes, “but Sunday is different. We don’t want to wait for butter to soften, and I’d rather not melt it. So as soon as the kids start singing, ‘Three little muffins in the bakery shop, you know the kind with the honey and the nuts on the top,’ we whip out the food processor and go: Oven on. Dates and butter, straight from the fridge, in. Whizz, whizz, whizz.”
Thanks for reading!
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