Rhapsody in brown

This is ECB Butternut Squash and Falafel Coronation, everyone's favourite vegetarian jubilee meal. I made it for a vegetarian-stacked family picnic and explained its back story on the day, which guaranteed it being eaten because everyone had to try it after that. It actually received quite positive reviews, though it did draw the revealing comment that it was "not like anything I've ever tasted before".

It was certainly a big step up from the riddle wrapped inside an enigma coated in breadcrumbs that was Peri Peri Breaded Tofu. It's strengths and weaknesses are well summed up by one of the other reviews: "like curried egg but with falafel".



About making it:

1. It's a bit cheeky to list roasted butternut squash as an ingredient outside of a "using leftovers" recipe, though that kind of thing is very much the norm these days. I roasted half a butternut pumpkin, which gave me just over double the recipe amount, and added the lot because it seemed right and I wanted it to go around.

2. The ingredients list chopped onion and garlic, which are then never mentioned again, so I decided to give them the most charitable interpretation and include them in the falafel mix after a quick soften in a frying pan with the spices.

3. The falafels themselves were good, and as with the breaded tofu, the dish's best moment was just before its final assembly, when everyone was still pure and innocent:

(Above shows the 150 g pumpkin quantity specified in the recipe: not enough to balance the falafel IMO)

Then the recipe says to break the falafels in half, which means they are no longer cute and they crumble even more when combined with the pumpkin and mayonnaise.

4. The falafel spice + Keens curry combo is more successful than the Peri-Peri + masala combo, but there's no getting away from the fact that this is another bit of slightly forced match-making between flavours not found together in nature - or in any living culture. That's why it gets the "unlike anything tasted before" response. It pains me to reproach these dishes on these sorts of grounds because arguments from nature or tradition are my least favourite thing in the whole world, but I'll still say it's the "fusion" element that makes it a worse dish than the same thing with, say, paneer or boiled eggs instead of the falafel.

The breaded tofu heralded a first test that was a big ole mess for the English and seriously corroded the morale of their team. If these dishes are predictors (allegories?) of Test results - and why not? why not a vego version of goat entrails? - then we have a better omen here for our guests, but not better than a draw I'd say.

Piri-Piri Dreaded Tofu

It's a long way (and long time) from rhubarb and custard Victoria sponge to commemorate the Royal Wedding to the English Cricket Board's official Piri Piri Breaded Tofu with Tomato Salsa.

It's the dish that launched a thousand snickers. Merv Hughes claimed it would make him dry retch for three days, which is surely an exaggeration, but it has certainly made my eyebrows knit for a good 48 hours or more since I had a go at it on the weekend. I'm fond of tofu, and also fond of items that have been "breaded" (crumbed) and fried, but they don't necessarily go together and the rest of it is shenanigan central.

A lot of it can be laid at the door of the "Piri-Piri" theme. Piri-piri is a kind of chilli and also a Portuguese sauce or marinade based on the chilli that also has things like garlic, onion, lemon juice and bay leaves in it. In the ECB recipe, it's a dry spice mix with a number of surprise ingredients like ground ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. I couldn't work out where these things were coming from until I found this blog recipe for a Piri-Piri Spice Mix inspired by a McDonalds french fries flavouring sold in India. The recipe ingredients, proportions and even the order they are listed in are identical to the ECB recipe, except that the ECB uses fresh garlic and oregano instead of dried, and dark brown sugar instead of caster. This can't be a coincidence. I'm guessing the cardamom and so on is the result of fusing Portuguese chicken seasoning with the local influence of garam masala - see this other blog describing the Maccas (India) Piri Piri spice mix as smelling "like Maggi’s masala".

Okay. Well, not okay really. As Chandler might say, could this derivation be more tortuous? And we haven't even thrown the tofu into the mix yet, conceptually or literally. Or rolled it in the panko. Or topped it with the salsa. There's a lot that seems jarring on the page (cardamom and... oregano, oregano and... tofu), which is what had me scurrying to the internet in the first place, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? I'm not a food purist (that's a lie, I am a food purist), and at the stage shown in the photo below, when I'd made the spice mix (it tasted... ok) and was about to crumb the tofu, it seemed like the whole thing might be just so crazy it could work. I wanted it to work, because despite my desire to sledge the Poms, it was my dinner.

Reader, it didn't. It was not inedible, but it was weird and weird in way that I still find difficult to describe. Weird for all the a priori reasons you'd expect from reading the recipe, with an extra helping of a posteriori weird on top, a sort of lingering je ne sais WTF. The spices were strange to my palate and deeply unflattering to the tofu. Tofu gets a bad enough rap as it is, it doesn't need friends like these. The salsa also clashed. I served the whole thing with - what else? - some red quinoa I found in the cupboard, which was right on ECB theme but no help either. I felt unsatisfied afterwards, but I also had no appetite for anything else, as if my faith in food as a whole had been shaken. A disturbing dish. Don't do it. Not that you were going to.

PS. Note to ECB re your "the quantities must be followed, along with the ingredients listings... If availability is an issue please do not use an alternative or omit from the recipe": My tofu "cutlets" ended up being "fingers" that weighed 166.6666 g per serve (500 g pack of tofu divided by 3) and not 150 g. I also used sunflower oil instead of coconut oil and baby tomatoes instead of beef tomatoes. Is that okay? Or is that the kind of near-enough-is-good enough attitude that destroyed the Empire?