Читать книгу The Tofu Cookbook: Over 150 quick and easy recipes - Leah Leneman - Страница 7

The addition of the word ‘style’ to every type of cuisine featured in this book is quite deliberate, and I make no pretence that the recipes are necessarily authentic. They were adapted by me using ingredients which were obtainable and which I liked.

All the recipes in this book are intended to serve four people for lunch or dinner (with perhaps a sweet to follow). However, this can only be a general guideline as appetites vary so much, and if you serve soup or side dishes then the recipes might feed more.

Many cookery books state that you must not mix Imperial and metric measurements since they are not exactly the same and could unbalance a recipe. However, the recipes in this book are sufficiently robust to allow you to be flexible and mix Imperial, metric and American measurements as you please.

As the recipes show, I tend to use canned beans rather than cooking them myself. Obviously using dried beans is very much cheaper, and canned beans have to be rinsed very thoroughly to get rid of the excess salt (and often sugar as well), but since I work full time and am busy at weekends as well, I find the convenience of using canned beans outweighs the other factors. If you prefer to use dried beans, as a rough guide 4–5 oz (115–140g) dried beans is equivalent to a 14–16 oz (400g) tin of beans.

Finally, a word about one ingredient likely to be unfamiliar to American readers and another unfamiliar to many British readers: yeast extract and nutritional yeast. Yeast extract is a thick, salty paste with a vaguely ‘meaty’ flavour; in the USA it is most likely to be found in health-food stores under its Australian brand name of Vegemite. Nutritional yeast comes in powder or flake form and has a vaguely ‘cheesy’ taste. Americans could order it from The Good-Tasting Food Co., PO Box 188, Summertown, TN 38483. Britons will find it in health-food stores as Marigold Engevita nutritional yeast flakes.