Soya chunks with sweet red pepper and pine nuts

Soya protein again. I'm actually starting to enjoy it. I was rather negative about it when I wrote the recipe for stir fried soya with radishes but I've discovered that there's soya protein and soya protein and the success of the recipes will depend very much on the sort you use. Some are definitely better than others.

Even though I'm more positive about it these days, I wouldn't eat soya protein every day. It's still not that good. I do keep a bag in the cupboard for emergencies - it keeps for ever. Archaeologists recently found some in a three-thousand year old Chinese tomb and when they soaked it in boiling water, they found it was still fresh and perfectly edible. That's not actually true. I just made it up. Soya protein is never perfectly edible.

Depending on where you live, pine nuts can be very expensive and there are better things you can do with them than cook them with soya chunks. You might want to think about substituting some other kind of nuts or even just trying the recipe without nuts. They're not crucial.

Ingredients

70g of dried soya chunks
1 large potato
3 sweet red peppers
1 onion
1 or 2 tablespoons of pine nuts
4 tablespoons of soy sauce
1 and a half teaspoons of flour
1 and a half mugs of water
Half a teaspoon of coriander seeds
A pinch of aniseeds
A few black peppercorns
Vegetable oil

Soak the soya chunks in boiling water for fifteen minutes then rinse them. Chop the onion and fry it until it starts to brown. Stir in the pounded spices, fry for a few seconds then add the drained soya. After another 3 or 4 minutes of stir frying, add the chopped potatoes and peppers and continue frying until the potatoes and peppers are hot. Add the flour and pine nuts and stir until the flour is cooked - about 1 minute should do it. Add the water and soy sauce and simmer until the potatoes are soft.

This dish is good served with plain boiled rice.

more soya recipes
more pepper recipes
more potato recipes
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