CONFESSION: I hate prepping tofu. I’m a huge tofu fan but extremely picky about density and texture. That’s why, whenever we visit Mitsuwa, our favorite Asian grocer, we load up on their fried tofu. Mitsuwa has large slabs of already fried extra firm tofu with vegetables embedded in it that take all the work out of prep. It’s one of my favorite shortcuts! We’ve used some of this before (the tofu cutlets, as in my pad thai), but the ones we bought on our last trip were large, meaty slabs that looked perfect for building a meal around.

I diced the tofu into 1/2-inch cubes, which went a lot further than I anticipated. Then I added in a can of seitan and we were in business.

What’s seitan? It’s wheat gluten, which doesn’t make much sense to me. I fell in love with it at Flat Top Grill’s Mongolian BBQ, and now I use it to add great texture and sweetness to my Asian cooking.

For this dish, I used a prepared Mo Po Tofu Sauce form the Asian grocer, some Hoisin sauce to give the sauce some body and tame the flavor, some onions and multicolored sweet peppers. I served it all over brown Asian rice. The texture of the tofu was simply perfect for this, and with the seitan too it was easy to forget we were eating vegetarian.