Lucky dip - on tofu and oyster sauce

Tofu is bascially a blank canvas, a vehicle for other ingredients, so you can throw all sorts of bold flavours at it" Meera Sodha - The Guardian

I've been a bit disappointed with my lucky dips of late and this is no exception. Lovely book - Step by Step Cookery by Madhur Jaffrey - a favourite cook, but when I closed my eyes and opened it at a random page I got Bean curd with oyster sauce. Not my thing at all - neither the bean curd - more commonly known as tofu here, nor oyster sauce either. I will admit though that it looks pretty tempting, but that might just be down to excellent food stylists. Or maybe I should overcome my prejudices and try it. Maybe it's really tasty.

For we do have prejudices don't we? I vaguely remember trying soya beans or maybe even soya milk perhaps, although that is less likely, and really not liking them. Hence my aversion to all things soy - except soy sauce - which I like a lot. Traditionally it's also a staple of both Chinese and Japanese food, neither of which are my favourite cuisines. Japanese always looks exquisite, but to me is somewhat bland. Chinese food can be good - when I was young I ate quite a lot of cheap Chinese food - chop suey and lemon chicken and so on, but these days no. Though I do admit to trying the odd stir fry now and then. I even bought a book by Charmaine Solomon on Chinese cooking once, but have never really got into it. So yes I am prejudiced.

As to the oyster sauce - well I just can't come at oysters. The very idea of eating something that's alive is repulsive to me. And yes I know that not all oyster dishes are alive, and oyster sauce definitely isn't but it's the association. I gather oyster sauce was discovered by accident back in the late nineteenth century when a guy who had a stall selling tea and cooked oysters, forgot to watch his oysters and they overcooked to a brown syrupy goo - which by all accounts was delicious. And oyster sauce was born. He went on to make a fortune out of it. I can take a bit of fish sauce, and I guess that is equally revolting, but somehow I just can't face oyster sauce, though I think I have a bottle in my pantry. Probably long past its use by date.

My other prejudice is via the vegetarian vegan thing. Vegetarian - well Ok - it's a good meat substitute - apparently high in protein and minerals such as iron and magnesium - but vegan is a bit extreme for me. Well they get very messianic about it don't they?

I'm not at all sure I have ever tasted tofu, though I may have. I gather the taste is fairly bland - which is Ok - suppose pasta and rice and even potatoes are too - and it can be made to look really tempting as in Maggie Beer's Silken tofu with umeboshi dressing

It's a bit like burrata in that sense isn't it? Very white so all sorts of things look good with it. Silken tofu is the softest kind but you can apparently get quite hard tofu too. It is made from soy milk which is sort of curdled with a special kind of salt, and then the curds are dried - sort of like basic cheese really. But blander.

There are thousands and thousands of recipes out there, but interestingly, Delia does not have any at all. A good selection of the kind of things you can do with it can be found in the Guardian's 10 best tofu recipes.

Maybe I should try it some time. I might find it's something I just can't do without.