Day 8 - Tempura Dinner

Today I was planning on making us black beans and rice. Well, about halfway through the workday I realized that 1. i forgot to buy black beans, and 2. they need to be soaked overnight. ARRGH! But then I remembered that I still had a coupon for h-mart. 1lb string beans for $.50. I'd pick up the black beans then too. There was rice at home too, so we'd still have rice and beans for dinner, but they'd be green instead of black. So I started looking around online for things I could do with the green beans when I found a recipe for tempura green beans. That would be perfect! We'll just have a little light Japanese dinner. Of course, the batter in the first recipe called for light beer. Well, we just can't afford to buy a beer right now. Then I found one that called for corn starch instead of beer. Well, I have plenty of corn starch as a staple at home, I figured that would work. The recipe was for tempura tofu and green beans, so I decided to check out the price of tofu at the store, and if I thought we could afford it, I'd get some.

I had forgotten how cheap tofu is. There's a brand at H-Mart that's only $0.99/lb. So I bought it with the plan of prepping a quarter of it for the tempura, and saving the rest for when the blackbeans and rice ran out. That's exactly what we did. The whole thing took almost no time in prep besides mixing the batter and cutting the tips off of the beans, and it was pretty good too!

The Batter - I halved the below, and only ended up using a third of it. I just put it in a container in the fridge when I was done.
1.5 cups flour
.5 cup corn starch
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp salt
.25 tsp ground black pepper
1.75 cups ice water

Sauce - There was a lime/soy sauce recipe that I ended modifying a little bit (mainly because it was too tart!)
6 tbl soy sauce
.25 cup lime juice
1 clove garlic, through press
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1 tbl honey (or two packets from starbucks ;)

Nutrition - really kinda suprised me. Maybe it's because the tempura is fried that this meal had such a high calorie count, but it all ended up pretty good:
For 1 serving rice, 2 tbl sauce, 1 tbl sesame seeds, 15 tempura green beans, and 2 slices tempura tofu slices:
Calories: 1064.19
Protien: 28
Fat: 16.76
Carbs: 201.23
Fiber: 19.05
Sodium: 2075.59