For Cafe 8′s ninth anniversary, they produced a nine-piece tapas plate. Everything on the plate was superb, but one item was so tasty I wrote to the restaurant and asked for the recipe. It turns out it was available all along in their recipe book, which you can buy here.

On the tapas plate, this “cheese” was served on fried lotus root crisps, but we’ve plonked it on some boiled veggies. It went fantastically with the broccoli, so maybe a broccoli and tofu cheese salad would be a good idea.

It’s not really a replacement for cheese, but it’s incredibly more-ish and a nice, healthy alternative to a salad dressing.

Firm tofu: 1 block
Olive oil: 4 tablespoons
Dried basil: 2 teaspoons
Lemon juice: 2 tablespoons
Minced garlic: 1 teaspoon
Salt and pepper to taste

1. The proper recipe calls for you to leave the tofu out overnight to drain it of water. We can’t plan that far ahead, so we just squeezed the water out with a weight and it seemed to work fine.

2. Bung everything in a bowl and mix it with a spoon or fork. It tastes best if you mix it into more of a cream than a cottage cheese.

3. Add salt and pepper as you please.

4. Serve, eat, then go to Cafe 8 to see how it’s supposed to taste.