Readers of this site, and my Twitter friends, know that I like food and cooking….but don’t call me a Foodie. Much of what I cook tends to be seasonal, and I find myself preparing Southeast Asian dishes in the fall and winter, and Mexican meals in the summer, but I’ll swap over from time to time. In the summertime, when we have an abundance of cherry tomatoes from garden, we love preparing these TLTs: Tempeh, Lettuce, Tomato Sandwiches. Now, these flavorful beauties aren’t Asian, but the tempeh is.

Tempeh by Sakurai Midori (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Tempeh (or often tempe) is a traditional Indonesian food made by culturing and fermenting soybeans into a firm cake. It is much, much denser than tofu, and has an earthy, nutty flavor. Because it is nutrient dense, and a good source of protein, it has been adopted by vegetarians in the western world and used as a…