Lemongrass tofu

This lemongrass tofu dish is an unfortunate example of a dish that looked (and photographed) much better than it tasted, although all the blame lies at my own feet given my various wanderings from the original recipe. It certainly has all the makings of what should have been a tasty dish--lemongrass, galangal, tofu, coconut milk, jalapeno, and cilantro.

I'd never cooked with galangal before, and with lemongrass only once before, and I've eaten dishes containing these things but not enough of them to know what exactly each one tastes like, so they're a bit foreign as ingredients to me. Some snippets of commentary I've read about galangal have likened it to ginger (though another book I referenced indicated that there is no substitute for galangal and that using ginger instead is totally lame), so for the tofu dish I sliced the galangal as if I were using ginger. Galangal does look like a cousin of ginger, only with a more woodeny texture, if that makes sense, so that helped strengthen my resolve to pretend it was ginger.

While it was cooking, the dish looked very white--white tofu, white coconut milk--and I decided to toss in a hint of sriracha for color. Since it was a vegetarian recipe and so didn't contain fish sauce, and I love fish sauce and I know from past experience that thai green curry is delicious with both coconut milk and fish sauce, I decided to throw in some fish sauce. With the sriracha and the jalapenos--I left the seeds in for more spice, since jalapenos are usually pretty mild (sidebar: have you ever noticed that jalapenos are maddeningly inconsistent in their level of spiciness from pepper to pepper?)--the dish was tasting quite a bit spicier than I had intended. With every taste, it seemed to get hotter and hotter. I then decided to add some extra sugar because I thought it could use a touch more sweetness than the sweetness of the amount of sugar called for in the recipe, and I thought it might help tame the spice. When I tasted it after adding the bit of extra sugar, I couldn't tell the difference...so I added in a little bit more.

For some reason, the final product was slightly bitter. Did I use too much galangal? Lemongrass? I'm really not sure. In addition, it was too spicy (and if I'm saying that, it's probably a "yikes" type situation), too cilantro-y, and strangely sweet. So I think the lessons here are clear: unlike bacon, sriracha and fish sauce do NOT make everything better, there obviously can be too much of a good thing, and extreme caution must be taken when adding sugar to a savory dish. Sigh.