Choosing Bell Peppers for Sweet & Sour Tofu

"So while the sauce is thickening up, which really only takes a few minutes, we're going to cut our green bell pepper for the sweet and sour tofu. Make sure your cutting board is stabilized, either by using a piece of non-stick material or a wet towel. Another great trick I learned is if you only have one cutting board and you're cutting things on it like garlic and onion, which are very pungent and actually kind of stain the material, put a little x or something so you know one side is for the garlic and onions and the other side is maybe if you're chopping nuts or things you don't want to have that flavor. Once your cutting board is stabilized and you have a red bell pepper, you always want to make what's called a 'stabilizing cut' on anything round, because you don't want to cut something that's moving and cut yourself. So you carefully hold on. I'm just going to cut the top off, and now it's stable. It's not round anymore, it doesn't move the way that a round thing would move. I'm going to take the little stem out. Save every bit. A green bell pepper's actually an unripe pepper, red one's are ripe. I'm just going to cut it so that I can get rid of the seeds and the membrane using as much of the pepper as possible. So now I have several pieces and I am going to cut it into little cubes. When I see a little bit of membrane - there's nothing wrong with eating it, it's just I want to have nice, even cubes. I like when what I am making is uniform as possible. You throw out the seed packet, and then I'm just going to cut it into cubes. Sort of like about this big. Of course they're not going to be exactly the same size, but I don't want to have little itty-bitty pieces and huge pieces at the same time, so I try to make them as uniform as I can. Again, if you absolutely don't like bell peppers, don't use it. It'd still be delicious. You could probably use a red pepper, too. Just in a traditional sweet and sour, green bell pepper is what's used."