Cookstory: January 3, 2013

More notes on the continuing development of this project at the end of this entry.



After that busy first day, I didn't have to cook at all yesterday. Special shout-out to the ZuBean for her suggestion of pizza for dinner. God bless Mommy, and Daddy, and Lou Malnati.


Evening

Sweet Ginger Tofu with Soba Noodles.
Piper commented: "You must really like this tofu recipe, because you make it a lot."

"Actually," I said, "I'm not a particular fan of this. But your mom likes it. So yeah, I do make it a lot."

That response got a scrunchy-face from Laura. I thought she knew that I don't dig this dish, which came from a Peter Berley vegetarian cookbook that was one of my first purchases when we started a decade-long vegetarian period. Laura really loves it, and so this is definitely one of those go-to, "happy wife = happy life" weeknight recipes.

It's simple enough: the tofu bakes for 45 minutes in a bath of tamari, rice vinegar, mirin, honey, toasted sesame oil, fresh grated ginger, and garlic. A healthy slab is served over soba noodles, with some added sauce.

Tonight's version featured a loud, unmitigated disaster, which thankfully was unrelated to the food. I remove excess moisture from the tofu by cutting it into four slabs, wrapping the pieces in a clean dishtowel, placing a cookie sheet on top of the bundle and placing heavy weights on the cookie sheet. My weight of choice for years has been two filled Brita pitchers next to our sink. I had difficulty balancing the pitchers on the cookie sheet tonight, so I cheated them a bit toward the wall on the countertop, in case they slipped off. Shortly after I turned my back, there was a terrific crash that almost sent me through the ceiling. The pitchers had fallen to our tile floor, depositing at least a gallon-and-a-half of water across the surface. One pitcher was shattered. The other, as I found out later, had enough of a crack across the bottom that it too had to be thrown out. An expensive mistake. Piper assisted with the mop-up, and I'm ordering a new Brita from Amazon to the tune of $30+. (We'll go with just one pitcher now; two was an unnecessary luxury.)

Other than that, the meal went according to script. As you can see from the ingredients in the "marinade" (nothing truly marinates before cooking commences), it's a very savory dish. Or, to be more accurate, seriously umami. For all the importance umami plays in cuisine, this is just too much of a good thing, which for my palate is a bad thing. (Sudden thought: what if I squeezed a lemon wedge over the finished dish for a little springlike brightness in January? Good idea or bad idea?) By all measures, this is a winter recipe: everything about it feels heavy, and I desperately need something sweet to balance it afterwards. (Tonight's sweetness courtesy of leftover cranberry cream scones.)

I have found one thing to improve the dish: I changed brand of soba noodles. The Eden Organic brand that Whole Foods sells are 40% buckwheat, and that wheat taste just adds to the heaviness of the dish. So I make a special trip to Evanston's Sea Ranch, where they have a small but "efficient" Japanese grocery section that sells the Hakubaku brand of soba. I don't know why, but they are SO much better, and really take this dish up a notch and make it more palatable for the non-Lauras in the household.


Common Dinner Salad.
I'm really struggling with salads these days. That's a discussion for another day.


Chicken Nuggets.
Whenever I cook something that I know the girls will detest, I turn to either chicken nuggets or beef hot dogs for them. This tofu recipe definitely falls into that category of "too much" for kids. One of the important things I needed to remember when I became a parent was how much more intense everything tasted when I was a kid. Seasoning that may be okay for grown-ups I'm serving will likely be too intense for the children. So while I usually insist that the kids try the food we're having, I also don't want them to go hungry. Color me soft.

The chicken nuggets I bake are uncooked and frozen -- Bell & Evans brand, purchased at Whole Foods. The breading is light; no bizarre ingredients. So while they fall into the "parts is parts" variety of processed food, they are less, uh, manipulated than other similar products one might find. And the girls love them.



Beaucoup thanks to my friends who read the first entry in this project, gave me encouragement, and some constructive criticism. Based on that feedback, I'm going to walk back one statement I made in the first entry: that I'm adamantly anti-food-photography. My resistance to pics grows out of my process and my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to photography. (Read: The food-related photos I generally see on the Internet seem better than anything I could pull off myself.) But I'm going to give it the old college try, with the understanding that a) I may bail on this at any time, and b) every photo is going to look like it was shot on the same countertop with the same plateware, so it's probably all going to look bland anyway.

Also, while I'm not necessarily going to write out the recipes here in the blog, I will link to some recipes when there are Internet versions available.