Fried Tofu Stir Fry

It's not like we don't eat, but I realize it's been a good while since I've posted a recipe.  When something awesome strikes, I'll write it up for you, but we've been eating stuff you'll find in past posts, mostly.

This is a recent stir fry with an illicit fall red pepper.  It was awesome, but not super-different.  I usually just stir-fry the tofu, but this time after I drained it, marinated it (mirin, soy, fish sauce, sriracha, onion, garlic, toasted sesame oil, rice vinegar) and drained it again, I tossed it in corn starch and shallow fried it (like the banh mi recipe).  I stir fried some chopped up veg - broccoli, onion, carrot and the aforementioned pepper - and added some of the marinade.  That's really it.  Dinner. 

I took the head off a chicken

No pictures, but this is not a post for the super-squeamish.  Just a warning.

Like everyone in the mid-90s, I was a vegetarian teenager, which meant that I ate a lot of grilled cheese and zero beans or nuts.  I didn't eat tofu and had never heard of seitan or tempeh or any other vegan protein.  I was also once so anemic that I had to routinely drink the water spinach was boiled in for the iron (not recommended).  So when vegetarianism wasn't working for me, I went back to meat.  Sort of.

I'm the kind of meat eater who isn't looking to expand my horizons.  I have a friend who loves rabbit and duck, but the cuteness factor gets to me (my mom grew up with a pet duck).  I've never been able to eat anything on a bone, and this means Sous Chef Brian has used a fork to take meat off a chicken wing for me.  

So I don't eat a ton of meat, in overall quantity or in range. 

I'm also pretty upset about factory farming, so I try to buy meat from local farmers and feel like I have a sense of where it came from.  This is easy, with beef, we have great farms we can buy it from.  With chicken, the real limit is that at the farm stands and similar locales, most of the time you're getting a whole chicken.

So in reality, while I say I "make food out of food," what I actually do is make food out of vegetables.  I don't take meat from a non-food state and bring it to the table.  The meat I'm working with has generally been all fooded up before I see it. 

Potato Cauliflower Soup

I've been traveling for work, which means I have once again taken many pictures of hotel carpeting.  I don't do a ton of traveling but this past month or so has been exhausting.  I spent more time elsewhere than I did here.   So I've seen an array of conference center rugs. 

Coffee Rings

It also means I haven't been cooking, because you know, I've been elsewhere, and that I came home and had no idea what was in the fridge or freezer.  So I had to do a serious overhaul/cleanout/accounting for what's what like I did a while back.

Thanksgiving Centerpiece

The magical part of doing that was finding soup in my freezer.  Chicken soup and butternut squash soup and potato cauliflower soup.  Finding soup in the freezer isn't like finding frozen tofu or leftover pasta sauce.  With soup, you're already there.  It's dinner.

Piercing Array

Before I left, I had made up a lot of potato cauliflower soup.  I don't find a lot of use for potatoes, and potato soup has a guilt-laden heaviness to it that stems from the clear association between potatoes and saddlebags--an association often forgiven in the face of french fries.

Still, somehow soup sounds like I'm pretending.  "Oh, it's healthy, it's soup."  "No, it's potatoes." But when I found myself with these potatoes, I also found myself with a head of cauliflower.  And if there's one thing cauliflower does well*, it's pretending to be a potato.

Curried Acorn Squash Soup

Oh, right, dinner.  I've been in that space for too long where I forget what that task I'm supposed to accomplish around 7pm is.  Dinner. 

This is dinner.  It took about 15 minutes of actual-paying-attention-time and it was ridiculous good.  Like, tell your friends and family good. 

I had this little acorn squash - and I don't have prep photos because I didn't think it was going to turn into anything special.  This little acorn squash came home with me on CSA day a couple of weeks ago, and my friend Kim said, "What are you going to do with it?  It's so small!" and I shrugged and said, "Soup? Just two servings but still, soup." So look at my math and imagine multiplying it to get the number of bowls of soup you want to get.  

The Egg Test

I'm not a perfect locavore in any way.  I try to buy local, in-season produce, but then sometimes I find myself with a pineapple, or a banana, or a mid-winter red pepper.  But I try pretty hard. In the warmer part of the year, I get the majority of my food from a CSA and a farm market, and in the cooler part of the year, I rely on a buying club and can get almost everything I need from local folks.  Don't look too hard in my fridge at the pickles or the worcestershire. 

There are huge advantages to eating this way.  You can get to know the producers.  You understand what you're eating. You help the local economy.  Your food is fresher.  You get more variety, year round.  

One of the tiny drawbacks, however, faces me every time I go to use an egg.  I get my eggs from my CSA right now, and when that's over I'll get them from another fairly local farm.  That means that my eggs aren't always sold in new cartons that are clearly labeled with the date.  So sometimes, eggs are a gamble.  Did we get those eggs two weeks ago, or was it the week before that?  Which of the two cartons in the fridge is newer?