My Tofu Experiment

Recently, while eating at a buffet, I had the most delicious tofu ever. And every time I've been back there, I've had this amazing tofu and it's absolutely fabulous. So I decided to try to figure out what they did and recreate it, and this is what I've come up with so far:

1 block extra-firm tofu, rinsed and drained
1 Tbsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp tamari
4 Tbsp teriaki sauce

Cut tofu into 12 logs. Put them in an airtight container with the remaining ingredients and marinate for a day or two or three or four.

Heat a skillet. Dump the tofu and marinate together into the pan and fry. Move the tofu around over and over again to prevent sticking and make sure the sauce is coating the tofu well.

Serve.

This was very popular with the kids. Even family members who 'hate' tofu gobbled it up.


This, however is not how the buffet tofu tasted, even though it was good. I am going to keep on experimenting.

My Cooking Philosophies

First of all, almost everything tastes better with garlic. And when you add fresh garlic to something my philosophy with that is: the more the better. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dish where I said, ‘oh this has too much garlic.’ I have eaten things where someone else eating the same dish has said, ‘this has a lot of garlic,’ and I barely noticed it. Bring it on, I say, when it comes to garlic. Of course there are certain things that you should never add garlic to, like desserts and sweet things, or anything that isn't cooked. (I am talking about cooked garlic here.) But when cooking things for a meal I ask myself: could this use some garlic, even if it’s not always used here? Very often the answer can be yes.

            Second, when it comes to salt, less is more. It is very easy to over-salt something and once it’s in the food you can’t get it out. It’s best to add a little at a time, but not too much. There are those people who say that salt makes things taste better, but I say not true. Salt in moderation can enhance flavor, but it can also make something taste like, well, salt. I don’t want to have my food taste like salt. I want my food to taste like what it is, not anything else. Yes, a little salt can make some things taste worlds better, like potatoes for instance. I think that potatoes are the one food that begs for salt. I can’t eat a potato these days without it. But even then it should taste like a potato, not like salt. But overall, a little salt is fine, but that’s it. 

            Third, when it comes to children, there are a lot of tricks that can be used to get them to eat vegetables. (This works well on adults, too, if you have any of those around who don’t like to eat healthy things.) Usually you can just add the vegetables to foods that they already like. For example, my children at one point claimed a great hatred, not just distaste but intense hatred for peas. They announced that they would never eat a pea, not in a million years, yuck, yuck, yuck, etc. For quite a while I didn’t ever feed them any, but one day I put some in with their macaroni and cheese, one of their favorite dishes. They gobbled it up. And never said a word of complaint about it. They finished every last bite of it, too. a couple of weeks later they announced again their great intense hatred for peas when I told them they had eaten some recently and didn’t seem to mind it at the time. Their eyes became wide and their chins dropped. They looked almost pale. No, no, no, they insisted, we would never eat peas, yuck, yuck, yuck.  You must be making a mistake Mommy because we don’t eat them. I then told them about the macaroni and cheese. What did you think those little round green things were anyway? I asked them. They thought for a few seconds. Then the light bulbs went off. You mean to say we ate them?! I became convinced that they had not known what peas even were but had decided to hate them anyway before this incident. But after that they ate peas with no problems. 

            Another trick is to take vegetables and grind them up and mix them in with a sauce. This works well with spaghetti sauce or any pasta sauce. I found a recipe recently for a baked macaroni and cheese (still a favorite around here). For the sauce, you boil some carrots and cauliflower and then grind them up in a food processor with a little cheese – the really good kind – and that makes the cheese sauce that you mix with the pasta. It looks and tastes like cheese sauce, but better because you’re using good quality cheese. And you can’t tell that the veggies are in there. Brilliant.

          Another kid trick: sugar. Kids are so used to highly processed, chemically laden foods that they expect that pow of flavor with every bite of whatever they eat, since that’s their experience with the highly processed foods. I say if you want to eat more naturally, to take them away from that experience and bring them into the experience of tasting real food, try slipping some sugar into some dishes. They’ll never know. But they’ll like the taste of whatever it is all the more. One example of this is pasta sauce. I put in a tablespoon or so of sugar into the sauce to make it a bit sweeter. They think my sauce is great – not because it’s anything special (in my humble opinion) but because of the sugar. Try it sometime. You can always wean them off of it slowly, if you want to, but that only works if you don’t get used to it yourself.