Menu Mondays: Stockpiled Tofu

You asked us how we cooked tofu (well, one of you did, anyway) and we're going to deliver because it gives us a chance to talk about the most important tool in a veggie friendly kitchen's arsenal: stockpiling the building blocks of easy veggie-based meals. 

We alluded to this last week in the Harvest Quinoa recipe when we talked about having diced onions in your fridge ready to be grabbed and tossed into the skillet. It's not that we're that organized--we're just that lazy. Mrs. Married With Veggies has a funky work schedule that regularly plants the dinner hour between 9 and 10 p.m., and nothing's a bigger drag than coming home and getting your choppy choppy on. Except maybe coming home and finding dog puke. 

Hungry? 

Us, too! So the tofu: We make a big batch of the stuff, put it in the fridge, and use it throughout the week (same for the onions and beans for that matter). And it couldn't be easier...

Team Stockpiled Tofu is a simple (yet dynamic!) duo.

 

 

 

 

 

Slice the packages and drain. Remove the tofu and put them on a paper towel on a cutting board. Yes, paper towels, Lay off me. I don't have any towels that haven't been used for cleaning yet.

Press the tofu with six simple (but powerful!) layers: 1) cutting board 2) paper towels 3) tofu 4) paper towels 5) cutting board part II 6) weight (yeah, yeah, yeah, a big pot would do, but where's the fun in that?)

Let gravity do its thing for 30 minutes, then remove the icky, sopping towels.

Cut each block-o-tofu into 8 even(ish) slices

Mr. Married With Veggies insists on 0.5 tBsp of olive oil per block-o-tofu, but I think you could get away with less. He rubbed each slice in the heated oil as he placed them in the pan.

Cooky cooky for 7 minutes

Flippy flippy and 7 more minutes.

Enjoy your tub-o-ready-to-go tofu all week long!

Mr. Married with Veggies says it's a waste of time to cut each slice into 8 triangles, but they make me ridiculously happy.

They also make modern art. I call this one sunburst with seagull over the sea.

And this one, I call lightning fast lunch (wheat pita with hummus, tofu, tomato, and spinach).

So here's the straight "recipe."

Ingredients:

• 1 package extra firm tofu
• 0.05 tBsp olive oil

Step 1. Drain tofu and put on a cutting board lined with paper towels. Cover with paper towels, a second cutting board, and a weight. Leave for 30 minutes. (Do NOT try to speed things up by pressing down on the top--this is a passive process!)

Step 2. Cut the tofu into 8 slices.

Step 3. Heat olive oil in a skillet and place tofu slices in two rows. Cook for 7 minutes each side.

Step 4. Use for sandwiches, stir frys, and just plain munching all week long!

Step 5. OK, you caught us. The recipe is for one batch, but the pictures show us making two. When we finished one batch we immediately started a second, but you should try it with one block of tofu. This week we just know we have a few recipes that will call for tofu so we did a double batch.

Vegan Is Easy, Healthy Is Hard

When Cathy and I started this program, we made two immense changes: going vegan and eating healthy.  In my mind, I had initially lumped them together, but they are distinct choices, one of which is immensely harder than the other.

If some all-powerful being told me that I'd stay in wonderful shape if I chose one of two options: be vegan but eat anything I wanted that fell into that category or be an omnivore but have to eat only  healthy options, I would have made the decision in a heartbeat. Pasta sandwiches dripping with oil, here I come! And why not wash that down with a pan of apple crisp (with vegan butter of course)? Simply put, it's easy to cut things out of your diet when plenty of bad things are left in.  

As the program has progressed, I've found that I rarely have urges for things that aren't vegan, but I often wish for less healthy versions of what is in front of me.  As I eat my daily salad, I don't wish there was a pile of steak tips on top, but instead that I had a nice, fatty dressing instead of the fat-free low-cal balsamic. While this can sometimes be a struggle, the important lesson I've learned is that you can live without the things that aren't in front of you, but as soon as something is, there's a desire to make less healthy choices.

This is particularly important for me to realize with a business trip on the horizon where food and beer will flow freely.  Staring at the buffet lunches of meats and carbs and fats and sugars, the temptation to go with the lesser evil will be a horrific challenge.  And when it comes to free beer, well... next topic.

So I have two weeks to steel myself to the temptations of bounteous badness.  My secret weapon: remembering what the scale said after living vegan and healthy for several weeks.  I hope that's enough.

So that's hunger....

I made two strange food related discoveries this week. The first is that the string of chemicals in vegan sour cream, cream cheese, and cheese cheese mean that these substances are not health foods. Other tip offs were the weird headache and general fog-head that came on after eating any of them (it took me two times to make the connection and a third to confirm it).

The second is that something about eating a mostly plant-based diet has killed my desire for most of the foods that used to sing sweet siren songs to my belly and tongue and convince me a taste and another and one more couldn't possibly hurt anybody.

This afternoon I thought I was coming down with a flu. I felt logy and tired, I had a low-grade headache, and I could hardly focus on the work task at hand (though to be fair, said task is the kind of deadly dull stupidness that inspires lesser mortals to pluck themselves bald). I was ready to admit defeat and go lie down a while, when my stomach grumbled loudly enough for me to stop typing and look down at the peanut gallery below, and peanuts, I thought. Peanuts would be really good right now. Why is my mouth watering? And there goes the beast in my belly again, which is when it dawned on me: I had forgotten to eat lunch.

I forgot (!) to eat lunch.

I never forget to eat lunch. Certainly not when I'm working on a yawner of a project that would inspire lesser mortals to pluck themselves bald.

So I put some hummus and tomato on a pita and, well, do you have houseplants you neglect like I neglect my houseplants? And by neglect I mean forget you have them for weeks and then praise Jeebus when you see them acting all droopy that you were self aware enough to only take on succulents that don't need you very often anyway? When you water a plant that's been neglected like I neglect them, two things happen. First, the dirt slurps the wet right up and second the plant perks up. Immediately. Kind of like I did after I ate my hummus-and-tomato pita.

I don't advocate skipping meals to the point that you feel sick, I really don't. But forgetting to eat when you've had food issues as long as your memory of the taste of chocolate? That's something special, that is.

Perhaps I'll show my plantly gratitude by buying my much neglected succulents a drink.

Menu Monday: Harvest Quinoa (Keen-wa)

Quinoa sure looks an awful lot like dirt sprinkled on your
plate when you're as shitty a food photographer as I am! 

This recipe could also be called The-Quinoa-recipe-I-submitted-to-the-Trader-Joe's-quintessential-quinoa-recipe-contest-that-doesn't-have-a-snowball's-chance-in-hell-of-winning. But we at Married with Veggies think "Harvest Quinoa" is less of a mouthful.

The trouble with the recipe isn't the lack of beauty in this garden rainbow of a meal (trust me, the camera isn't doing it justice) or an issue with the harvesty yum  of the taste (though Mr. Married With Veggies insists black beans would be a better choice in the dish). 

No. 

The real problem was I decided to include onions under the "binders" category that the contest defines as "salt, pepper, butter, cooking oil, etc," because, really, what  vegan/vegetarian/flexitarian worth her salt doesn't have diced onions in her fridge to throw into the pot at a moment's notice, right? 

I know. I know. I could have dropped the spinach at the end, but I…just…couldn’t…do it. The spinach, she is too much a part of the pretty-pretty of the plate at the end! 

So pull the onions, you say? You can't mean you really want me to sacrifice taste, can you?! 

What about losing the bell peppers or the corn? Yeah, but what part of rainbow are you not getting? 

"Surely, the broccoli could go," you say. "It's green, afterall, and the spinach has that color covered, right?" You know what? It's like you don't even know me anymore! (Insert slammed door sound effect here, please).  

So, yeah. I'm very likely totally disqualified, but you know what? I made up a recipe, like all on my own (insert the sound of a film projector with a little kid quipping "I made this!" here, please). Which means I should probably warn you that there's the ever so slightest possibility that I've worded something ambiguously enough to result in a cooking snafu that could end in anything from a forgotten and very overcooked something or other on the minor end all the way to a burned-out kitchen on the disaster end. I take no responsibility for either, but hey, let the adventure begin!  

  

Team Harvest Quinoa reporting for duty, sir! 

TEAM HARVEST QUINOA 

• 1 cup Trader Joe's Organic Tricolor Quinoa (you can use any brand--even plain--but TJ's tricolor looks like pebble soup while it cooks and that makes me irrationally happy, though if you want to rob yourself of joy, have at it!) 
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 cup diced onions
• 2 TBSP Earth Balance
• 0.25 cups water
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 cups cooked chick peas (or 1 14-oz can, though this was NOT part of our testing)
• 2 cups broccoli florets
• 1 cup red bell pepper
• 1.25 cups frozen corn
• 1 cup baby spinach (packed tightly)

STEP 1. Put the quinoa and veggie broth in a saucepot at high and bring to a boil. The instructions on the back of the package indicate that it's possible to make the quinoa in four minutes in a microwave. Lies! Vicious, vicious LIES! Cook the quinoa on your stove and keep an eye on it if you're a quinoa newbie (when I was a quinoa newbie, I, too thought it was pronounced Quinn-oh-a). Reduce the heat to medium, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Seriously, keep an eye on it. I suggest stirring at the 10- and 15-minute marks because your quinoa may well need a little less time or a little more time to soak up the water depending on how high octane the heat on your burner is.

STEP 2. While the quinoa cooks, chop the onions and get them into a frying pan with the butter, stirring to coat, then let them brown (about 5 minutes) while you get the rest of the veggies ready. Cook them longer if you prefer your onions browner; less if you like them on the icky raw side, not that I'm judging you for liking something that will make leave your breath smelling like old socks or anything. There's room in this world for every kind of tastebud and blah, blah, blah. 

STEP 3. Add the chick peas, broccoli, corn, red pepper, and water to the frying pan. It's starting to look kind of pretty already, no? Stir, then cover and cook for 5 minutes. 

Just after the dump.....

STEP 4.  Remove the frying pan from the heat, dump the quinoa  and the baby spinach on top in a mound (truly, it’s impressive-looking) and slowly (I’m serious about the slow bit—be patient or you’ll be cleaning little quinoa bits from your burner for longer than it takes to wolf this thing down) fold everything together until the quinoa and vegetables are mixed in well. The spinach will wilt perfectly from the heat of the food. 

....and just after the very, very patient "fold."

STEP 5.  Divide the Harvest Quinoa into four bowls and allow those eating to salt and pepper to suit their own tastes.

Per serving: 448 calories; 10g fat; 17g protein, 14g fiber (per sparkpeople.com)

Vegan Dog Caught in the Act!

"Mmmmm," Bo says. "Grasses is very very nom, nom, crunch, crunch, nom!" 

Let me be clear: We do NOT have Bo on a vegetarian diet. Just sometimes--mostly when he's sick to his tummy--the world becomes a giant salad bar to him. He favors bright green blades of grass to the exclusion of just about every thing else. And normally I yank him away--I have it on good authority that the green doesn't feel so good (in other words I've seen the greens coming out of either end), but I had my phone in my hand, and it cracked me up as an if-it's-good-for-mommy-moment from the Bo-Bo. That is all.