We have met the tofu tacos

How could anything go wrong when Po is on the package?

and they were actually edible.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that the Woman's Day February Month of Menus included a number of vegan options, including tofu tacos. I was intrigued -- both the S.O. and I have been the recipient of the "eat less red meat" talk from our primary care physicians thanks to cholesterol numbers that are less than optimal -- so I decided we'd try the recipe. It actually fell early in the month, but first Larry's had no tofu in stock and then there was the pepper problem. Larry's Market in Baraga is a nice small town supermarket, but it is small. It does have a surprisingly cosmopolitan range of merchandise, stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a store its size, but there are limits. Tofu was one of them.

That is, of course, until I happened to mention to someone working there that I had been hoping they carried tofu even though I hadn't been expecting it. Voila. The next time they got a shipment in from whoever distributes that stuff, there it was. Tofu. (Side note: Lord, please don't let Larry's be stuck with almost a full case of tofu just because one person wanted one package!) I had planned to wait until we got up to Houghton or Marquette but I no longer had to.

Of course, I still had to wait until we got to Houghton or Marquette because of the pepper problem. The recipe called for a poblano pepper. Like I said, Larry's is small. Fresh pepper selection there falls into bell peppers, jalapenos, and occasionally those bags with mini multi-colored sweet peppers. The recipe called for cooking half a red pepper and half a poblano and then garnishing with fresh jalapeno. Poblanos aren't a real hot pepper, but they do rank several slots higher than sweet bell peppers on the Scoville scale. Tofu is bland (to say the least) so I wanted a pepper with a little bit of a kick to it. Ordinary green bell peppers weren't going to make it into the frying pan. In any case, having cursed Larry's with a stash of tofu, I wasn't going to suggest they expand the pepper selection, too.

Well, as luck would have it, Marquette with its multiple supermarkets is between where we live and the town of Trenary. On our way home from the Outhouse Races on Saturday, we stopped at Econo Foods. Poblano pepper problem solved.

I made the tacos yesterday. They were a surprise. They weren't bad. I can actually see making them again, especially if an occasion arises where we have friends or relatives visiting who prefer not to eat dead animal flesh. The biggest issue (if you can call it that) was feeling a little weirded out because the crumbled and fried tofu had a texture and general appearance similar to scrambled eggs but a color and taste that was totally different.

Tofu Tacos with Romaine slaw

Finely chop 1/2 each small poblano and red pepper, 2 cloves garlic, and 1 small onion. Saute mixture in a large nonstick skillet with 1 tbsp oil for 4 minutes. Crumble 14 oz extra-firm tofu (squeezed of excess moisture) into the skillet and season with 1-1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp ground coriander, salt and pepper; saute until golden brown. Spoon into corn tortillas; top with sliced romaine and jalapeno. 

Gotta love the way they jazz it up by saying "with romaine slaw" when the "slaw" consists of some shredded lettuce.

Things I did different: I used a whole poblano and no red pepper and used medium firm tofu (it was the only option available) instead of extra firm. It's possible that if I'd had the extra firm, the texture would have been a little less scrambled egg-like. If I do this recipe again (or something similar) I'll use two whole peppers, not just one. It has also brilliantly occurred to me that a person could probably take ordinary taco seasoning and substitute tofu for the ground meat those seasoning packets tell you to use. I have a giant package of Sysco taco seasoning so one of these days I may experiment with it.

I am still mildly in shock. Holy wah. Tofu is edible. Who knew? 

Multiculturalism on the dinner table

Curried Lentil Soup; photo from Woman's Day

Back in the 1970s when I was much, much younger and spent a good part of my day dealing with a couple of little barracudas, figuring out what to have for various meals was a definite annoyance. You know, it's bad enough that a person  has to cook 7 days a week, but meal planning on top of the kitchen drudgery? Not fun. Just about every cookbook aimed at novices (which I was) includes some sample menus but doing the same half dozen dishes over and over gets old fast. Then I discovered this wonderful feature in Woman's Day magazine: the month of menus. Something different for every day of the month. It wasn't always something I particularly wanted to cook and on a fairly regular basis I'd get annoyed by the food editor's assumption that every reader was going to easily find the same ingredients in their small town IGA that someone living in New York City could track down, but the menu at least presented possibilities. If the menu said something about fresh fish, it was easy enough to substitute some frozen cod.
Fast forward forty years. I'm still using the Month of Menus, and I still regularly curse the food editor for some odd ingredients -- farro? What the hell is farro?! -- but the menu still serves as a handy way to provide more variety on the dinner table. It has changed over the decades, of course. Back in the '70s it would include basics like meat loaf. It also included a suggestion for a simple dessert. A suggested Sunday dinner might be fried chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and sliced bananas in orange juice. They had no problem including stuff like frozen fish sticks or canned fruit cocktail as ideas.

There is no way either of those items would make it on to the Month of Menus now. The menu makes concessions to people's hectic lifestyles but you're still going to do a lot of from scratch cooking. And the suggested desserts vanished in the '90s. Woman's Day still publishes a lot of dessert and snack recipes but apparently you're eating that stuff at other times of the day, not when dinner ends.

All of which brings me to the thing that caught my eye this month. Two things, actually, although the multiculturalism has been creeping in for a long time. Fusion cooking is nothing new to anyone who reads Woman's Day. They've been pushing stir fries of various types for decades, doing various Latin dishes, and introducing readers to the use of fresh ginger root, lemongrass, and other spices for a long, long time. The February menu includes a couple of curries, tofu tacos, feta salsa verde, and a number of other goodies that show just how far we've traveled since the 1970s fried chicken or basic spaghetti with a hamburger meat sauce. There is no hamburger, no ground beef in any form, on the February 2016 menu.

Granted, there are burgers. Turkey burgers. (I shudder at the thought, to be honest. Had we done burgers on that particular day, they would have come from a shredded cow.) In any case, red meat in the form of beef is almost nonexistent on the menu. It turns up about once a week. Pork, chicken, and fish make appearances more often. But what struck me was the number of vegan dishes. Yep, vegan. No messing around with halfway measures and simply going meatless -- the menu includes several dinners that I could serve to vegan friends with no worries. Like the tofu tacos, which actually sound pretty good. The way the tofu is prepared it might actually be edible. If I can managed to track down some tofu (Larry's doesn't carry it; apparently there aren't many tofu eaters in Baraga County), we'll test drive the recipe.

Woman's Day used to do Meatless Mondays as part of the menu. That feature has vanished; they've switched to a stealth approach. Which is fine with me. An occasional vegetarian or vegan recipe strikes me as a good idea, a sensible thing to do when beef can be a real budget-buster, especially when the resulting dishes don't make a person feel like they're sacrificing anything. We did a curried lentil soup (a soup that I'd be inclined to call dhal, but if Woman's Day doesn't want to be explicitly ethnic, that's their call) yesterday that is really good. I'm clipping the recipe; we're going to do it again. I have a hunch we'll probably save and repeat the other vegan curry, too. It uses chickpeas. I'm not quite as optimistic about those tofu tacos, but you never know.

Curried Lentil Soup

1-1/2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1-1/2 tsp cumin

6 cups low sodium vegetable broth

1-1/2 cups red lentils

2 large carrots, grated

4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 tsp curry powder

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

2 bay leaves (optional)

1 cup light coconut milk

Kosher salt and pepper

Cilantro, for garnish when serving

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, covered, stirring occasionally for 6 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cumin and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add the borth, lentils, carrots, thyme, curry powder, cinnamon, and bay leaves (if using); bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender, 12 to 15 minutes.

Add the coconut milk and 1/2 tsp each salt and pepper; simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with cilantro if desired. Makes 6 servings.

I didn't have fresh thyme so skipped it (I was afraid powdered might be too intense) and used only one bay leaf (it was big). We also skipped the cilantro; I'm one of those people who thinks cilantro tastes really nasty and can't understand why other people like it. I really liked this soup. It was fast and easy to make, it's low cost, and it's a nice, hardy soup for a winter day. Best of all, because there's just me and the S.O., it made enough that I was able to put two containers into the freezer so we're getting three meals out of prepping for one.

As for farro, thanks to the magic of Google I now know that farro is a type of primitive wheat. It is being touted as a substitute for quinoa as it is equally nutritious. If it's showing up in Woman's Day recipes, one can only assume that it can be found at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to make it to Larry's.

Another canning binge begins

I thought I was done preserving foods for this year. I made a gazillion batches of pickles of various types, having made the mistake of buying a bushel of cucumbers from the local fruit stand -- I cannot grow enough cucumbers in our glacial till garden soil to count on having enough to do anything with -- so filled a lot of pint jars with cucumbers, vinegar, and various spices. I pressure canned a couple dozen pints of green beans. I made 3 batches of pickled beets. The S.O. reminded me last week that the plum trees actually had plums this year so I made plum jam. And I thought that was it.

Then I noticed the tree that has really good pie apples had a fair number of apples this year, so now I'm giving serious thought to canning apple pie filling. The tree next to that particular tree yields fruit that is quite good for jelly and applesauce. . . so, yep, there's now a whole lot of jelly jars sitting on the counter waiting to be washed.

And then there are the green tomatoes left in the garden. This was not a particularly good year for tomatoes -- we had major issues with blossom end rot; apparently our garden suffers from calcium deficiency -- but there are enough green tomatoes out there for at least one batch of green tomato pickles. The other day I stumbled across a recipe for green tomato pickles that includes jalapenos. So you guess it. I'm contemplating making green tomato pickles sometime in the next 48 hours.

Why does it have to be within the next 48 hours? Because in the midst of the canning binge, I'll also be prepping the Guppy to hit the road. The S.O. has the bunk-over-the-cab area done -- insulation in place, a new sheet of paneling tacked up to replace the one that was there (that cheap paneling doesn't survive being pulled off very well) -- so I am now free to finish packing various supplies and making sure nothing's going to bounce around too much when we pull out of here on Saturday morning. Today is Wednesday. That gives me basically 3 days to indulge my atavistic desire to fill a metaphorical pantry. I may have to make another trip to the produce stand, though, because it just hit me I haven't made apple marmelade in a long, long time. I think I need to buy some oranges.

Adventures in cookery

I am not noted for my culinary skills. The S.O. jokes about the smoke alarm serving as a dinner bell with good reason. I have a bad habit of getting distracted and allowing things to become a tad crispier than they were meant to be. Despite that, I do like trying out new recipes occasionally.

Yesterday I decided to try a recipe for a Rhubarb Strawberry Jello pie. I've heard of people using strawberry jello in rhubarb pie, but I had never attempted it myself. My fallback recipe for rhubarb pie is the one my mom used -- it's the three ingredients one (rhubarb, sugar, eggs) that's so simple that after a person had made it once they never need to consult the recipe again. Still, I'm trying to use up last year's rhubarb before this year's gets big enough to be picked and frozen. Much as I like that pie recipe, doing the same thing over and over does get a little old. It seemed like a good time to try something different. So I did.

The recipe for the Rhubarb Strawberry Jello pie came from a community cookbook sold by the Aura Volunteer Fire Department a few years ago. The fact each recipe has a person's name associated with it sort of serves as some reassurance -- surely no one will contribute recipes that don't work when people will be thinking of that recipe as Martha Harju's Shoo Fly Pie or Jennifer Tikkanen's Killer Brownies. I'll be nice. I won't mention the name associated with this particular rhubarb recipe.

The recipe itself looked intriguingly simple. You dump the rhubarb into an unbaked pie shell and then sprinkle a package of strawberry jello over it. This gets topped with a mix of flour, butter, and sugar. I got the impression the topping would be a sort of streusel type of topping, kind of like what you find on some apple pies. Nope. It was more like a form of concrete. You shouldn't have to get out a chisel to cut a pie. It was definitely one of the stranger outcomes I've had in baking. The pie itself tastes fine, but that topping is really, really odd.

There are several other rhubarb pie recipes in that cookbook, including another strawberry Jello one, so next time I may try one of them. They're all over the map, though, on how much sugar is appropriate for a rhubarb pie. They all use the same amount of fruit (4 cups) but the sweetener? Anywhere from 3/4 cup to 2 full cups. I'll probably pass on that last one. Rhubarb is tart, but there's no way it needs that much sugar to take the edge off.

It's that time of year again

Before canning

It's September, and once again I've been busily channeling my pioneer ancestors. The days get shorter, migratory birds start flocking up to prepare for the trek south, and I feel the urge to get out the canning kettle. Twenty-two pints of pressure-canned purple-hull beans that turned green when cooked, several batches of cucumber pickles, pickled cauliflower, Frog Balls (pickled brussels sprouts),  a batch of hot pepper slices, plum jam, 12 quarts of peaches, and I'm feeling compelled to can more.

After canning. Maybe next year I'll invest in a Frencher.

My You Can Can book has multiple recipes I'd like to try. Tomatillo salsa -- the tomatillo plant in the garden is loaded with fruit; there must be enough to make 6 or 7 pints of salsa verde. I've never canned salsa. Homemade fruit cocktail -- that's something that it never occurred to me to try making myself. Watermelon relish. Yellow squash pickles.

But even without the cookbook, I can think of things to make this fall. Awesome Relish -- a person can never have too much Awesome Relish on hand. Apple juice -- granted, there aren't very many apples in the orchard this year, but there are some feral trees near by that are loaded. Apple pie filling -- some of those feral trees must have good pie apples. Last year I put up about a dozen jars of apple pie filling -- they all got used. Ditto apple sauce. Green tomato pickles -- the tomato plants in the garden are loaded with tomatoes, and there's no way they're going to ripen before we have a hard frost. I'd rather turn some into pickles than deal with having multiple boxes of green tomatoes slowly ripening in the house. At this point, the big question is which I'm going to run out of first: ideas or jars. And once the jars run out, I can always buy more.

My afternoon

Local peaches from Publix.

Despite the label, I think the "local" was actually South Carolina. Close enough.

Turned out peeling peaches (something I'd never attempted before) isn't any harder than peeling tomatoes, and you use the same technique (quick scalding in boiling water, then into ice water, and the skins slither right off).

Crushed peaches prior to cooking bear a disturbing resemblance to something you'd find Sunday morning on the sidewalk in front of a frat house.

End result -- six jars of peach jam.

And I still have enough peaches left to make a cobbler. Life is good.

The recipe, from a USDA extension booklet that's at least 50 years old (it was my mother's):

Peach jam with powdered pectin

3 3/4 cups crushed peaches (takes about 3 pounds peaches)
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 package powdered pectin
5 cups sugar

Sort and wash fully ripe peaches. Remove stems, skins, and pits. Crush the peaches.

Measure crushed peaches into a kettle. Add the lemon juice and pectin and stir well. Place on high heat and, stirring constantly, bring quickly to a full boil with bubbles over the entire surface.

Add the sugar, continue stirring, and heat again to a full bubbling boil. Boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat; skim and stir alternately for 5 minutes. Ladle jam into hot containers and seal immediately.

Makes about 8 6-ounce glasses.

Awesome Relish

Or, how I spent my weekend.

1. The Younger Daughter will rejoice. In a rare burst of domesticity I made 9 pints of Awesome Relish (aka my mother's carrot relish recipe). Tammi has a serious addiction to the stuff.

2. Scored an amazing find at Goodwill -- a plastic bag with at least $50 worth of high quality thread for a mere $2.19. It's one of those typical "leftover from an estate sale" type of donations where several dozen spools of thread got bagged together to make them easier to sell. If I were a more imaginative writer, it might have inspired me to wax eloquent on mortality and little old ladies and their fabric and thread stashes that they spend years building up. . . and then their unappreciative heirs just have an estate sale specialist bag it all up and sell it for almost nothing. Even sadder, no quilters or crafters notice it at the sale -- and it all ends up at Goodwill. In short, a vaguely poignant vignette on the fragility of humanity. Instead, I'm just exulting in having scored all this great thread for next to nothing.

3. Talked the S.O. into watching Part 2 of "John Adams" so now the disc can go back to Netflix. He doesn't seem too thrilled with the prospect of it being a multi-parter -- the snoring was kind of a clue. Guess it is kind of hard sometimes to get excited about a historical drama when you already know the high points (revolution, politics, Adams ends up as president). There was a scene, though, that metaphorically nailed politics in general -- Adams thoroughly enjoying digging in a manure pile.