Room for Improvement

I'm not one to make New Years resolutions formally, but around that time of year I do some pondering on potential areas of life improvement and try to be conscious of those areas throughout the next... well, until I forget about it.

One potential area of improvement at our house is food. No, not the taste -- we eat what tastes good! It's the nutrition. It's not that we eat poorly. There are either fruits or vegetables or both on the table at almost every meal, and at least half our bread usage is whole wheat. But I still felt there was room for improvement. What I really felt, was there was room for tofu.

Now I've only had tofu once about 10 years ago and I had to ask what it was. I don't recall a thing about how it tasted. But it sounds like a very good food -- high protein, low fat, low cholesterol.

Unfortunately you can't get tofu in our little town, so last time we were up in Dickinson I picked up a package at Wal-Mart. I went on-line, found a few recipes, and set forth to cook.

The first recipe I tried said to slice the tofu and dry-fry it (at first I thought it said deep-fry -- too bad). I followed the directions, but things went badly. I blame my pan, which was originally a non-stick teflon pan, but these days is a teflon-mostly-scraped-off pan. Needless to say, the tofu stuck, and then fell apart, and then smelled funny, and then got dumped down the sink before Wade got home and could see it and get grossed out.

On to recipe number two (I'm not easily deterred in the kitchen). This one went much more smoothly. I attribute this to the fact that prior to cooking (baking) the tofu, it was covered in grease. The little marinaded cubes cooked up to a nice golden brown. I added them to a beef broth to serve over rice. It looked pretty good. It tasted like nothing (which is how it's supposed to taste, from what I understand). It felt a little weird. A little too weird. Even for me -- and I love to eat! Levi actually ate all of his, although he did comment that the tofu cubes weren't as good as the bits of shredded roast in the broth. The leftovers went down the drain.

So our menu remains unchanged, still with room for improvement. Perhaps with room for beans. Beans are high in protein and fiber, low in fat and cholesterol...

I'll let you know how it goes.