Tofu, and Notes On Not Being A Dick.

I've always been kind of meh on tofu.  It's kind of slimy and I don't love the texture.  But every vegan recipe site I look at (since I am a proud faux-vegan) is all tofu this, tofu that, you must gargle with tofu 3x a day.  So I tried it again and Das Bich recommended baking the tofu first, which dries it out and gives it a more meat-y texture.  Last night I pressed the tofu first instead, laying it on a plate lined with a paper towel, laying another paper towel and plate over top, then laying a heavy cookbook on top of the plate.  This squeezes out the extra moisture and firms up the tofu.  And then I did this:

Slice tofu into 1/4" slices, then in half.  In a small bowl add soy sauce, in a separate small bowl mix together panko bread crumbs, 1 Tb nutritional yeast, 1 tsp dry mustard, 1/2 tsp garlic powder, and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper. Spray cookie sheet with baking spray.  Dredge tofu slices in soy sauce, then bread crumb mixture, then lay on cookie sheet.  Bake at 350 for 1/2 an hour, flipping slices halfway through.  I had mine with a side of lemony sauteed kale from our kale-zilla plant.

Mooch has become a persnickety eater as she got older, but she loved these.  She kept asking if they were chicken or cheese (suckah)  Forget about the Mister coming near these - he is not down with faux-veganism.  He's all about the Paleo diet these days and if I hear "but is it Paleo?" one more time I may lose my shit.

This week started out with me being stressed about everything I have to finish up at my current job.  I start in a new department on August 6th, and my baby brat sister B'lanna is getting married on the 25th.  My house looked like a tornado hit it.  It was very all about me and how stressed I was, and then someone walked into a movie theater in Colorado and killed a lot of people, including a six year old little girl.  And if there is ANY positive, and positive doesn't even seem the right word, out of these horrific unimaginable senseless things; maybe it's that for some of us it makes us hit the reset button on our "all caught up in me" world.  I hugged the girls so tight they complained, and fixed my husband the stupid f-ing Paleo dinner he requested. I put together a big bag of stuff to donate to Goodwill.  I made a conscious effort to smile at everyone, and played parking meter fairy.  It's my small response of putting positivity back into the world when people are hurting and reeling and angry and scared.  And I re-posted a portion of Obama's speech that he made regarding what happened in Colorado to my FB page.  Because he was essentially summing up my feelings - pay more attention to how we treat each other.  And it turned into a politicized freaking argument. 

In the midst of this I was accused of "living in a haze".  You know what?  Fine.  Yes I do not follow politics to the point I can rattle off statistics, because the more I learn about politics the more it becomes crystal clear that all politicians are more or less actors who will tell us whatever we want to hear.  And the more I follow them the more frustrated I become.  And the more frustrated I become, my patience with everything goes down, and that's not good.  Because ultimately I think it's the small things that matter the most - and how we treat each other is the end-all, be-all.  The truth is if you look back over your day and realize that 90% of the time you were either annoyed or stressed or angry, then you're not being a positive force in this world, no matter what you're doing.  If you realize that almost everything you've said in a day has either been argumentative or negative, THEN YOU NEED TO CHANGE.  And if you make a decision not to then you own a small piece of the bad things that happen in this world, no matter how you spin it.  And if consciously trying to be positive and spread the love is a "hazy" point of view ... then stay hazy :-)