Here’s the other half of my block of tofu marinating:

I baked it for twenty minutes:

And then I put it on a plate with some leftover peas, as well as some newly cooked green beans:

I feel like I’m looking at swatches to pick out green carpet.

SAUCE V. MARINADE

In short, I liked both. Cooking the chimichurri took some of the edge off the vinegar-y zing. The main problem concerning judgment is that I used tofu as the vehicle. Next time I’ll try it with something that’ll soak up flavors better.

GREEN BEANS

More interestingly (for me) was preparing the green beans by boiling, rather than my normal method of steaming. Steaming green beans always sucks because they never seem to get tender. Boiling left them with a very nice texture.

By the way, I don’t particularly like the way green beans smell and taste, but I love the smell and taste of green beans because it reminds me of spring and summer, or of being in a garden. I’m not really sure what to make of that.

This is now my fifth post without one morsel of flesh involved, and I’d like to assure everyone that this website isn’t the first step in a process that includes such things as leaving informational pamphlets around and prompting “philosophical talks” that are thinly-veiled conversion attempts, and which ends in an inevitably doomed confrontation with stronger, meat-fed federal employees.

In the meantime, here’s some more frigging tofu.

The origin of this meal was an Internet search for “marinade parsley garlic.” Previously, I had only known parsley as my least favorite part of the Passover Seder, and I recently bought a ton of it in order to expand my conception of it beyond merely a tool to taste my ancestors’ tears. When it’s not dipped in salt water and eaten raw, I like it.

The first result of my search for a marinade involving parsley was a recipe for chimichurri, which is Argentinian pesto, more or less. The sauce is usually served over meat (especially beef), either as a sauce or a marinade. According to Wikipedia and lazily cross-referenced elsewhere, chimichurri was an invention of an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry who helped fight for Argentinian independence. The natives loved his dish but of course couldn’t pronounce his name. Therefore, chimichurri. There’s really no part of this story I’m not skeptical about.

I looked at a bunch of recipes, and they varied. The common denominators, though, were parsley, garlic, and olive oil. I chose a recipe from Epicurious. I picked this one because I’ve heard of Epicurious.com and because it was the first website that came up besides the previously cited Wikipedia page.

First, though, I had to press the tofu.

This time I got Mu Tofu, which is made right here in Chicago.

Don’t believe me? Here, let me bring my camera closer:

Sweet, it’s kosher, too. I can put it on matzah and be completely miserable.

I like this tofu a lot, actually, because it’s cheaper, because it’s gratifying to buy local, because it’s even more gratifying to tell people I buy local, and because it has a harder consistency than other tofu I’ve eaten, making the tofu-pressing process much, much quicker.

After the tofu was pressed, I rubbed it with olive oil, salt, and pepper and baked it in the oven at 375 degrees for twenty minutes (a new tofu-cooking technique recommended by Vegan Melanie).

While the tofu was cooking, I made a Jamie Oliver recipe he calls Minted Peas Under Oil, a name which leaves nothing to the imagination.

Here are the (frozen) peas with mint leaves strewn about:

Here’s the above with boiled water poured on them:

That photograph is easily the greatest photograph I’ve ever taken. Let’s look once more:

It’s peaceful, isn’t it? It just makes you think. Hold on, I’m going to zone out for a bit.

Anyhow, here are the cooked peas and mint, which I then covered in olive oil. Oliver’s instructions weren’t to cover them in olive oil, but to COVER THEM IN OLIVE OIL. It’s really not a fine distinction. You can’t see here, but trust me, I’m almost out of olive oil now.

Did you find yourself looking at that photo and wishing you were closer? I have good news for you:

The peas are supposed to sit for at least thirty minutes so you have time to figure out exactly how many dollars of olive oil you just dumped on frozen peas, so I set them aside and made the chimichurri.

Here are the ingredients for the chimichurri:

1 cup (packed) fresh Italian parsley
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup (packed) fresh cilantro
2 garlic cloves, peeled
3/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt

Here’s the after picture:

And here’s the final plate, with the chimichurri spooned over the cooked tofu:

Whoa, that’s a lotta green.

CHIMICHURRI – IT WAS LIKE I WAS ACTUALLY IN IRELAND

The Indian who Jimmy McCurry stole the chimichurri recipe from was onto something, that’s for sure. This version was quite zingy, owing to all the vinegar and the cumin. It was good, just a more intense taste than I was expecting. I think it’ll mellow out as it sits in my fridge, or as it looks at my picture of the peas under water:

I’m going to experiment with different versions, since not all the recipes I saw called for vinegar, although I imagine this version would be good over beef. I also suspect it might be good with salmon.

Since chimichurri can be used as a marinade instead of as a sauce like I used it here, I’m going to try it in that capacity later this week.

THE PEAS – THE OIL…THE OIL…

These were very good. The mint flavor was extremely subtle. Instead, I believe the mint just gave the dish some sweetness. Next time I’ll try it with some more mint, just to see how it tastes if the minty flavor is more overt.

As far as the amount of oil I used, I’m fairly certain it was a power trip by Jamie Oliver to see if he could get nunces to blindly follow his directions and do something ridiculous like turning their bottle of olive oil upside down and losing half their supply.

DID THESE TWO DISHES EVEN GO TOGETHER?

I’m not sure. The chimichurri sauce was sweet and sour, and peas were sweet, too. Those flavors seem to hit at the front of the mouth, and because of that they actually seemed sort of nice together.

On the other hand, ideally there’d be something to balance it out. Also, the amount of oil consumed tonight turned me temporarily blind. Beware.

I almost always have tofu in my fridge for three main reasons:

1. It’s inexpensive.

2. I’ve been brainwashed by Big Protein.

3. I don’t have to take it out to thaw, thereby making it a contingency plan of sorts if I forget to take meat out during my pre-caffeinated haze before work.

Also, I kind of like it, and by “it” I’m referring to the texture, since other than sight, touch is the only sense it stimulates. Har, har, tofu is bland. But seriously, it is.

I usually get tofu recipes from my vegan friend, Melanie. She is, after all, vegan, although I’ve gotten recipes from her that aren’t based around soybeans, including a very simple, very good marinade for portobello caps that I just remembered.

This time, though, I consulted The Food Network’s website, which I like because of the search engine that refines the results by a number of categories, including ingredient, type of dish (main, side, etc.), and, most importantly, difficulty.

The reason I chose this dish is because it calls for coconut milk and curry paste, a combination that is not only binge-eatingly delicious, but that also makes me dreamily reminiscent of my former life as a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. I went to college there for two years, and then took a year off so I could soak up all that the city had to offer. Even though my year off consisted of working twenty hours a week at a coffee stand inside a grocery store and gigging once a month with various regional orchestras in northeast Ohio, I was able to squeeze in a dinner with my friends Chester and Rachel (now Mr. and Mrs. Chester). They brought me to a restaurant called Siam Cafe.

There are three things that I recall about the place:

1. It was located in a Beirut-like section of Cleveland. I’m not sure if that’s an apt analogy. Is Beirut still a war-torn hell hole? Well, the last time I was in Cleveland, it certainly looked like a war-torn hell hole. My theory about Cleveland is that if you drive in any one direction, you will sooner or later find yourself in a poverty-stricken, run-down, and quite probably dangerous area of town. For accuracy’s sake, I suppose I should update my measuring stick. Siam Cafe is located in a Cleveland-like section of Cleveland.

2. The building clearly used to be a fast food restaurant. Seriously – check out this image from Google Maps Street View:

You should see what it looked like inside. I think they still had the trashcans with the swinging doors.

3. The food was pretty good, particularly the Massaman curry. The Internet just told me Massaman curry is of Muslim origin, which makes sense: Massaman is close to Mussaman, which is an old way of saying Muslim. Massaman curry has all sorts of stuff in it – usually a meat, veggies, potatoes, peanuts. But most importantly, it combines the magical powers of coconut milk and curry.

My trip to Siam Cafe kindled a love affair with this coupling that continues with fiery passion to this day, so when I happened upon the recipe, I knew it was the one I had to make. That, and the website said it required five minutes of prep and fifteen minutes of cooking. Even taking into account the mathematical formula I’ve come up with to estimate cooking time -

Cooking time = Professionally estimated cooking time x 2, maybe 3

- I could still whip it up pretty quick.

Here’s the link to the recipe: Tofu with Thai Curry Sauce

Here are the ingredients called for:

Sauce:
1 cup “lite” coconut milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon red curry paste, or to taste (see Ingredient notes)
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Tofu & vegetables:
14 ounces extra-firm tofu, preferably water-packed
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 cups baby spinach (6 ounces)
1 medium red bell pepper, sliced (1 1/2 cups)

I bought regular coconut milk instead of “lite” stuff because there’s no quicker way to ruin a food memory than to substitute crappy lo-cal, lo-fat ingredients.

Hmm, I wonder if Vegan Melanie is even allowed to eat coconut milk? I used to ponder such unanswerable questions after my year off from college, when I transferred and became a philosophy major.

Speaking of which, the nice thing about making tofu dishes is that I get to put my degree to good use:

As you can see, I also studied music.

When I first began preparing tofu, I wasn’t aware that you had to squeeze the water out of it to keep it from disintegrating in the pan. I now remove the water, but I think there are two places with room for improvement.

First, I use a lot of paper towels. An unconscionable amount. I suppose I could use regular towels, but I’d still need quite a few of those, right? I have no solution for this.

Second, I could probably use fewer textbooks to squeeze the tofu. Tofu is pretty delicate, and I think less weight could get the water out without altering the integrity (which the above picture method did slightly, puffing out the sides and cracking).

Before I cooked the tofu, though, I threw the sauce together. This was about the time I realized this recipe is incredibly easy. See the ingredients I listed above? Well, put them in a bowl. Since the sauce was the whole reason I made this recipe, I took a picture:

 Mmm…Cleveland…

The rest of the recipe was just as easy. I fried the tofu until it was brown and very crispy, threw in the spinach, pepper, and sauce, and then I ate it. Here’s what it looked like in the pot:

And here’s the dish’s last moment, right before I doomed it and some jasmine rice to death by chewing:

RESULTS

Pretty good overall, though I wanted more sauce, as well as more flavor from the sauce. There was about a half cup of coconut milk leftover from the can, which I would use all of in the future. Also, I’d up both the brown sugar and the curry paste, although I’d do that while adding a little more salt since salt has some sort of hocus pocus in it that amplifies flavor.

The most successful parts of this meal were the bell peppers and the rice. Usually I chop vegetables at random, but I actually took some time to figure out how to cut and gut a pepper. The result was uniform strips of pepper. I felt like I was eating in a restaurant instead of in the kitchen of a child with ADD.

The rice turned out really well, too. I don’t know, I guess I used the right amount of water and cooked it for the right amount of time, not that I took any measurements of either. Oh well. I’m about to read the chapter on rice in my Alice Waters cookbook, so I’ll probably soon learn that I’ve been doing it all wrong. For tonight, at least, I made rice like a champ.

Most importantly, I got to eat coconut milk and curry and spend a lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.

I only wrote that last sentence because I wanted to see if my website was the only one that has the phrase “lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.”