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The most delicious things we ate last week were the lentil
and walnut burgers in the picture from The
Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen. They were more mushroom than anything
else and had the deep richness you get from mushrooms combined with substance
from the lentils. The walnuts could have been more in evidence and we ended up
with a mixture that was slightly soggy for burger (there’s no egg in the recipe
to hold it together). But definitely one to do again, perhaps with tweaks.
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Once again, the burgers pictured above aren’t my
main topic this week. This week, I bring you… tofu!
Is soya essential in a vegetarian diet? I’m a little
suspicious of things that use soya as a meat substitute, in fact the whole idea
of ‘meat substitute’ goes against the grain. It seems to me that if you want to
eat meat enough to look for substitutes for it, you might as well eat meat. I
feel much the same about butter and all the various substitutes for milk. But
hey, people can eat what they like. Just don’t come anywhere near me with a
veggie sausage…
But back to soya. I know I eat things that contain soya all
time but I don’t ever recall knowingly eating tofu before now. We decided to
make a stirfry last week and while this would have been perfectly fine with a
pile of lovely vegetables and a few nuts, I thought it was an opportunity to
try out tofu. I’d work out exactly what
to do with it when I got it. Probably, I thought, there’d be some
instructions
on the packet, or a recipe, the way there is on pasta packets.
So number one difficulty was that I couldn’t find any tofu in Tesco. I felt sure it
would be somewhere in the chilled cabinets, but I searched amongst the dairy and
the meat and the ready meals … nothing. (I still think it’s there, lurking. If
I had been doing online shopping I’d have found it in a moment.) Eventually I
found it in a little cardboard carton amongst the jars of Chinese sauces.
Number two difficulty was the texture. It seems there is
more than one type of tofu. This slid out of its carton like set yogurt and
though I managed to slice it into cubes as instructed in the one recipe I
found, it broke up and looked rather like scrambled egg.
It tasted fine, insofar as you could actually taste it
amongst the lovely veggies and the nuts and the sauce and the noodles. I’m sure
it gave us all a big boost of protein too. But it really didn’t add anything.
And there’s another thing. Number three difficulty. It wasn’t
until the day after I’d eaten the tofu that I remembered the time when someone
left soya milk in our fridge. I used it out of curiosity and because I don’t
like waste. But the next day I developed an ENORMOUS zit, a throbber the like
of which I don’t think I ever suffered as a teenager. It didn’t disappear
completely for over a week. So the morning after our stirfry, I found my hand
running over my chin when I woke up, felt the developing bump and this memory
slotted into the foreground of my mind. Reader, I’m still recovering…
Here's the entire menu for Week 6.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
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