Day 15: Try Tofu

     I found myself strolling through the isles of the Pacific Ocean Market with my brother earlier today. Its a heavily oriental influenced market place where everything is in Japanese (or Chinese or some other language, I have no idea, sorry). Its a very interesting market, filled with strange aromas and of coarse, suspended carcases of dead animals. The glass casing with all of the iced fish heads was a favorite for my brother. I was there because I assumed that a store as bizzare as that would surely hold some "new thing" potential. I figured that I would eat a brain or something just as absurd. But, I had no idea how to spell brain (still don't) in whatever language this marketplace had adopted, and I didn't want to eat brain bad enough to ask any employees. So, I did the next best thing, I bought some tofu. It may not be as interesting as brains, but its new just the same. Plus I think that I owe it to my stomach to fill it with something other than peeps.

     So I got the tofu and I looked up a video on how to make a tofu meal. The meal in the video was garnished with exotic spices and bases and looked pretty appetizing. From there, I figured that since I don't have any of those obscure sounding flavor intensifiers (probably because I'm not vegan {or even vegetarian for that matter}), I decided to to simply eyeball it and do my best to throw in whatever scarce ingredients were left in the fridge. This is a big step for me, actually using my gut instinct on cooking a meal. I mean, I had a goal last week where I just cooked burritos for my family and I felt a little out of my environment on that, so imagine how unprepared I felt about "eyeballing" on a project like this. So I followed what little instructions I could from the video and heated up some oil, diced the tofu and cook until it started to brown. Thats about when I looked towards the fridge and cupboard for flavor inspiration. I rummaged through for a while and picked out some things like sea salt, balsamic vinegar, Frank's Read Hot (hot sauce), garlic spice and pepper. I threw a "dash" (however much that is) of this and a "pinch" (see last use of parentheses) of that in, and then proceeded to pour way too much balsamic in. Things were looking good, the tofu was soaking up the delicious juices, the aroma was pleasant and I was fairly appetized. By now the experiment was done cooking but before I tried my creation, I set up a control. I saved a couple pieces of raw tofu that I was going to use to gauge how much better or how much worse my version of cooking with tofu turned out to be. I gave a piece to myself, brother and dad for us to try. My dad described it as "kind of indescribable". It didn't really have a taste, just a tasteless cube of mush. So we tried my version which looked and smelled pretty good (just sayin'). It was defiantly describable, just not by much. Basically, it just tasted like sea salt and hot sauce and garlic spice and pepper (which is not that bad at all). That wasn't the only taste but those were the most apparent. So the conclusion: we all decided that tofu isn't really that great but at least my cooked version of it is (by a mild margin) better then it's raw counterpart. I do plan on trying a real dish of tofu sometime though, ya know, with all that broccoli and what not.

Tofu: "Its pretty alright"