"The Can"

Here is the slaw I was planning to make with the dressing. It turned out well. Not that slaw is a particularly difficult thing to make as long as you have a decent dressing. This picture is about two weeks old now. I have since made the slaw again with a slight change to the dressing: a bit more ginger and a little more than half the original amount of sesame oil.
What I am proud of, "the can" in the picture is the tofu. I got the recipe from the April 2006 Vegetarian Times magazine. I had never cooked tofu in a cast iron skillet before, the skillet is, in fact, a fairly new acquisition. The most difficult part was letting the tofu sit untouched on one side for seven minutes, and then on the other side for five more. I do not like to leave things alone when cooking, I like to stir and disturb my food. Those first seven minutes I anticipated chiseling off the tofu with a thick, black, unbudging cake left behind.
But no! It flipped - nothing to it. Five minutes later (three of which the glaze was added to the pan) diner was served. What did the cook think?
He hummed! He hummed while he ate - the ultimate compliment.

Dressing - Take One

Monday night I knew I was coming down with something, we also had a lot of ginger to use up. We decided on something fast, easy which just so happened to also be healthy. The most obvious choice was our red lentil soup, it's super easy (broth, onions, red lentils, spices, delicious) and comes from a great cookbook, Ismail Merchant's Passionate Meals, an Indian food book which I'll maybe write about sometime, but not now. Soup was the cook's job, and he did a fine one at that. But this isn't about the cook, it's about the can't cook.
I had already chosen the Sesame-Ginger dressing from my Vegetarian Planet book (which is hit or miss - but it's usually not the book's fault). I'm not sure if I'd ever even made a dressing before. I thought it called for a good deal of dark sesame oil - 1/4 cup, but I followed the recipe - with just a touch more ginger. It was made of ginger, a little garlic, pepper, sugar, salt, apple cider vinegar all together. Then sloooowly whisking in the canola & sesame oil in order to emulsify everything together.
What a pain! It took me about 4 minutes. Four long, arm cramping minutes. But in the end, it got a "That looks great. Good job on slowly emulsifying, Jess." Of course this is before we had consumed any of it. . .
It was alright, not great and nowhere near bad; a bit too sweet and a bit too sesame-ish. Both mellowed out the next day, and was quite tasty. Cook thought it would be good in a cabbage slaw, so that's probably what's next.
Also coming up is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Here's a hint - it's being planned around the upcoming dry periods (interpret that as you will).
And I did get sick - but not all that sick compared to other people I know around here.