Homemade Vegetarian Dinner Last Tuesday!

Cooking on Tuesday night was a little rough for me. My plan was to make baked tofu in a cashew cream sauce over jasmine rice, steamed Brussel sprouts and baby carrots with fennel, and a salad incorporating some of the crazy lettuce we had bought at the San Francisco Farmer's Market on Saturday.

The biggest problem I faced was the time crunch. It was pouring rain most of the day, so my errands took longer than usual to carry out. I also think the damp cold weather irritated my foot. I was walking terribly slow with an obnoxious limp. By the time I got home I had about a half an hour to make everything. After I put on the rice and started the veggies in the steamer, I realized there was no way the rice would be done in time. I had to improvise, so I put on water for the rice noodles that I remembered I had. Those take a few minutes and are 100% brown rice, so I figured that would be an adequate substitute.

I doubled the recipe for the cashew sauce (I had found online at http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=17310.0), with less water because that was all of the starchy water left from the pasta and three times more garlic, just because. In a medium size skillet I sautéed large pieces of red onion and the Savory baked tofu I cut into cubes. I just bought the tofu already cooked. Then I poured in about half of the cashew sauce and let it reduce about a third in the pan, because I thought it tasted too strong on its own, which I think worked perfectly. However, next time I would reduce more of it and then add the rest of the sauce and reduce it again about a third and save some cashews to garnish the dish. I never made the salad.

Baked tofu in a creamy cashew sauce over rice pasta 

and steamed Brussel sprouts, carrots and fennel

Yesterday, I made a salad with red leaf and just peppered in the weird lettuce we had bought on Saturday. One of the lettuces was a dark maroonish red color and the other one was green with spots the same color of red. Both of them had a strong bitter taste, but mixed with the red leaf lettuce, blue cheese, pine nuts, apples, and grape tomatoes it tasted great. I fried up a package of the Gimme Lean fake sausage with some red onion, poured in a jar of organic spaghetti sauce and threw in the rice we didn't use on Tuesday. I felt very industrious not wasting anything and it all came out great.

So, now it is Thursday and I have no idea what I am going to make for dinner tonight. I am being taunted by the huge bowl of radishes Thomas and I were hypnotized into buying at the Farmer's Market.

Wish me luck!!!