Tea.

When we lived in Ann Arbor, I bought my tea at the food co-op. One corner of the store is entirely filled with bulk herbs, spices, flour, sugar, soap, pasta...er, sort of bulk everything. This includes loose tea.

Every time I go back, I end up at the bulk shelves, filling a paper bag with the best assam I've ever had. Then I take it on the plane to California and proceed to drink it daily until gone. Rationing goes into effect when the bag gets down to 1/4 full. My pinches of tea get smaller; my steeping time gets longer; I occasionally drink darjeeling or green tea first thing in the morning. Then I run out of tea.

When we first moved to California, we discovered a huge Asian supermarket called Golden Phoenix within walking distance of our apartment. They had a complete aisle filled with nothing but tea. Granted, the tea was almost 100% bagged--even the tins turned out to contain a stack of tea bags--but this was ok. We could try a hundred brands of Asian tea we'd never seen before! We bought 100-count boxes of oolong and china green for $4 apiece. I drank them every day for months. I may not have had my loose tea, but it was certainly workable.

At Golden Phoenix, remodeling signs went up. They stayed up for several months. Then they disappeared, replaced by huge placards from the leasing agent. Fabulous. We ran out of our tea stash in about a month.

Now what? I wised up the last time I was in Ann Arbor, and bought the biggest bag of tea I'd ever seen. It's currently half full. The time has come to find a new source of tea.

You wouldn't think this was a problem in the famously, stereotypically food-oriented Bay area, but it is. My normal stores here do have some bulk bins, but they're nothing like the food co-op's. At best you can get spices and grains; tea is out of the question. That's what I would prefer: loose, bulk tea that I can shovel into the same tins every time. Whole chamomile heads. Intact leaves. Tea I can inhale before I decide to buy. Yes.

So the only loose tea vendor I know of is at the Stanford Mall. As you might infer from the words "Stanford Mall," however, it's far too expensive to actually patronize. I suppose I should make the effort to get up to the city and explore, or at least find another interesting grocery here in the suburbs. Maybe one of the hundred coffeeshops around has tea for sale as well. In the meantime, I suppose I'll have to have to rely on Twinings, Pompadour, and The Internet.

Experimental barbecue sauce

We had a slab of tofu sitting around waiting for someone to use it. So tofu is hard to cook well, even hard to cook edibly. I also don't especially like tofu. However, it was there, and demanded to be eaten NOW or else it would rot among the cheese and yogurt. Because leftover tofu belongs in the spot with cheese and yogurt, apparently.

Ok. We'd had dry-fried Indonesian tofu the day before, so we couldn't have it again. We'd failed spectacularly the last time we tried to make sesame tofu. Stirfry isn't that interesting, and tofu never gets a good texture in a stirfry anyway.

I hit on seared marinated tofu. The marinade? Barbecue sauce. So you might assume that we had a bottle of a good sauce lying around, or at least some A1. No. I wanted to make the barbecue sauce myself.

This is not so hard, or so unheard-of. What happens at (or probably before) barbecue cookoffs? The contestants clearly can't use premade sauce--that'd be really generic, and besides, what if the judge recognized it? Impossible! So everyone makes their own secret sauce, swathes their pork belly in a quart of it, and hopes for the best. I can do that, even if there is no pork belly within a mile of my refrigerator, ever. I looked up some sample recipes, made a list of necessary ingredients, and started experimenting. My results were sweet and caramelized, almost raisiny--next time we're certainly going to have to add more hot spices--and quite good on the tofu.

Barbecue sauce

1/4 yellow onion
cooking oil
some mustard powder, black pepper, red pepper flakes
about 3/4 cup ketchup
2 spoonfuls molasses
1/2 spoon white vinegar
couple good glugs of vermouth
1 spoonful spicy brown mustard
maybe a cup of water
pinch salt
a little lemon juice

Mince your onion within an inch of its life. Throw it in a pan--not too wide, like mine, but a little saucepan--with a glug of cooking oil of your choice. Add some mustard powder, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, and cook everything on low until the onion is sweet and melty. This will take a while. Go do something else while it's cooking. However, remember to check on it as well--I burned the hell out of my first pan. It was awesome. Spicing: I used only a couple shakes of each spice, but in the future, I'd definitely use more. The mustard was not such an issue, since I added some actually mixed mustard later, but red pepper flakes? I want LOTS of those.

When your onion is sufficiently soft, add all your other ingredients but vermouth and stir to mix. I didn't measure at all here, which was possibly a mistake. Ketchup should predominate the mix, closely followed by water. The rest are all spicing components and should be added according to taste. The problem there is: who knows what your tastes are if you've never made barbecue sauce before? The solution: add spicing components slowly, and taste your results continually. I would also say smell your results continually, but I don't want anyone to end up with a sinusful of vinegar fumes like I did. Do the chemlab thing and waft.

Let things cook on low, with the pan lid on, for a good half-hour at least. You may want to stir occasionally, check on the texture, and let some steam escape. Eventually your mixture will mellow to a raisiny (again) brown-red color, and thicken to a nice saucy consistency. If you have a stick blender, you may want to puree those onions into the rest of the sauce. I don't have one, so I just took things off and let them cool.

So we come to the tofu part.


Seared marinated tofu

slab tofu
barbecue sauce
a little more vermouth
uh, pan and spatula

for presentation:
wheat bread
green onion

Cut the tofu into 1/2 inch thick cutlets and press it, if you haven't done so already. Trim it into 1-person servings and marinate in the cooled sauce for at least an hour. I left mine overnight, as we were getting up to the two in the morning area and I really wanted a quesadilla right then anyway. When you're done marinating, heat a wide saute pan on medium-high. Slap the tofu into the heated pan and sear for a few minutes on each side. Throw in a glug of vermouth and let it steam away.

In the meantime, toast some wheat bread, one piece for each serving of tofu. Chop up the greens of a green onion or two. I love those greens. When everything is done, slide a slab of tofu onto each slice of bread and top with copious onion. Eat with a fork, or top with more toasty bread and eat like a hot sandwich if you are so inclined.

Sammich time

Today the kitchen was bare, and yet I still had to make and eat a lunch at some point. Often in this situation I end up just eating bread and cheese, but not this time, since we were actually out of cheese! Oh no! Such a thing rarely happens, because we eat all kinds of cheese. So what could I do instead? I rummaged around in the cabinets, becoming more and more horrified by our lack of basic staples (no peanut butter?!), until I came up with this: the mushroom sandwich.

I was kind of dubious here. How could a mushroom sandwich be enough to fuel me through a day of work with highly energetic kids? I thought I'd probably have to go buy some sort of last-minute drugstore supplement, like string cheese or saltines. Then I realized that there was cream cheese in the work refrigerator.

Mushroom sandwich

2 or 3 big button mushrooms
1 green onion's greens
wheat bread
decent mustard
cream cheese
black pepper

Sandwiches are easy. Cut your mushrooms into thick slices and your onion greens into 3-inch strips, so as to fit inside the bread. Mustard up one slice of bread; cream cheese and pepper the other. Layer the mushrooms and onion greens on the bread, top with the other slice, and eat.

Some people may be into toasted sandwiches. I am generally not one of them. I think that the softness of the bread is one of the essential things about a sandwich like this, especially one relying on such a soft filling (cream cheese, although I guess mushrooms are kind of soft...I would call them something else, like "chewy" or "robust"). It's very comforting to eat something so soft, and besides, it doesn't rip the skin off the roof of your mouth like a toasted sandwich would do. There: my major issue with sandwiches, exposed!! ! Gracious. Now it's going to be on the 11 o'clock news. I'm going to have to start wearing horrendous dark sunglasses and drinking eight dollar half-caf lattes, or something.

Broccoli mushroom butter pasta

Children, this is a butter vehicle.
Broccoli mushroom butter pasta.

1 shallot
3-5 cloves garlic
1 small crown broccoli
at least 6 or 8 mushrooms
2/3 box fusilli pasta
romano cheese
olive oil and butter
salt, pepper, basil, and red pepper flakes

Put on the water for your pasta.

Heat some olive oil in a wide frying pan. Chop up your shallot and garlic, and add them to the oil. Add some basil and some red pepper flakes. Toss and cook on low-medium. Ooh! Delicious! And we haven't even gotten to any substantial anything yet!

Dissect your crown of broccoli into small, pleasing bits. Add some chopped stem if it's edibly tender, or even peel the stalk and use it as well. Chop up your mushrooms into large irregular oblongs. I like a variety of pieces for this business.

In the meantime, put on your pasta. If you're using something less robust than fusilli, wait a little longer to put it on. You know how to cook pasta.

Add your broccoli and mushrooms to your shallot and garlic. By now you may notice that your pan is looking a little dry. Add some more olive oil. Add some butter for good measure. I like butter.

Cook everything on medium to low until tender and voluptuous. Salt a little; pepper a lot. It looks like it needs some more butter. Add some more butter. You want those mushrooms to soak it up into a vast pit of buttery goodness. Butter.

Your pasta should be done at just about the same time as the vegetables. Drain it and toss immediately into the frying pan. Stir everything up to make sure you have enough oil and butter. Not enough? Add a little more butter.

Serve, laced heavily with grated romano cheese.

OMG
I FEEL HAPPY

A tiny martini

After two weekends of crazy traveling, we spent today in complete collapse. We made tea, played video games, and eventually went downstairs to take a look at the top of the fridge and figure out what to drink. What to drink was a tiny martini.

Normally "a tiny martini" sounds like a ridiculous affectation out of a prewar Britain novel. These, however, were in tiny glasses, and so could take "tiny" as an actual descriptor. Mine could also take the descriptor "dirty," which is how I like my martini as a general rule.

Dirty martini

dry vermouth
gin
olive juice
olive

You know how to make a martini. Put a drop or two of dry vermouth in your glass, top with however much gin you want, and add a fat green cocktail olive. Dirty martinis just require a bit of olive juice along with the olive. No problem. What else could you possibly do with the brine in the olive jar?

John prefers the pink gin, another minor variation. This one seems even more stereotypical: you can just see a bunch of imperialist officers sitting around India with glasses of these, and maybe a few gin and tonics for qood quininic measure, sweating profusely and trying to ignore the thought of potential uprisings.

Pink gin

bitters
gin
lemon peel

Shake three or four drops of bitters into your glass. Add gin and lemon peel, twisted to release the oil. The bitters will turn your gin a lovely light salmon pink.

If we weren't such lazy, lazy heathens, we would probably shake our martinis with ice before drinking. But we are lazy, and besides John generally has the cocktail shaker full of water and lime. So we add ice instead. Then we get distracted and forget to drink, and our martinis slowly dilute and condense until we remember them again.