Weekly Food Prep - If At First You Don't Succeed

In my previous entry about using up what I have on hand, I mentioned a block of tofu. It was previously frozen, which alters its texture and makes it better for certain applications. The trouble is I didn't want to do those applications, but did want to use it up.

So, I tried to make it into a kind of spread by seasoning it with some salt, pepper, lemon juice, nutritional yeast and garlic powder, and pureeing it smooth. I didn't care for the result; it was unpleasantly grainy, likely because of it having been frozen.

It sat in the fridge like that for a couple of days while I kept cogitating what to do with it. I considered everything, from using it as a ricotta analog in a lasagna or cannelloni, to making pasta or gnocchi out of it, to just sucking it up and eating it on sandwiches.

Nothing was clicking. And then, thinking about a small portion of mashed potato that was also lingering, along with a few spoonfuls of homemade carrot ginger dressing, the solution presented itself: soup. Put the tofu, the potato and the dressing in a blender with some water, maybe a dash of chicken bouillon, and whiz the whole thing smooth. Make a nice potato soup that can be had hot or cold, and that uses everything up.

That's what I did. And it worked.

The lesson is that unless you've concocted something utterly inedible (which I also did this week*), there's almost always some way to save a dish.

*I made a batch of kvass, the first stage of which involves soaking toasted bread and dried fruit overnight, followed by removing and squeezing out the bread before pitching the ferment. I had the thought to try using the wet bread to make some kind of reconstituted cake, which might have been possible, but not the way I did it.