Farm Kitchen Chronicles: Garlic-Chili Tofu With Veggies

It's all about the sauce!

I have a love/hate relationship with tofu. When I was vegetarian, and later vegan, I really overdid it. When Alex and I lived at the vegan co-op, I did a ton of tofu scrambles (for breakfast or dinner), tofu tacos, and noodle soups with tofu.

For a while, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing in the kitchen. I didn’t have much knowledge about nutrition yet, and I had one vegan cookbook to really teach me the ropes (and encourage my tofu overdoing, I suppose).

Too much tofu is not ideal; soy, though very nutritious, can be hard to digest for many people, unless it is fermented soy, like miso. I pretty much stopped eating tofu when I worked at my first farm job in Texas and started butchering chickens and goats—my strict vegetarianism was over at that point, and tofu just fell to the sidelines. I actually kind of just—well, forgot about it.

Fast-forward to visiting my parents. Though I usually prefer to cook for everyone, my sister, coming in from Chicago and seeing my exhaustion, insisted on buying us all Thai food take-out. Since Thai take-out basically does not exist in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, I hadn’t eaten something like that in a very long time, so when she asked me what protein I wanted, I went with my usual avoiding-industrial-meat self and picked tofu. Eating take-out with chopsticks out of a white paper carton in my pajamas, while watching bad reality TV, really made me feel nostalgic for my days living in an apartment in Wicker Park, but also made me feel nostalgic for tofu. Though still not my favorite vegetarian protein (I prefer to cook a lot of dried beans, plus tempeh when I can find a good brand), I realized then that maybe I need to give tofu a chance again. As I slurped that greasy food, I thought, I actually love tofu!