Monday, September 2

Baked Tofu, Colcannon, Roasted Romanesco

Rating: 4.5

We’ve been eating a LOT of potatoes lately since our CSA gave us so many in the final boxes. Most of them are on the small side, which is actually great since that makes them perfect for roasting, using in soups, and of course, mashing. I’ve wanted to try the recipe for colcannon in Color Me Vegan for a while now, so I decided to make that and sort of built the rest of the meal around it. Colcannon is also known as Irish mashed potatoes – the main difference between it and your regular basic mashed potatoes is that it has cabbage in it. The recipe I used substitutes kale for the cabbage, because, well, kale.  You never have to ask me twice to eat kale, so I was all over this one. Anyway, what goes with mashed potatoes, Irish or otherwise? Gravy. There are as many vegan gravy recipes out there as there are vegan mac & cheese recipes, probably more, actually, but I like to make a fast and easy gravy since when I make it, I usually have a lot of other things happening in the kitchen. I can only do just so many things at once in there. The recipe we use is the brown gravy recipe from Happy Herbivore. It’s delicious, fast and simple. If you rock the oil-free thing, and like to keep your mashed potatoes fat-free as well, Happy Herbivore also has a version of Colcannon in the Happy Herbivore Abroad book. So, mashed potatoes, kale, gravy. Check. Since there was gravy for dinner, I went with the Basic Baked Tofu recipe from Appetite for Reduction, one of my best-loved and most-used cookbooks. This tofu recipe is so versatile – it’s great as we had it, just on it’s own with gravy, as well as in sandwiches and salads. Let it marinate for as long as you can so it gets maximum flavor. I like to let it sit for about 8 hours – the marinade is really simple and you can make it in about 5 minutes before work, put the tofu in and then just pop it in the oven when you’re ready to cook. It only needs about half an hour to bake, so you can make your potatoes and gravy at the same time. Even though the potatoes had kale in them, I wanted another veggie with dinner. I’d planned to just steam some broccoli, but when I went to the grocery store earlier in the day, they had Romaneso, or as we call it, Fractal Broccoli. We first tried it in the spring when there was a small head of it in our CSA box. We loved it. All I do with it is toss it with a little olive oil, slat and pepper and then roast it. I just put it in with the tofu this time, but it could have used a little more time – it was a little, tiny bit underdone. Still good, just not quite how I wanted it. So, not a typical Labor Day cook-out type meal, but hearty and homey and just what we needed to cap off a very busy and fun long weekend.