One of the crappiest things about having class Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, Ukiah practice on Wednesdays and usually some social event on Fridays is that I have no time to cook, which is why I’m putting up some backlogged recipes. I made this back in February with black bean soup, but I figured I’d spare you another hot soup recipe now that it’s July, and just post the tortilla bowls.

Tofu and White Bean Tortilla Bowls

You will need:
1 lb firm or extra firm tofu, diced into bite-size pieces
1 can white beans (I think I used navy beans in this because they are my favorite, but cannellini or great northern would be fine also), drained and rinsed
1 clove of garlic, minced
Spinach
Salsa of yer likin’
Tortillas (fajita-size, I believe)
Cumin
Chili powder
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Cilantro

My goal for this recipe was to make an edible tortilla bowl, like the ones they sell at Mexican chains like Qdoba (as my friend Nikki says, “It’s a bowl. That you can EAT!”) for salads and the like, but without frying it.

What I did was spray the inside of two deep cereal bowls with cooking spray, and jammed the tortilla down in there to fit the shape of the bowl. After drizzling the tortilla with olive oil and seasoning it with salt and pepper, I stuck something heavy (that, for the life of me, I can’t remember now—a rock? My cat? I’m not sure. Oh, stop writing the nasty email right this second, I was joking.) wrapped in aluminum foil in the bottom to hold it down, and baked it in a 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes. The result? Ehh. It looked nice, but wasn’t much to write home about. I guess sometimes frying things is really the only way to do them.
So anyway, in a bowl, toss the tofu with the beans, a glug of olive oil, and a healthy sprinkling of cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper.

In a hot skillet, add another glug of olive oil and cook your garlic for just a minute. Dump in the tofu and bean mixture and heat, stirring occasionally, until the tofu is cooked to your liking. Throw in a handful of spinach (a prize to the first person to comment with the number of times I have used the phrase “handful of spinach” on this blog—seriously) and stir until it wilts. Take it off the heat and divide between your tortilla bowls.
Top each with a spoonful of salsa. Rob and I went through a phase over the winter where we were obsessed with Frontera brand tomatillo salsa:

So I used that and then sprinkled the top with a little more chili powder for color and topped it with cilantro. It was pretty good, but I guess the point is that you could use any kind of spices or salsa that you wanted. Next up= learning to fry a damn tortilla bowl. We’ll work on it.

Aaaaand the close-up:

This recipe was adapted from one I read in last month’s Bon Appetit for Chicken-Lime Fajitas. It translated nicely to being vegan and was totally delicious, though it left me with a lot of cabbage to use up (that’ll be posted later.)

Tofu-and-Lime Tacos

You will need (to serve 2):

Taco shells or tortillas (I’m a soft girl, Rob’s a crunchy guy.)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Olive oil
Green onions
1 lime (for juice and zest, get extras if you want to garnish the plate)
3/4ths block extra firm tofu
Red cabbage
1 avocado
Cilantro
Salt and pepper

In a bowl, mix about 2 TBS olive oil with your garlic, the juice and zest of one lime and some salt and pepper.
Now, slice your tofu into finger-sized lengths. Whose fingers? I dunno, your fingers? You figure it out. Place the tofu pieces in a large Ziploc bag and pour the lime mixture over. Leave a little bit of the liquid in the bowl, you’re gonna use it later. Toss and shake the bag until the tofu is nice and coated. Throw (you can gently place, if that suits you better) the bag into the fridge to marinate for an hour or so. Turn the bag over once if you think about it to make sure it marinates evenly.

Once it’s been in there awhile, grab your trusty big skillet (you can carefully pull it from your closet, if you want. Why are cooking terms so violent??) and start it heating over medium-high heat on your stove. Once it’s nice and hot, dump the contents of the tofu bag in, getting as much liquid in the pan as possible. I think I actually added a bit of water to the mostly-empty bag and dumped that in the pan in order to get all the oil and lime juice out. To the skillet, add some chopped green onions if you so desire. This is what it looked like in my pan:

Cook until, well, it’s the doneness that you like in your tofu. What are you really looking for in tofu? When you find the right doneness, you’ll know.
While the tofu is cooking, slice two leaves of red cabbage into strips. You could grate it, I guess, but I liked the slightly thicker strips that slicing provided. Place the strips in the bowl with the leftover lime marinade and toss them around with about a TBS of chopped cilantro, to just very lightly coat.

Then check on your tofu. Is it done yet? Is it all you dreamed it would be?

It probably isn’t. So, take your biggest knife and slice around the pit of the avocado so you can essentially break it in half. To get the pit out, WHACK it with the knife so the blade is stuck in the pit (this needs to be violent) like so:

This illustration confuses me, as I’ve never seen an avocado so tiny as compared to those giant fingers. But you get the point!

Now your tofu is probably done. Remove it from the heat and arrange tacos as follows: taco/tortilla, tofu, cabbage, avocado. Finish the whole thing with some chopped cilantro.

Here are mine in tortillas:

And here are Rob’s in hard tacos:

It’s been awhile since we made these, but if I remember correctly, Rob’s only beef with them was that the cabbage consistency was a little TOO crunchy when raw, especially in big chunks. I personally liked it, but if that sounds like it would be a problem for you, by all means throw the strips in the pan and cook them around with the tofu until they are done to your liking.
Then again, what are you really looking for in cabbage?

Wahoo (Fish) Tacos with Lime-Garlic-Cilantro Crema

So, in an effort to use up more of the aforementioned wahoo, I decided to make tacos. Now, when I say, “Let’s have tacos for dinner,” Rob thinks Taco Bell. That’s not what I had in mind. Traditional Mexican cooking does not include melted orange gunk, and I wasn’t about to cook up a pan of Grade D ground beef. Words that Rob never wants to hear in reference to what he’s eating: lime-garlic-cilantro crema. Oh well. It was good! This was also adapted from a Cooking Light recipe.

I cut the fish into fillets, which is one of the most disgusting tasks ever. I’d rather scoop the litter box with my bare hands. Into the raw fish, I rubbed a mixture of spices. The ratio was probably something like 1 part cumin, 1 part coriander, 1 part chili powder, ½ part garlic powder, ¼ part crushed red pepper and just a few shakes/grinds of salt and pepper. You could definitely up the spice factor on this with more red pepper. The fish was baked at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes, until it flaked easily with a fork (the best way to tell when most kinds of fish are done.) Into a bowl went the cooked fish, and I broke it up into bite-size chunks with a fork.

Split the fish between some warmed tortillas. I stupidly bought the fajita kind, but you should get the smallest kind possible. Add some shredded romaine (shred it yourself instead of buying the pre-shredded kind, it tastes so much crisper) on top of each and top with lime-garlic-cilantro crema. For this, mix equal parts sour cream and mayonnaise (Mayonnaise freaks me out a bit, but I happened to have some Veganaisse around, and it worked fine) and then equal parts of thinly sliced green onions and chopped cilantro. Add garlic, as much as you’d like, along with a few big squeezes of lime juice and, even more importantly, some grated lime rind. Mix it up and adjust it to taste.

In the pictures, you can’t really see the crema too well, but that’s because I got the world’s largest tortillas and by the time they were done, I was ready to just devour them, so we only got one picture before I had a taco in my mouth.

I served this with a corn and black bean salsa/salad, which was tossed with cilantro, lime juice, olive oil and a bit of salt.

I liked this one a lot— you had to tear a bunch of the tortilla off in order to get at the good stuff inside, but I thought the tanginess of the crema was a nice compliment to the slightly spicy fish.

Rob was “pleasantly surprised,” which is pretty much the best compliment you can hope to get when feeding him something he’s never tried before. He gave the tacos 8 hot dogs, and the salsa 6 (because he really only seems to like liquid-y salsas whereas I am more of a chunky salsa kind of girl), so we’ll even it out to 7.

You know what the worst part is? Right after I made this and effectively finished the wahoo, we went to visit Rob’s family, at which point his stepmother sent us home with another 10 pound bag of it. And a 10 pound bag of mahi-mahi. Looks like I need to come up with some good fish recipes.

Got any you’d like to submit?
Send ‘em to food@thefoodsex.com