Three Little Words

This past weekend, I cooked up some delicious short ribs using Mario Batali's recipe. God, they were good. The pumpkin orzo - ehhh. A little weird. But then, I didn't follow the recipe exactly because I wasn't in the mood to wrestle with winter squash, so I used canned puree. Neal seemed to like it, but heck, orzo is pasta and that's all he needs.

After the meaty feast, I thought we should have something more veg-ful on Sunday. So I dragged out the box of tofu that was dangerously close to its sell-by date, marinated it in some Makoto Ginger Dressing (man, that stuff is gooooood), and rolled it in breadcrumbs for a nice pan fry. To appease the non-tofu-lover in my house, I made some peanut noodles with leftover bowtie pasta.

I had also picked up some baby bok choy at Wegman's the other day and decided to braise it. I found several recipes for braised bok choy on the Web, with cooking times ranging from 8 to 30 minutes. I decided to wing it. I had leftover beef stock from the short ribs, so used that as my braising liquid and added a pinch of soy. The result - ugly brownish bok choy. But it tasted yummy, and was nice and tender. I'd do it again, but use good old-fashioned Kosher salt in place of the soy, to prevent excess discoloration.

To round off the meal, I sliced up and simply salted a yellow tomato. When I plated my mess meal, I squeezed a squiggle of Sriracha under the tofu, and added a small dollop of Hoisin to the side, just in case Neal felt the need to mask the taste.

He polished everything off and then said those three words I never thought I'd hear from him.

"More tofu, please."