It's a texture thing

You can't win 'em all.

I would really love it if every single dish I made was pure gastro-magic. I really would. But everybody makes mistakes in the kitchen, sometimes really dreadful ones. I made one this afternoon resulting in a slimy brown bowl of soy protein,and one cranky, hungry, gastro-junkie.

Imagine a marinade based in agave nectar (left over from my previous adventure with Lucky Shrimp. An auspicious start I thought). I'm going for a sweet and sour Asian thing today, so I mix it with some soy sauce (Cheap soy sauce from the convenience store downstairs. Second ingredient corn syrup. Mistake number 1). Then I add fresh grated ginger, ground Szechuan peppercorns, a little cayenne. So far we're doing okay, aside from my questionable taste in soy sauce. I drain and dry a block of tofu and cut it up into cubes, and toss it with the marinade. Now some would argue that using tofu at all was my second mistake, and after the resulting mass of grossness, I might be inclined to agree with you. This whole thing might have gone a lot better had I opted for spareribs over soy, but I had the tofu on hand, and according to every vegetarian I've ever met TOFU IS DELICIOUS! (Liars. Sauce is delicious. Peanuts and chiles and garlic are delicious. Tofu is packing material.)

Anyway, I don't marinade the tofu long enough, because, hey, I'm hungry now. So hungry in fact that I drop some Canola oil in a pan, let it heat up for all of about 7 seconds (Mmm, lukewarm Canola oil...) and I drop in the tofu, cold marinade and all. Now instead of sizzling and caramelizing and crisping up on the outside, my tofu is swimming in a bath of warm Canola oil and cheap soy sauce. It's not sizzling. It's just sitting there, and I'm beginning to believe this was a bad idea, but I continue. I turn the tofu until it's picked up a bit of dark caramel color on all sides, and sprinkle the whole mess with black sesame seeds (Another mistake. Contributes nothing flavor wise and looks like bugs). I drop it in a bowl WITH THE OIL (Why???) and dig in.

Ugh.

The tofu's not crispy. It's slimy, unctuous, just warm enough to be extra special gross. This dish reminds me instantly of all the people I've ridiculed over the years for turning up their noses at some new dish, citing, "I have this thing about texture." (A lame excuse for not trying something new if ever I've heard one, but with this sluggish pile of brown tofu in front of me, I'm beginning to understand). The marinade, treated with any care at all would have been perfectly edible, but as it is, it's clumsy, sticky, salty. I've done a terrible thing. This is really, really bad.

I almost didn't write about this particular culinary adventure. I figured I could go on portraying myself as queen of the kitchen, a wooden spoon in one hand and a perfectly ripe heirloom tomato in the other. But the potential for self-deprecating humor proved too much, and this dish was just too bad to let it go without comment, and so I am sharing. We all make missteps in the kitchen, some worse than others. The key is to recover as best you can, and if you happen to be cooking for company, and the mistake is particularly foul, have your local pizzeria on speed dial and an extra bottle of wine on hand. This lunch was particularly bad, (although only for me, thank God) to the point that it has done a number on my culinary confidence, at least for the day, and my adventurous dinner plans might find themselves toned down in favor of some comforting old standard recipe, something I know I can't screw up. Something heavy.

After all. I did skip lunch.