Self-Taught Homework #12: You & tofu bond over Eldest Daughter Syndrome
You rediscover holding boundaries on time while you spend a week home alone.
Tofu’s superpower is its ability to absorb whatever you give it.
You can’t tell if you admire or worry for tofu.
The meatless protein recipes you find primarily feature tofu, and a disproportionate amount of those recipes come from Instagram (sadly).
When you scan a private folder of saved Instagram cooking videos, you search for one recipe you swore you saved about a one-pot-looking tofu medley. Your worst eating preferences reflect back to you (double sadly). You are surprised to find yourself remotely caught off-guard at the amount of cheese, bread, and cake recipes that crossed your threshold onto “ooh, save that” territory.
Tofu, and its generous soy lineage, reflect an eldest daughter energy you find relatable. Soy can disguise into a cream cheese, fried chicken, a smoothie, a tomato sauce. They can spice it up in a mapo tofu dish or heal you with a miso soup.
Without soy, would mainstream vegan eating be feasible? Has soy been carrying the team on their backs the whole time without any glorification? When does tofu have the sexy appeal of cheese, cake, and bread? Never?!
…anyway.
This week, you are home alone. Your boyfriend has a ski trip in Colorado with your friends. The cats are home with you, but they don’t flip laundry or clean their own scarf-and-barf, and they sit on whatever interests you outside of them.
You’re in the first week of your new part-time nannying job (thank goodness thank goodness thank goodness). As you work for a sweet Manhattan family with a six-year-old girl, your caretaking instincts flood in from your own six-year-old memories of feeding bottles and holding your third or fourth siblings as babies. You all were babies, you suppose, but then you watch this six-year-old girl navigate the subway with adult ease.
You watch this new girl—what is the relationship terminology for this: your boss? your client? your “child”?—as she talks about hip bruises and soup dumplings and Taylor Swift’s Grammy speech. She feels like she could be your sister, or you could treat her like your sister, because she’s not afraid to pull the scrunchie out of your ponytail or tell you “My dad said today would be a really good day for ice cream” or asking you to spell I-CUP before laughing and saying she tricked you. You’re comfortable, and you scrub her hair the way you massaged your siblings’ heads.
You like her a lot very quickly, and the buzz of monitoring someone else’s needs feels as natural as breathing. Truly. You don’t know you’re doing it most of the time. When your girl puts her parka hood over her face on the bus after you dropped a little German teddy bear keychain from her backpack into a subway grate (because of course this happens in your first week), you lean over to see why she’s quiet. She replies, “I’m fine.”
That probably means she’s feeling something un-fine—“fine” isn’t a feeling as much as a conversation ender—but you know how it can be easier to not talk about it. Saying you’re fine means you’re handling it alone. You know this feeling as well as you know monitoring everyone else’s needs, because the two sensations of analyzing someone else’s reaction and back-burnering and containing your own discontent are two pulses of the same legume.
Tofu is also fine, in case you were gonna ask.
There are so many reasons you’re grateful for this gig. The family knows you write and wants to support you in the afternoons so you can have your mornings. They’re incredibly sweet. One friend texted you that it sounded like a romantic note in an author interview: “In my twenties, I took a nannying job while I was writing my novel…” You’re flattered at her optimism.
(This doesn’t account for the fear you have of failing, of embarrassing yourself for the invisible audience of judges you want to please with your success. You hear them, sense their puppet strings, though you can’t unroot their ongoing feedback on your ambitions. The oldest story is the one that plays in your head, the one where you’re not moving fast enough and too scared to take a first step.)
The most immediate gratification of this job is the job itself. A schedule with hours in the day that don’t belong to you. An immoveable hinge to work everything else around. You missed the feeling of “coming home from a day’s work.” That sensation of a commute, of stopping at the grocery store to consider dinner options, of dropping your bags at your door. You never really had a job that when you physically leave it, you mentally leave it, too.
It’s so refreshingly normal.
The shoes come off by the front door, and free evenings return. You no longer have the full day ahead of you, the mornings slow and the afternoons swollen with indecision and the evenings tight with all the things you should’ve done earlier. You have a time when you can consider yourself, for better or worse, “off.” You can meet friends who are “off” work around the same time as you are, or you can catch an evening movie.
Taking care of someone else has allowed you to take care of yourself.
On Tuesday night, you walk into a dark Central Park where joggers and bikers flash past under street lights. You listen to your audiobook. The weather has the last of a winter bite to it as it warms into an autumnal transition to spring. You’re walking to watch two Best Picture nominees in a rare, deliciously selfish back-to-back showing in the Lincoln Square AMC, one of which, Zone of Interest, is a German, subtitled film about Auschwitz and a generally tough sell for most people.
You don’t have to sell anyone else on seeing these movies, coordinate with their schedules, or worry that they will resent you the cost of admission if they don’t like it. (No one has ever blamed their company for a bad movie, you think now, but the judges in your head see it differently.) You don’t have to worry if the movie didn’t make them feel good or gave them a headache from being in seats closer to the front. You can just go.
Until your audiobook pauses, your screen with the navigation and movie tickets goes black, and your phone dies.
You stop to think through your options. You can wander until you magically end up at the Lincoln Square AMC twenty minutes away and then barter with a clerk to charge your phone to see the ticket?
Absolutely not.
You walk back the way you came to the subway stop you know, and you go home.
Once you’re back in Brooklyn, an hour later than you would’ve been if you had gone straight home and earlier than you would’ve been if you had gone to the movies, you wander the grocery store for a braised tofu you found on Instagram.
This feels like the easiest way to introduce yourself to tofu. It’s only a sauce. And tofu. You can get to know tofu personally and put her on the main stage before tossing her as an ensemble role in another recipe you have planned.
It turns out, tofu works best under pressure.
It’s common practice and recommended with pressed tofu to cover it with paper towels and place a small saucepan anchored with cans to wring out the tofu. Tofu is an extremely wet ingredient because of its curdling and straining origins (as discussed in Lesson #12).
You place a small pot on top of the tofu and let it sit for thirty minutes. When you come back to it, the paper towels are soaked, but the rectangular shape holds. She’s spongy, light, and easy to whatever you need her to be.
Cutting tofu is almost too easy, and you do cut it in a way you later question. You slice vertically to have long rectangles, then you slice those in half. But then you move your knife parallel to the plate, like you’re dicing an onion or removing the uneven mound of a cake layer, and the tofu pieces roll off your knife. No two tofu blocks end up the same size, and it felt important that you should’ve kept it consistent to make sure they all cook the exact same way.
But what can you do now but roll them in a light coat of flour and fry them in oil?
As you pull together the marinade of soy sauce, garlic, sesame oil, sugar, and water, it looks loose. It doesn’t reduce down to the syrupy texture in the video. You imagine that you missed an ingredient (you opted for red pepper flakes when you couldn’t find gochugaru in the grocery store, and that was your downfall). Throw some more green beans and kimchi in with the tofu to create a bowl effect on your meal, and find some leftover rice in the fridge to sop up the watery sauce.
You settle on your couch, and you are happy with the tofu. It has a fried crunch to it and sponged up the sauce, it provides a soft contrast against the green beans and kimchi’s soggy crunch. The two of you hang out with low expectations. You think you and tofu could do this again sometime in the future.
When you’re out at a comedy show the next night, you fantasize about the leftovers: the minor crunch of the fried tofu, the salty sesame flavor of the sauce, the easy bite after bite. You come home late, after 11 p.m., and it’s waiting for you in the fridge. It’s almost better the second day, since all she’s done since you last talked is absorb, absorb, absorb the remaining sauce.
You get back on the couch, and the cats curl up on your side, and you fall asleep, open-mouthed, and wake up at 2:45 to the lights on and the cats meowing to tell you to get to bed, you got a job tomorrow.
Twenty-eight is the new age where you are excited about no plans on a Friday.
Well, technically, you were supposed to see Zone of Interest, but your phone died—again—before you reached the theater. Even though you packed a phone charger, you still would rather die then ask an AMC employee to plug your phone in for some juice to watch a movie, so you call it quits. Again.
No biggie. You’ll be in the same neighborhood next week, and besides, you have more tofu in the fridge waiting for you.
Earlier this week, you found the only vegan or remotely healthy Instagram recipe you saved. It looks like a delicious, creamy curry, and the content creator has an Australian accent and says casual things like “nooch” and “roasted veg” and “strength trainer on a plant-based diet.”
This dish will flip your health around 180 degrees, you know it.
At first, you’re excited as you walk through the grocery store. As you pick up a cylinder of nutritional yeast and wander the spice racks, you imagine the night ahead of you. Your Kevin McAllister Home Alone fantasy is watching and reading everything as if the night will never end. You’ll stay up until 3 a.m. watching international films with corseted costumes and finishing two copies from a months-long backlog of New Yorker magazines. Scratching anything off that infinitely scroll of things to consume in your free time hovers between productivity and relaxation. Taking a stab or two at the mountain of things you “should” absorb is a type of relief. Someday, you’ll catch up, complete everything, and levitate out of your corporeal form into an orb of infallible knowledge. Like Siri. Until then, you’re stuck in your body on mortal time.
This also goes for recipes. Having a recipe you’d like to try, then actually cooking it, is a head high. To resolve to do something, then do it! Can you imagine?!
Spending your Friday night cooking with a new ingredient doesn’t feel lonely. It feels refreshing. This is for your future self. See you on the other side of Friday, future tofu-guru you!
You pick up a $10 garam masala spice and throw it in your hand basket, and you exhale. A rational version of yourself might question why this has to be an essential, and you counter that someday you might need garam masala, you just can never predict when a recipe will call for this spice. You have a job, but you still do not have money in the casual sense of having money. But walking down a spice aisle or specialty cheese section, you will spend unreasonable money.
The grocery store, as you text your boyfriend from across state lines, is your Lululemon.
Once you’re home, FaceTiming your boyfriend as he packs his ski equipment to come back home, the recipe turns out to be a gigantic hullabaloo. Two trays of roasted veggies? A skillet? A bowl to marinate tofu before adding it? A third tray if you opt for toasting seeds and nuts, a lure you thankfully didn’t fall for in your grocery store haze? Then a blender?! All for a one-pot dish?!
You started cooking at 9 p.m., and you finish closer to 11 p.m. with a second dishwasher load going.
It tastes…fine.
The roasted cauliflower and sweet potatoes provide a great, easy snack while the rest of the food and devices require your attention. Puréeing the butternut squash was high-maintenance of the squash, and you resented it when your new four-cup food processor is too tiny for all flesh of a full roasted butternut squash, the sweet potatoes, and the roasted “cauli.” Despite all the spice seasoning, it’s under-seasoned a bit.
Between tofu cubes, sweet potatoes, chickpeas, cauliflower, and butternut squash in your abridged version of this recipe, there are a lot of ingredients in this kitchen, and you tried to please all of them anyway you could.
Poor tofu didn’t get enough time to marinate. Tofu chills in the mash-up of chaos and says, “Don’t worry about me! I can just soak up the butternut squash purée!”
God bless tofu.
You don’t want to tell tofu, but as you toast a piece of sourdough bread to match the golden bread swiveled through the creamy curry in the original plant-trainer video, you mostly wanted the bread.
Back to who you were! A gluten fiend!
You thought tofu would change you, but was your relationship based on a lie?
You would like to be healthier, you swear! You promise, as if you’re bowing to the Ghost of Christmas Future, that you will eat more produce, incorporate healthy protein into your life, unpack your reliance on grains!
Sometimes, you just fall for a recipe because of its buttery bread.
You and tofu can hang, but you love bread.
Is that such a crime?
Without that little bread swivel, would you have tried this recipe? Would you have tried out all the techniques you have practiced over the last three months (though usually not all at once for one meal) otherwise? Were you this mad at butternut squash when you had to use just as many elements for the butternut squash pasta? (Yes, you were.)
As you perch on your couch, sourdough toast and tofu medley and wine glass across a few surfaces and Nim in your lap, you forgive yourself. Your love of bread, the person you always have been, introduced you to something new. There’s no shame or judgement in that. In this moment, in your empty apartment, you turn off the panel of judges, dip the bread into the dish, and press play.
This was more than fine!