After Dinner Thoughts

Well, tonight's dinner was definitely an adventure!

Pressing the tofu was a first for me. I found an article on About.com describing what to do. I used a baking sheet, folded two paper towels per tofu brick, put the tofu on top of the folded paper towels on the baking sheet. Then folded another paper towel, put a cutting sheet on top and used the Joy of Cooking and Passionate Vegetarian (books) as weights. Left it for 15 minutes, replaced the paper towels, and left it for another 15 minutes. The rest of the tofu prep was pretty easy.

Then, I prepared the barbecue sauce! It was good, however there were a lot of ingredients. I don't know if it's worth making your own barbecue sauce when there are so many commercially available. Maybe if it's your own secret recipe.

I also made steamed green beans with carrots. They were fine. This was kind of a dressed down version of green bean and mushroom medley - a family favorite. I didn't have any mushrooms and only used a tiny bit of onion. I talked about this recipe on December 18, 2009.

Everything to this point was fairly straight forward and easy. Then I got to the Hotel Cordon Corn Bread. The recipe itself is not too bad. The trouble came when I didn't have a 10 inch diameter pan that was 3 inches deep. This turned out to be a problem. Instead I used an 11 1/2 inch diameter pan that was only 1 1/2 inches deep. The recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of baking powder along with the flour and corn meal. You may have guessed it - I had an overflow in the oven. YUCK! I became aware of this when the dish had been in the oven for 15 minutes, I opened the oven to add the tofu in sauce into the oven to bake alongside the corn bread for a final 15 minutes. The overflow of course started burning. We turned the hood fan on which helped; I was worried the fire detectors would go off, we lucked out there. So, if I ever make this again I will make sure I make it in a deep dish. It was really tasty though and everyone enjoyed it.


I also made a lemon pudding pie. Used a store-bought pie crust; baked it and let it cool. The filling was made with 2 small boxes of vanilla pudding, 1 3/4 cups 1% milk, 6 oz frozen lemonade (thawed), and 8 oz cool whip (thawed). The pie was scrumptious!

Overall dinner was a success even if it was a little messy. I've started thinking about what to have next week since it's Mother's Day. I asked Mom what she'd like and she said it's too far in the future and she was too full to know right now. I'll come up with some ideas and run them past her this week. I'll let you know what we decide.