general tso's tofu

has anyone out there read the fortune cookie chronicles by jennifer 8. lee? well, in it, along with trying to find the origin of the fortune cookie, she seeks out general tso's chicken all over the world in an effort to understand chinese cuisine in the diaspora. it has nothing to do with this recipe, but making it made me think of the book--which i read a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed. i would recommend it to anyone who is interested in food history/culture books :)

anyway, this was SO delicious--and the leftovers were fantastic the next day (just not as crispy). and then i even wanted it again. oh, and i notoriously hate chinese food. but i was looking for a new tofu recipe and this struck my fancy. below is a conglomeration of several recipes i looked up.


general tso's tofu

1 lb. extra firm tofu
~ 1/2c cornstarch
vegetable oil for frying
3 chopped green onions
1 tbsp minced ginger
2 cloves garlic
2/3c vegetable broth
2 tbsp wheat-free tamari
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 1/2 tsp gluten free hoisin sauce
1/2-3/4 tsp red pepper flakes
sesame seeds

1. press and drain tofu. pat dry and cut into 1/2" chunks. toss tofu in a bowl with the cornstarch (reserve some cornstarch to thicken the sauce at the end--just set aside in a separate bowl about 1 1/2 tbsps).
2. heat oil in a non-stick skillet and shallow fry. i really sauteed until nice and crispy on about four sides. that seemed to cook all the cornstarch and make it nice and crunchy. it may take 2 batches--then remove and drain on paper towels
3. heat a small amount of oil in the pan. add green onions, ginger, and garlic. cook until fragrant--DO NOT BURN GARLIC.
4. in a separate bowl, whisk together broth, tamari, sugar, vinegar, hoisin and red pepper. remove a couple of tbsps and mix with reserved cornstarch. add liquid mix to pan--do not add cornstarch mixture until the rest is warm.
5. mix cornstarch mixture into pan, stirring constantly until thickened.
6. add tofu and coat evenly.
7. serve with broccoli over brown rice. garnish with sesame seeds.

no judgment please :)

i went to see bon jovi, in concert, at gillette stadium in foxborough--and i had a great time! i was a HUGE bon jovi fan back in the day. slippery when wet was the first cassette i ever bought for myself--probably with the little pocket money i would get from my grammy or grampy (thanks guys!). but i was in love, and tunes like "you give love a bad name" just took my breath away and made me dance in that crazy way that 7-year-olds dance. let's not forget, too, that jon bon jovi himself was quite attractive in the hair band circuit, and is still quite attractive!

anyway, i bought all his other cassettes as a child--went back to runaway and then the self-titled bon jovi and then moved on to new jersey, which i have since lost to deterioration (i still have both bon jovi and slippery when wet on cassette and listen to them every once in a while! they're not sounding their best...). then he went solo, then back to the band, and then songs like "bed of roses" came out that made me cringe and long for the old bon jovi. but by the time one wild night came out, i was a fan again. so now that they're back on another stadium tour, i had to go. the current album is called the circle and it was pretty good. but of course, a lot of old favorites were played!

from the 80s: "you give love a bad name," "dead or alive," "livin' on a prayer," "bad medicine," "i'll be there for you"
from the 90s: "keep the faith," "someday i'll be saturday night"
and some new greats from the 00s: my favorite is "it's my life"

so don't judge me for my love of rock and roll (or pop music or anything else that make lee and beth say that i must hate music). it's just another stop in my eclectic music tastes! :)

oh, and check out the article from boston.com on the concert. i agree with what they say, for the most part--the "circle" of the stage was little used, and kid rock just sang a bunch of covers with a couple of his songs--though he had pyrotechnics and bon jovi didn't. except kid rock also gave me horrifying images of pam anderson in my head which took some time to subside... but i do still say--a fun show :)

spying moms, sherlock holmes and the KJV

what do these all have in common? nothing, except that i'm reading them...

spying moms:
so i read a book called spymom by val agosta. i was drawn to it because the back cover said something about this woman being a big fan of nancy drew, and when she was diagnosed and then recovered from breast cancer, she decided that she would live the life she wanted. so she wanted to become a private investigator. this book is a true story and i won't reveal too much, but some of it is pretty funny! some of it is also disappointing because val felt that because she had cancer she deserved special treatment. while some may think that also, it's sad because her two p.i. partners, first her sister and then a woman named mollie, either had cancer or other chronic illnesses themselves. val put her illness up front and center, even when mollie complained because mollie also felt ill--val's excuse was that cancer got them information. anyway, it's a small thing but it just got annoying throughout the story. it is an inspirational story, not my normal kind of book--very christian and a little preachy--but entertaining. and just about anything with a nancy drew link will draw me in :)

sherlock holmes:
well, i'm still reading the 2nd volume of the large annotated edition i checked out. we're on month 7 of reading sherlock holmes this year! i'll finish them all by december 31, i will...

kjv:
i'm reading 3 books on the kjv and the kjv itself, partly for an exhibit to go in my space at work at the end of the year and partly for a challenge. the 3 books on the kjv are for the exhibit--i have to research and come up with some ideas for a small exhibit to go in my library by the end of the year for the 400th anniversary of the kjv. the bible itself? well, i've never read the kjv, it was so influential in the evolution of the english language, the founding of america, and english language history in general. it also happens to be the bible that christian scientists use most frequently so this is also relevant to work. but i'm reading it out of sheer interest, pleasure and of course, intellectual pursuit. i was a religion major in college, took many religion classes and read many parts and many versions of the bible, but not the kjv. my time has come.

my new home

here is our new home in somerville. enjoy!

hallway:

front room (we will use as our library eventually):


kitchen:

we repainted this room, what we are using as our living room, but the previous owners had as a dining room. we like it this way! before...

and after!

bedroom:

and finally bathroom. the might just be the smallest bathroom i've ever lived with. the toilet is behind the door:

we also have 1/3 of the basement, but i didn't take pictures. it's not that glamorous. but here is our little backyard and patio :) we share these with the upstairs neighbors, as well.


fyi: we will actually be repainting the entire place eventually. the old owners tended toward very dark and brown-ish colors (except the bedroom). it's not really that we don't like the colors (except the bedroom), but they don't match with our stuff, style, anything really. so we will slowly but surely replace them. the bedroom is next, but there will be some closet renovations happening first. i'll post when that happens!

vacation pics

all right, it's been a lot longer than i thought, but we moved a week ago and it was just the other day that we finally found the camera and all the cords necessary to download pictures. warning, this is a long post :)

so here it is. we began our trip with a laugh in promised land. yes, this is promised land, pa. dear lord, there is not much there, but there is this handy fuel stop!

when we arrived in virginia, we went straight to luray caverns. they are astonishing. this here is "dream lake." this is actually a reflection of the stalactites on the ceiling!


the next day we began our hike of approximately 40 miles of the appalachian trail. lee is pretending to orient us. about 3 miles in, we had a lovely picnic.

our stop for the night: lewis mountain cabins.

hiking the appalachian trail day 2--off for big meadows lodge!

big meadows lodge itself was wonderful, and we had a nice meal in the dining room. then we reposed in the sun room after dinner and played a game of checkers. the only bummer was that they are redoing the porch, so we couldn't sit outside--the porch wraps around this beautiful room. but we did manage to see a great sunset.


hiking the appalachian trail day 3--skyland resort or bust!


and then we capped off the evening with a slice of virginia blackberry ice cream pie (topped with meringue) and then another wonderful sunset.

hiking the appalachian trail day 4--canceled due to broken toe. instead, lee drove me around. here i am with our binoculars, the very same ones we believe we left in the rental car :(

and then driving around through beautiful virginia farm country for the next day and a half and wine tasting.


a good vacation, overall :)

vacation and more

so folks, it's been a while. and i must apologize because this will be a picture-less post because i am not sure where my camera is packed just at this moment. it's been pretty busy for us: we closed on a condo, painted a room, went on vacation, and are packing up to move into said condo. this has been a span of a week and a half. so the camera is possibly in vacation stuff still, or has been packed into a moving box. unsure...

anyway, more on the condo later. for now, i'm thinking about vacation-time.

this year, we went to virginia. specifically, we went to shenandoah national park and hiked the appalachian trail. wow... we were initially supposed to hike 40 miles of the trail, but scaled that back to 30 once i possibly broke one of my toes. it is currently a lovely shade of "raisin" and is being nice when it is taped to the next toe. it only really hurts when i stand on my foot for a long time right now. sigh...

in any case, when we arrived in virginia, we went to this town called luray and ventured into luray caverns. this was great because it was 100 degrees outside and the caverns are naturally air conditioned :) these caverns were beautiful and spectacular. check out the web site and see for yourself! and hopefully next week i'll have some pictures for you. i highly recommend this visit to anyone who finds themselves in that area of the country. stunning, really! when we were done, we had a phenomenal dinner (start sarcasm) of rice chips, potato salad, and cucumber salad, procured at the local food lion. this was finally accomplished after driving around for about 45 minutes, past a host of fast food--of which i could not eat any of it except taco bell, and well, we're just not going there--and finding the 3 restaurants in town. i also could not eat anything at those places except the pricey one. and really, who's going to spend $18 on a stuffed portobello mushroom? i don't care if it's organic--that's just ridiculous!

anyway, bright and early the next morning, we picked up our shuttle at thornton gap and were dropped off to start hiking from swift run gap. the day's hike went from there to lewis mountain cabins. this was the first accommodations we had in the park. the three lodges were all done in the 1920s and 1930s and have a great feeling to them. in short, we got to hike up to 10 miles/day and come "home" to a bed and shower every night. it was great. this day's hike was mostly uphill from swift run gap and was a great hike through old forest growth. but man, was it hot and humid.

we arrived at lewis mountain and our cabin with a little patio and grill to cook on. we had a much better dinner of tofu burgers, roasted fingerling potatoes, mandarin oranges and van camp's pork and beans (those were for lee).

the next day we set out for big meadows lodge, and another approximately 10 mile hike. first thing on our hike, we saw a young bear that we had to scare from the trail. luckily, that was pretty easy. he was just eating away, minding his own business--but you can't really just walk up to bears. best to scare them away--especially if he was young enough for mama to be nearby. that would be a bad scene. the rest of this day's hike though was not that great. there were no views, the woods were dense and it was hard to see if there were any critters around, and i broke my toe. i just kept knocking it into roots and rocks, my own fault really, and then i hit it again and i felt a searing pain through the toe and up my foot. then lee decided to take a diversion hike down the mountain to lewis falls, essentially right below big meadows lodge. because we were almost at the end of our hike, i said ok. well, it was pretty far down the mountain, we saw no waterfall (it was not really the season for this waterfall), and then on our way back up encountered a LARGE bear. and he was not to be very deterred by our clapping, whistling, arm-waving antics. he just sat on his haunches and looked at us. he eventually lumbered away, but this was alarming because he did so very quietly and we're sure he was watching us from not far away. and he was about 500 pounds or more. male black bears can be aggressive and you do not want to mess with them. i have never hiked faster up 1000 VERTICAL FEET in my life. and yes, when we got to the top at the lodge, we saw the sign that said it was 1000 feet down. lee was not allowed to choose side diversion hikes after this.

when we got to the lodge, we saw my pretty swollen and gray toe (it was not yet ripened to it's lovely purple shade) and then the gigantic blister on the back of that foot from walking funny.

but the next morning, we got up and hiked about 9 miles to skyland resort, our final lodge stop. this hike was wonderful, with beautiful vistas, lovely rock slides, and it was a perfectly cool day with low humidity for hiking. when we got to skyland, however, i knew my hiking time was over. my foot was throbbing, my toe had turned quite purple, and that blister had become a large bloody hole in the back of my foot. lee did a great job finding a way down the mountain for us--it was still about 10 miles to the car. a great woman named carla, who worked at the lodge, took pity on us and drove us to the lot on her way home from work. THANK YOU CARLA! she really saved our vacation :)

to celebrate, for dinner in the lodge that night we ordered a bottle of wine called chateau morrisette. it was not that fantastic, really not good actually. but it was called blushing dog and was a white zinfandel. lee had to order it because it had his name. oh well. we also had a slice of ice cream pie, made with virginia blackberry ice cream. divine!

for our final day in the park, since we had the car, we drove to all the overlooks and vistas that we were missing from not doing that day's hike. lee was a nice chauffeur :) then we drove out of the park to sperryville, va, on our way to leesburg. the plan was to meander and do some virginia wine tasting. but first, in sperryville there was rumored to be a gluten free bakery. and we found it! it was just a little storefront, with really no retail part, but the woman was great! we bought a meat stromboli for lee's lunch, a spanikopita for me, and 2 cream cheese brownies. i was in heaven! and her sister lives in boston and is involved with a health food market here and has a gluten free bed and breakfast in malden! WOW!

so we meandered and drank wine, sometimes good wine, sometimes bad, and then finally came home on july 3. it was a nice trip except for the toe part. we also started reading bill bryson's a walk in the woods which was fun to read while hiking the appalachian trail. i'll tell you all about it when we're done.