When you ask most people what keeps them from eating as healthfully as they aspire to, the most common answer is time. Yes, some people say money, or that they just can’t control themselves when they smell Cinnabons at the Mall. But the real issue for most people who try to get a meal on the table after work is time.
So, I will share the best habit that you can cultivate in your quest to eat better. And that is to make batches of food ahead of time that you can draw from all week long. Don’t cook a cup of rice for tonight’s dinner, cook three, and stash the rest to heat up later in the week, or stuff in a burrito, or make fried rice. If you are going to cook, always look at making extra, so that the 15 minutes you spent on that cooking procedure isn’t just for one meal, but for two or three.
Most of the articles on this topic center on cooking up meat, so let’s take a page, and make it vegan. Instead of picking chicken off the bones, let’s prep a “protein” to slide into a few meals over the week. If you make a habit of this, you will thank yourself every time you open that refrigerator and realize that you have a meal ready to go, if you just assemble it. Today, I am prepping tofu. Tofu is infamous for being time consuming. Pressing it, marinating it, then frying it in copious amounts of oil makes really tasty tofu, but it is daunting, especially for beginners. So here is the fast and dirty way.
Once you have this baked and ready, you can slap it in a sandwich, cut it up and put it in wraps, stir fries, soups, or into pastas. Really pressed for time? Tear open one of those foil packs of curry, or a can of soup, and float these tofu cubes in there. Cook up a pot of brown rice or quinoa and when it’s done, stir some shredded kale and tofu chunks into the hot grain, cover, and eat when its all hot.
Set yourself up one day a week, and you will be so happy to open that fridge and see your tasty tofu, all ready to fill your belly!
E-Z Tangy Onion Tofu Cutlets
I used the Wildwood Extra Firm 20 ounce block of tofu, which is so firm that you don’t need to press it at all. Just pat it dry. I sliced it into four long slabs, but you can slice the block either direction, and make smaller cutlets.
Serves 4
20 ounces extra firm tofu
1/4 cup tamari
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons agave
1/2 yellow onion, slivered
olive oil for pan
Preheat the oven to 425 F. Dry the tofu and slice in slabs. In a cup, mix the tamari, rice vinegar, and agave. Spread some olive oil on a sheet pan with a rim. Place the fou on top and cover the slabs with half of the onion slices, then drizzle half of the tamari mixture on the tofu. Bake for 20 minutes.
Take the tofu out and turn the slices with a metal spatula, then cover the topw with onions and tamari mixture. Bake another 20.
Cool on a rack, then store tightly covered.
