Friday, March 9, 2007

I Did it, Vol. III, and a tasty lunch

Ladies (and the occasional gentleman), I did it, I did it! I did my third run/walk of Week 1 of C25k--AND it didn't even get difficult to do until I got to the sixth section of my run. I'm so excited! Week 2, here I come.

I told my husband's sister--who has recently worked up to running a 10k--and she asked me what 5k I'm going to do. I said, I guess I should pick one that's right after the last week of my training! So I'll be checking up on that now.

I got home from my run/walk psyched to eat a healthy lunch, too, so I ate some leftover curry tofu salad.

After having a lovely curried chicken salad at West Egg (we were there so that I could sample their tasty–but not perfect–cupcakes) last weekend, I decided that I would try to make a curried tofu salad at home this past week.

I froze a block of extra-firm tofu and then thawed it in the microwave. That process firms up tofu for some reason. Then I pressed the tofu with our giant bamboo cutting board for a while to get out more of the moisture.

I sliced purple organic grapes in half; chopped two very large, not very strong green onions (from our CSA–the biggest green onions I’ve ever seen); toasted some walnut pieces; and tossed all of that together with lots of curry powder, some Greek yogurt, a little Lawry’s seasoning salt, a few grinds of pepper, a tiny bit of sugar, and a small amount of light mayonnaise.

I sliced up the tofu and stirred it in. Then I realized I needed lots more yogurt and curry powder, so I tossed more in . . . twice.

After leaving the salad in the fridge for an hour or so, I stuffed some pitas (slightly warmed in the microwave to prevent breakage) with some CSA butter lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and the tofu salad.

In the end, I really liked the flavors, especially today after they’d melded a bit. But I don’t love the consistency of the tofu I used . . . not sure if I should have cooked it, shouldn’t have frozen it, or what.

We also ate oranges that came in our CSA order; our CSA is low on their late-winter produce and is waiting for their spring produce to be ready, so they had to supplement with some organic produce from Florida. The juice oranges we got were absolutely incredible.


indian-salad.jpg

There's my mp3 player in the picture after I finished my work-out.

Feel free to share any suggestions for alterations to the salad.

4 comments:

urban vegan said...

Congrats on your running/walking victory!

S C, aka Tubby said...

I always wish that I could cook after reading your blog.

Jen said...

I'm not sure about the tofu... I guess maybe the best thing to do is experiment. I'm still trying to figure out when it's important to drain/press the water vs. freeze vs. silken vs. regular etc. Who knew there were so many options?

Sounds like you're doing great on the C25K program! Can't wait to read about your 5k race in a few weeks :-) I hope you find one that has a cool T-shirt! Whenever I wear my first-ever 5k race t-shirt, I feel extra motived; it's a good reminder of my progress.

Sally JPA said...

Urban, thanks! I have a vegan recipe from dinner last night that I need to post, so check back for that soon.

SC, it's taken me several years of trying and failing to learn how to cook. If it interests you, I encourage you to start with easy recipes, following the directions exactly, and then branching out to experimentation when you're comfortable. (Even tonight, our dinner worked out, but I was a little concerned I'd made a disaster.) The biggest thing for me to learn with cooking was how to time things to be done at the same time.

Veg, I am going to try baking the tofu next weekend, as I hear that may offer the texture that I'm going for in this recipe. We'll see! And you're right--I'm definitely going to find a race with a t-shirt. :)