Adventures in Cooking: Broccamole

There are so many things that you can make with silken tofu! Smoothies, fruit dips, and stuff that is supposed to resemble cheese or pudding but doesn't—these are all popular tofu recipes. Basically, if it is supposed to be mushy, creamy, or somewhere in between, you can make an unconvincing vegan version of it with silken tofu!

If you have recently used some tofu to make creamed spinach that doesn't taste like creamed spinach, and still have some left over, you might want to search the internet for recipes you can use it in. Or not, because I've saved you the bother and hunted down the ultimate use for leftover tofu—it's broccamole!

This recipe has the kind of name that I enjoy inventing myself for other recipes I've tried — such as "tacofu" (tofu taco filling), and "no-tato salad" (potato salad made from cauliflower) — but this one came ready-made by the recipe author. The name alone is reason enough to give it a shot, but combined with the fact that it will help you use up the remains of a broccoli crown that you've had sitting around for just a tad too long make it a no-brainer!

Now, I've tried a lot of new recipes over the past year, but there's "trying recipes," and then there's "Adventures in Cooking!" I've realized there are actually a number of criteria that must be met in order for a kitchen session to qualify as a true Adventure:

1. You must attempt to make a smaller amount of food than specified by the original recipe
   
2. You must substitute, remove, or otherwise alter at least one ingredient
   
3. You must cut as many corners as possible during preparation
   
4. The process or outcome must be terrible, unexpected, or at least mildly comedic.
   

I'll leave it to you to tell me if I nailed #4, but in making broccamole, I followed the first three principles so diligently that it's not even worth trying to replicate the original recipe here. Instead, I'll just describe how you can follow the Rules of Adventuring so that they result in something that might be generously referred to as broccamole.

1. You must attempt to make a smaller amount of food than specified by the original recipe.

If you only have 1/4 a block of tofu and something like a cup of  broccoli florets, you're on the right track, because the recipe calls for more of both. The goal is to finish them each off, so don't worry about the exact ratio; just throw them in the blender and hope for the best! Since this lack of measurement means you can't neatly calculate the remainder of the ingredients, just guess on them all!

2. You must substitute, remove, or otherwise alter at least one ingredient

It's a good plan to not have most of the ingredients in the recipe. Try something like the following: Never buy fresh cilantro, because you'll only use a few sprigs of it for any given recipe and the rest will always go bad, even when you attempt to root it in water! So just use dried cilantro. Use the same principle for tomatoes, but instead of buying them dried (impossible), just wait to use them until they're on the verge of spoiling, then dice them and stick them in the freezer so you can at least use them in cooked food in the future. Then you will conveniently be lacking fresh tomatoes when it comes time to prepare this recipe the next day. Onion and jalapeno should never make it into any recipe, so enough said about them! The remaining ingredients (spices mostly) are easy! Most spices are overpowering when used as specified by a recipe, so feel free to just sprinkle them conservatively into the mixture until it smells right.

3. You must cut as many corners as possible during preparation.

The original recipe is only one step—but really 5 steps lazily combined into one, so the corners are already pre-cut, if you ask me!

4. The outcome must be terrible, unexpected, or at least mildly comedic.

Well, imagine what you would get if you took some mushy cooked broccoli and some tofu, and you pureed them together. That's what broccamole tastes like! Pretty terrible, right? Like most recipes that attempt to replace one ingredient with a healthier one, this food is nothing like the inspiration. It doesn't help that, in the absence of the onion, peppers, tomatoes, and fresh cilantro, the resulting substance has no mouth feel. But at least it's the right color! In the end, that's what's most important.

My first attempt at eating broccamole was just as terrible as you might expect from an Adventure in Cooking. I just dipped some leftover garlic bread in it and paired it with a side of lettuce. Somehow when combined with garlic bread, the spices in the broccamole could no longer be tasted; so it lost the one quality that gave it an edge over a jar of baby food.

On my second attempt, I got wise and added in some chopped bits of the remaining broccoli stem, for texture, and scooped the stuff over some black beans on a tortilla with olives. I even grated some carrot on top because I needed it to look cute for a picture. With the broccamole serving more as a condiment than the main event, it was much less disappointing. But hardly worth the effort at that rate. Unless I have more tofu to use up and no better ideas, I probably won't make it again.

In fact, I definitely won't make it again in the near future, because the broccamole broke my blender! Unexpected, right? My blender is a relic from the 1960's that I found on Craigslist for 10 dollars. Though the motor is still going strong, the plastic parts have all turned brittle, and there are a number of cracks in the blade assembly. When I finished blending my broccamole to find gooey gobs of greenish gunk all over the inside of the blender base, I decided I'd repaired it for the last time.

I'm getting a new blender, and this time, I'm getting one with a food processor function too. Truth be told, I was so spoiled by my last boyfriend's insanely powerful Vitamix that I might just be forced to spring for one of those. It's only 450 dollars.

So, mildly comedic? You see these tears in my eyes? They're totally tears of laughter. Totally.