Tales of Broccoli, Stir Fry Sauce and Double Dinner

As I write this, I am consuming a beautiful stir-fry, which came about as part of my cooking bonanza this evening. The tofu I bought last week has been sitting in my fridge taunting me while I have been refusing to eat it because I wasn't in the mood. By some strange departure from my normal behavior, I also bought broccoli on that same shopping trip and I have been stoically refusing to eat that as well. It's not that I dislike broccoli really, more that given a choice of vegetables, it would never rank anywhere near the top of my list. That said, it does make a nice stir fry, which is why I bought it. That and the fact that I figured a little variation in vegetables wouldn't hurt me.

So here I am this evening, freshly showered from the gym and I still really don't want to eat the tofu, but I also don't want it to go bad. I peruse the fridge and freezer, and although I'd been thinking that I'd eat the fi,sh from my freezer, I happened upon my leftover pasta from last night. Great. It's nice and simple and I can throw in a tomato maybe or maybe some of the giant batch of collards that I cooked a few days before. But then I take out the Parmesan cheese and start thinking about my mom's classic pasta with broccoli and garlic. Once I've got the broccoli out though it seems silly not to cook all of it, so I opted to make stir fry and the pasta at the same time. I tend to cook a lot at a time and then let myself be lazy the other days. I couldn't decide which one to eat tonight but I figured whichever was left could be lunch tomorrow.

The pasta became pasta with garlic, oil and tomato while the stir fry started out more as a steamed broccoli, carrot, and mushroom dish which morphed more into a "fry" with the addition of onions and oil and the stir fry sauce. I bought this sauce specifically to drown broccoli in, because if there's one thing broccoli is good for, it's soaking up yummy asian sauces. Everything cooked pretty quickly, but because I had turned my steamed dish into a fried dish, there was a lot of water and my veggies ( and tofu) are swimming a bit more than maybe they should be. Still, it's pretty delicious and the stir fry sauce tasted fabulous. I chose the sauce because it seemed to have the right thickness and not too obscenely many calories or too much salt. All those sauces have tons of salt but this was a tad lower than some.

The pasta also turned out great, although I ultimately decided I'd be more excited about eating it tomorrow at lunch than I would be about eating stir fry.

And so here they are .... I really need better lighting in my kitchen.
Pasta...


And stir-fry!
And now time to clean up :(