Ginger-garlic tofu with special guest, black rice! (Thankfulness #13)

For those playing along at home, our past week was-- Tuesday: Emperor sent home from preschool with suspected pinkeye, Wednesday: Emperor home with probably pinkeye, Thursday: both Josh & I feeling a little run down at work, Emperor fine, Friday: Emperor struck by stomach illness, Saturday: I'm struck by stomach illness and Josh developing cold, Sunday: Josh - cold fully developed. I'm hoping our whirlwind tour of every illness ever is over at this point. If you think it's gross to read on a primarily food blog, you should know that it's gross to live it too people!

Anyway, since the Emperor and I were both better today after being trapped in the house for like a million years, we made a point of going out and having fun today. We went to the park for an hour and a half pre-nap and then after nap we went on a coffee date. Which leads me into today's:

Thing I'm thankful for #13: Amey! Do you know Amey from Vegan Eats & Treats? She is a wonderful lady, extremely sweet and talented too. And she has cute dogs. She came to meet us for coffee date today at the Delmarette, which was so nice. You may not know this, but I am an eXtreeeeme! introvert in my real life. Even though I've lived in Santa Cruz for almost five years, I really don't know a lot of people here and honestly I'm horrible about meeting new people. So I really cherish the friends I have here. I'm thankful for all of you, but only Amey went to coffee with me today, ha ha.

The Emperor and I spent so long out at coffee that we had to put together a pretty lazy and fast dinner together when we got home. I was thinking brown rice in the rice cooker + ginger-garlic tofu (based on a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian) + broccoli. But then TRAGEDY struck! I went to get brown rice from our big rice bin and... the bin is full of MOTHS. MOTHS, people. In my RICE. Even though I buy grains from the bulk bins constantly, I have really never had a bugs in grains issue before. (I've seen bugs in flour, but interestingly, *not* bulk bin flour.) I was not prepared for moths in my rice. I kinda freaked out.



Luckily, my grains & legumes cabinet is totally ridiculous so I fished around til I found something else I could make in my rice cooker, some black Japonica rice-- actually a combo of short grain black and medium grain mahogany, according to the bag-- that I don't remember buying. (Maybe I got it as a backup for J in MoFo?) No moths there, and it's basically just brown rice that is a different color, so I cooked that stuff up and served it.

The Emperor LOVED it. It's funny, I was telling Amey how lately he mostly likes to eat just one item on his plate-- usually the one he's most familiar with/likes the most. He might try one bite of something else, but he'll only really work on one item. Usually I give him three things-- I aim for a protein, a carb, and a green for most dinners-- and he'll eat a lot of one, one bite of another, and none of the third thing. And that's exactly what he did tonight, except instead of doing what I guessed he'd do (eat a ton of tofu, eat one bite of broccoli, ignore the rice), he went to town on the rice, had one big piece of broccoli, and totally refused the tofu. The tofu! Didn't see that coming.

Here he is eating some grapes while we had our coffee date:



PS that coffee was INCREDIBLE. I love the Delmarette.