m. 38 bbq tofu and polenta chips

things have been very hectic here the last couple of weeks as little baby e has been unrelenting in her cuteness and things have become more complicated with my mom's illness, it has led to a bittersweet period, we have been cooking a lot but often i don't have the energy to blog about all things delicious or ill fated, our dinner last night however was an exception, bbq tofu and polenta chips!  a long time ago when we were in seattle, m learned a technique for flavoring tofu that did not require a marinade, but rather you fry the tofu in a skillet on one side and then addany kind of sauce when you flipped the tofu (once it's nicely browned on the bottom), you flip the tofu only once and the effect is this amazing flavor throughout the tofu, it does take a long time (maybe even 30 minutes or more) but it is worth it ... and then these polenta chips that we have made often since about a month ago when we really started experimenting with polenta, these are flavored with caramelized onions and thyme (ala deborah madison), my camera provides us with this utterly stale image:

m. 37 vegetable tagine and flatbread

i have been wanting to play with our tagine recently, it's been a long time, but usually we end up turning any meal we do in it into some massive project, not this time though, this time we did a quick search for a recipe for the sauce and then threw whatever we had in the tagine, it was wonderful, we used a charmoula sauce recipe from john torode of masterchef fame that was really nice, the whole thing turned out like this:

but now you are saying, my what nice looking flat bread! and this was the most exciting part of the meal, in fact, and really easy to do, we got the idea from maria elia's the modern vegetarian, which recently has been supplying many of our sides, a version of the recipe can be found here ... we did ours with onion seed and it was amazing!