Pomegranate and Date Glazed Tofu Triangles

with Preserved Lemons

Ingredients:

• 3 packages organic firm or extra firm tofu

• flour for dredging

• 1 fresh lemon

• 2 large white or yellow onions

• extra virgin olive oil, as needed

• a few shakes of kosher salt

• freshly ground black pepper, as needed

• a few shakes of garlic powder

• a few shakes of ground turmeric

• 1 ½ tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

• ¼ cup chopped flat Italian parsley

• A jar of Preserved Lemons

For the Glaze

Note: If you’re making both the chicken and the tofu versions of this dish, double the recipe for the glaze and prepare the chicken as explained here, Pomegranate and Date Glazed Chicken with Preserved Lemons.

Ingredients:

• 8 ounces date syrup, called “Silan.” (available at middle eastern stores or here.)

• 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses (available at middle eastern stores or here.)

• ½ cup orange juice

• 2 cloves garlic, chopped

• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped

• 1 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

• 1 ½ teaspoons lemon juice

• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon ground allspice

• ¼ teaspoon cardamom

• ½ tsp ground turmeric

Method:

• Drain the blocks of tofu. Wrap each one in several layers of paper towels and set them on a cooling rack over a baking sheet to allow the tofu to drain for 30 minutes to an hour. Then wipe the baking sheet dry and cover it with a sheet of parchment paper.

• Whisk all glaze ingredients together in a medium sized bowl and set it aside.

• Unwrap the tofu from the paper towels. Cut each block in half vertically to make two thinner halves. Lay all six halves out flat on a cutting board and slice each one horizontally to make 12 pieces. Cut each one on the diagonal to make 24 triangles.

• Put some flour on a plate, season it with a few shakes each of garlic powder, turmeric, rosemary, salt, and pepper and mix it up to distribute the seasonings evenly. Gently dredge each tofu triangle in the flour on both sides and lay them in a single layer on the parchment lined pan. Let them rest while you prepare the onions.

• Preheat oven to 375°

• Slice the onions in ¼“ slices. Rinse the excess salt from a couple of the lemon slices and chop them; sauté the onions and chopped lemon over medium low heat in a skillet with a little olive oil and a dash of salt.

• When the onions are lightly caramelized, add a dash each of cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, and turmeric. Continue to sauté for another 2 minutes.

• Scatter the onions over a baking pan that is large enough to hold all of the tofu in a single layer. If you choose to do so, you can use a pyrex dish or an attractive oven safe dish, and then serve the glazed crispy tofu directly from the pan when done.

• Add a little more oil to the same skillet and over medium high heat, quickly pan fry the tofu pieces on both sides until golden. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes on each side. You’ll probably need to do this in several batches; don’t overcrowd the pan or it will be hard to get underneath them with a spatula to flip them. As they come out of the pan, lay them out on paper towels to absorb excess oil.

• Then, lay the tofu triangles over the onions in the baking pan in a single layer.

• Generously drizzle the glaze over the tofu and slide the pan into the oven. Bake for about 15—20 minutes, until the glaze is thickened.

• About 5 minutes before you take it out of the oven, sprinkle the chopped preserved lemon over the whole dish. You may rinse it if you don’t like the saltiness, but I think the salt is part of what makes it awesome.

• .Serve right from the pan, or spread the onions on a nice serving platter and arrange the tofu pieces over them. Finish the dish with some finely chopped parsley for color, and serve.

I don’t eat a lot of meat. By meat, I mean all animal flesh—poultry, red meat, fish … more often than not, my meals are vegetarian. And I enjoy them. The vegetarian dishes I prepare are proud to stand on their own merits.

In my younger days, I spent several years, on and off, being a card-carrying vegetarian.

I’m less rigid now.

My body tells me what it wants and when it wants it, and I pay attention. I’ve been feeling sorry for my body as of late. It’s been facing some tough challenges over the last year, and so making it happy and giving it what it wants is an important goal.

But holidays, for me, are about tradition. When we land on the special spaces as we travel around the board in that game known as The Calendar, each one calls to me, reminding me of the foods I’ve always associated with the particular day. And I want them.

So I make them. I eat them. I share them. They bring me joy. And a lot of clean-up. But joy nonetheless.

When roughly half my family suddenly—like overnight suddenly—became strictly vegetarian, holiday meals became a challenge. I needed to find a way to please everyone—to cook the dishes I’ve always cooked while also delighting those who now wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t want the non-meat-eaters to feel like an afterthought. At first I devised fancy, multi-step and complex recipes for vegetarian dishes that could shine beside my meat-based entrees.

Truth be told, it was just too much.

I love dinner parties almost as much as I love Holy Days. My formula has always been hors d’oeuvres and drinks, then some combination of appetizer, soup, and/or salad, followed by an entree with multiple sides and finished off with a few desserts and good coffee. That’s a lot, and now I was adding another entree. And although I’m younger than I’ll ever be again, I’m older than I was last year.

I was making more work for myself. Like it or not, what used to be easy is now a bit of a challenge. I should be scaling back, not revving up. My last go at it turned out to be a bust, and that’s never happened before. I did a full-on crash and burn.

I was forced to have an honest conversation with myself. I needed to re-think my approach, separate fantasy from reality.

And I’ve finally faced the fact that I don’t need to be a one-woman-show. There’s no shame in asking for help.

Even Wonder Woman has a team in her corner. And everything doesn’t have to be perfect.

But enough self-analysis here. We were talking about Rosh Hashanah dinner, right?

One thing I’ve learned is that it’s not hard to take a recipe from my repertoire and tweak it to be suitable for vegetarians. This tofu dish is an excellent example. I originally developed this recipe for chicken, but discovered that it works beautifully with tofu. The only extra work involved in making two entrees here is cutting, dredging, and frying up some tofu triangles, and that doesn’t take long. I’ve already got this wonderful sauce, so it’s no big deal at all.

Preserved lemons are used quite a lot in Middle Eastern cooking, and in Mediterranean cooking as well. They bring an unparalleled umami to any dish they grace. If you have a Middle Eastern grocery near you, you should be able to find them. Read the label—preserved lemons don’t need preservatives! The ingredients should read: lemons, water, salt. That’s it. I like these from Casablanca Market. And, they come with a nifty little cookbook!

You can also make your own Preserved Lemons. It only takes a few minutes to put them together. But … here comes the but … you do have to plan ahead. They take a month to cure in the fridge and I rarely manage to think that far in advance.

For the chicken version, I like to use slices of preserved lemon, laying one slice on top of each piece of chicken.

For this tofu version, I cut them into small dice and scatter them over the tofu triangles on the platter—a whole slice on top of a piece of tofu is just too overpowering.

Preserved Lemons are very salty. To me, that’s part of the flavor profile, but if the salt is too much for you, you can rinse them and wipe them dry with paper towels before using.