This dish is pretty much a vegetarian chile masquerading as enchiladas. You make a sweet potato and black bean chile with tomatoes, onions, garlic and salsa and then add some grated cheese to create the filling for the corn tortillas. The sauce is basically a reduced mix of tomato sauce and stock with chile powder and oregano (I used some leftover chicken stock, which violates a strict vegetarian regimen but I’ll take that up tomorrow).

We’ll see how this turns out, but I learned a trick that makes the assembly much easier than what I’ve done before. In fact, if the enchiladas turn out well, I’ll have to make my favorite vegetarian enchiladas – goat cheese – later in the month, superfoods be damned!

You need to soften the corn tortillas before you fill them or they tend to crack. In the past, I’ve done that by wiping them through the warm enchilada sauce, a method which works but which is messy and cumbersome enough to make me reluctant to make enchiladas. This time, I put them in the oven for a couple of minutes as it was warming up, and that seemed to work just fine.

(Sorry about picture quality, but they tasted quite good.)

By now everyone is familiar with kale chips and how much they cost in stores and how easy they are to make at home. Tonight’s dinner of sweet potato and black bean enchiladas notably lacked a green vegetable, and since I had some leftover kale, I decided to make kale chips instead of a small raw kale salad. The chips seemed more in keeping with the enchiladas somehow.

If you’ve been disappointed in your attempts to make kale chips at home (because they don’t turn out crisp enough), Melissa Clark’s suggestions (at the New York Times) might set you right. While the kale pieces have to be completely dry, which comes as no surprise, her other tip is equally important. She recommends you massage the olive oil into each piece of kale. This is similar to the advice you often see about massaging the dressing into a raw kale salad. I used to think the reason for the latter was that the acid in the dressing would “cure” the kale and diminish some of the raw taste. But recently I read that it is the oil that is doing the work rather than the acid. According to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats, kale has a waxy cuticle that repels water but is oil soluble. Rubbing the kale leaves with oil dissolves the cuticle and allows the leaves to soften. (If you’re interested in food and have not yet started reading Serious Eats [and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt], you really should rectify that at once.)

Here are before and after shots of the chips (make sure you use a decent bit of salt!):

Today’s breakfast is a simple trifecta of superfoods with some dried cranberries to brighten (and further sweeten) the deal. The whole thing takes less than five minutes to make and is basically warm granola for a cold winter’s day. Just don’t forget to add some salt (don’t be a hater).

Tofu is going to be a significant source of protein this month. I’m not inclined to eat any of the various vegetarian meat substitutes for things such as hot dogs, sausages, or hamburgers (though if I was doing this in the summer, I might change my mind about that), and for right now, I’m not going to use seitan or tempeh. We’ll see how it goes; I don’t have many bright lines about what to eat except that the only sources of animal protein Rachael and I are going to rely on will be eggs and dairy.

So tonight’s superfoods are tofu and cabbage – not particularly promising when stated so baldly. While cabbage rolls stuffed with tofu in a tomato sauce might work, there are plenty of more appetizing ideas to be found in the Far East rather than Eastern Europe.

As anyone new to tofu quickly learns, cakes of fermented soy curd are hopelessly bland, a fact that ends up turning off more than a few well-intentioned eaters. Fortunately, pressing some of the liquid out of the tofu and replacing it with a marinade makes a world of difference. I made a simple press out of a couple of cheap plastic cutting boards for just such a purpose:

After an hour or so, I had squeezed out about 1/2 cup of liquid:

The tofu puckered a bit because I think I was too quick in tightening the press over the course of the process. Although the next step would usually be to marinate the tofu, I had some dipping sauce left over from a previous dish and decided to fry the tofu by itself to see whether just dipping the tofu in the sauce at the table would be okay.

Asian slaw is an easy and delicious raw vegetable dish that can be quickly made with a box grater. Just grate some cabbage and carrots, slice up some scallions and red pepper, mix in some chopped cilantro and chili pepper (I also had some edamame on hand) and toss with a rice vinegar-based dressing some 30 minutes or so before eating. I made a dressing out of equal parts rice vinegar, honey and canola oil and added a bit of peanut butter, some soy sauce and sesame oil, a dash of chili sauce and some grated ginger and garlic. Unfortunately, I fried the tofu for too long; its texture was too firm for the dipping sauce to gain much purchase.

But it was still a tasty dish and one that I might return to later this month to make some improvements.

I started this blog to chronicle my cross-country bike ride with Roger Schwed, but I named it Bob’s Arc because I intended to keep going into new territory even after my bike journey was done. It has taken me quite awhile to circle back around to the blog because I still identify it so much with the bike trip and the trip still stands so apart from “normal” life that it seems odd to use the blog to write about other subjects.

But our decision (Rachael’s and mine) to embark on Frugal February again – no meat and no alcohol for the month – has given me the impetus to take the blog in a new direction. Faced with the (self-imposed) necessity of making vegetarian meals for a month, I have decided to take this opportunity to concentrate on eating more “super foods” (though it is unlikely that anyone reading this does not already know this about me, I do all the cooking for Rachael and myself). While this seems like an interesting idea – and a healthy one – there is very little that is simple about food any more.

The advent of cooking shows and the rise of the foodie (a subcategory that arguably should occupy a rung of hell even lower than that of hipster [what does it say about us that we create and self identify with subcategories that so quickly become obnoxious – yuppie, foodie, hipster?]) have helped to add status anxiety to our typically neurotic American preoccupations with food, diet and health. Increasing concerns about factory farming and climate change and the trend to locavorism further complicate the once simple question about what to have for dinner.

I don’t know where this experiment of blogging about eating super foods for this month will lead, but it should be interesting and fun. I intend to post pictures and recipes of what I’m making along with a lot of commentary about what we could call the practical ethics of the sensory and social activity of keeping oneself fed.

For the record, the super foods I’ll be using (I think) are avocados, bananas, beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, dark chocolate, eggs, grapefruit, green tea (?), honey, kale, lentils, mushrooms. oats, pomegranate (seems random), quinoa (inevitably), spinach, sweet potatoes, tofu, turmeric (guess curries are on the menu), walnuts and yogurt. Some of this might change, but I figure I have to start somewhere.

To show that eating super foods doesn’t mean that you have to subjugate pleasure to nutrition, here is a picture of some dark chocolate-tofu pudding: