Recipe: Rotel Tofu Scramble

I haven't been posting many recipes recently, so let's fix that! Now, a few notes on this one. First of all, please meet Rotel, or RO*TEL, to be precise. It's canned diced tomatoes with peppers and spices, and it's delicious. And a nice shortcut when you want to cook but it's 8 p.m. and you can't deal with chopping a lot of vegetables. Not that that ever happens to me. Ahem. Anyway, I had never heard of this until it started showing up in recipes from some Texan friends, but once I looked, I discovered that there are usually a few cans of it in the stores here. Sometimes it's with the other canned tomatoes and sometimes it's with the taco shells and stuff. Costco occasionally has it. Give it a try!

The second note is that the picture I'm giving you here is really bad. I forgot to take one last night, so this is a cell phone picture of the cold leftovers, in bad lighting. And this dish is nothing to look at in the first place. It's healthy and quick and easy and tastes really good, but it's not pretty. (Insert rant about food blogs making us think pretty food is best.) But I'm showing you anyway because people are wary of trying recipes without seeing a picture and because it shows you what the crumbled up tofu should look like. Okay. Onward!



Rotel Tofu Scramble

Ingredients:
about a tablespoon of cooking oil, maybe a little more (I used vegetable. Olive, peanut, whatever would work.)
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 can Rotel (I used the original flavor.)
1 lb extra firm tofu, drained and pressed*

Instructions:
1. Heat the oil in a medium sauté pan or skillet.
2. Add the onions and cook until they're translucent and cooked through but not quite caramelized.
3. Stir in the Rotel.
4. Crumble in the tofu - if you have any big chunks, it's easy enough to cut them up with your wooden spoon as you go.
5. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until everything's hot and just starting to brown a little bit. Ten minutes? Maybe? I forgot to time. I know that's unhelpful. But it's not like anything here will hurt you if it's undercooked. The extra water from the tomatoes should cook off and the tomatoes should taste "done," basically.
6. Serve with some sort of rice. I made rice pilaf last night, and that was a good combination, but brown rice or whatever you happen to have around would work just fine! Enjoy!

* In case you haven't made tofu before, here's a quick way to get it pressed well enough: before you start cooking the onions, slit the tofu package and drain out the excess water. Then open it up and plop the block of tofu on a plate between several layers of paper towels. Press down on it - don't worry about the tofu breaking up a little, because you're going to be doing that anyway. Let it sit and drain into the paper towels until it's time to add it.