As I mentioned earlier this week, I received two heads of cabbage in my CSA veg box.  We are not cabbage eaters in our family, but one of the things I like about the veg box is that each week I’m presented with veggies that I’ve never cooked before.  Sometimes I have great success with my new veggie adventures and sometimes things just don’t work out the way I hoped.  Such was the case with the cabbage.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I think this dish looks just beautiful!  Sadly, it didn’t taste near as good as it looked.  I marinated the tofu in the asian marinade from Veganomicon (p. 129).  I doubled the recipe thinking it would be a good idea to use half for the tofu marinade and the other half as the sauce for stir-frying the veggies.  I baked the tofu and it turned out really well.  While the tofu was baking, I tried to cook down some cabbage and bok choy.  I say “tried” because they didn’t cook down as much as I thought they would.  For some reason, I thought they would wilt like spinach does.  They did get soft, but the pieces were so big.  I learned a valuable lesson, though, in that next time I’ll cut the pieces smaller.  After the bok choy and cabbage got soft, I threw the sauce and some broccoli in the skillet.  I had added a tablespoon cornstarch to the sauce thinking this would make it thicken, but it didn’t.  Does anyone know how to get a stir-fry sauce to thicken up?

I plated the food and we sat down to dinner.  The first bite was a little strange.  This sauce, which worked amazingly well as a tofu marinade, was incredibly sour and didn’t work well at all for stir-frying the veggies.  Not ones to waste food, though, my husband and I ate everything and quietly agreed that this dish would not be made again.

I still have one head of cabbage left.  I have a couple of ideas for it and I’m crossing my fingers that they work out better than this dish did.