Cornucopasetic Ingredient Alert: Toasted Pita Chips with Mother Oven's Pita Bread and Heiwa Tofu

Ingredient Alert #1: Mother Over Pita Bread in the form of Pita Toasts

I love Mother Oven Bakery. The bread is Food with a capital F and it comes out of an honest to goodness earth goddess oven. His pita bread makes the best pita toasts I've ever had.

Pita Toasts

Cut two pita breads in half and then into three wedges. Separate the layers of each wedge and then mix all of the little pita pieces with 2 to 3 Tbs. of olive oil and some salt and pepper. Some crushed garlic would be good here too. Bake them at 420° until golden, spread out on a baking sheet, smooth side down. If you bake them too long, they become mouth lacerating triangles of doom. Spare your tongue and make sure you take them out just as they are beginning to brown.

What to put on your pita toasts:

• Pita toasts with tapenade, hummus and sliced radishes.
• Pita toasts with tapenade, radishes and garlicky sauteed broccoli rabe.
• Pita toasts with tofu "egg" salad.

Wait! Stop, and think about the poor broccoli rabe (a/k/a broccoli raab, a/k/a rapini) for a minute. It's an excellent and perfectly healthy green and yet it somehow gets a bad rap. There is only one farm selling it at the Portland market that I know of: Lalibelia Farm (and I thank them for it). But she was telling me today that they may drop rapini because it doesn't seem to be selling well. So go out there and buy some from here and keep it in circulation. I like to blanch it, drain it, squeeze the water out a bit and then sautee it with just garlic, or (as is apparently popular) with garlic, pine nuts, raisins, pepper flakes and lemon. The latter method is really excellent.

Ingredient Alert #2: Tofu


When I lived in Davis, California, I would buy the best ever tofu and soy milk at the Davis Coop. The stuff was made in Sacramento, just a few miles away. It was fresh and tasted unlike any tofu I'd ever had. It was almost a shame to cook it. We would eat it fresh with nutritional yeast gravy for breakfast. It was a treat. I've been disappointed that there doesn't appear to be any such local source for tofu here, but now I find that Heiwa Tofu of Lincolnville is filling the empty niche. And better still, Crown O' Maine will be distributing it beginning this summer. For the time being, however, you can get it at Morning Glory in Brunswick and at Lois' Natural Marketplace in Scarborough.

Tofu "Egg" Salad

• 1 cake of Heiwa Tofu, dried with a clean towel and then squished by hand into crumbly bits
  
• 1/4 cu. diced celery
• 1 shallot, chopped
• a handful of finely chopped herbs: parsely, oregano, thyme, sage, chives…
• 2 Tbs. capers
• 3 – 5 cornichons, chopped
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 1/2 tsp. tumeric
• 1/4 cu. mayonnaise
• 1 Tbs. dijon mustard
• 1 – 2 tsp. of lemon juice
  

I might be off on the amount of mayo, so add that in spoonfuls until it comes out egg salady.

Now we just need a local tempeh source.