tofu reubens, baked beans, macaroni salad

Sometime last year, Drew and I went to a cooking demonstration given by Chef Tanya Petrovna, the mastermind behind Native Foods, a fast-casual, vegan chain. While cooking, Chef Petrovna told us that when she was a child, she was baffled upon learning that a friend hated spinach. But then she went to her friend's house and was served spinach...from a can. No wonder her friend hated spinach! Food from a can or a box is infinitely inferior than fresh, and it is unfortunate that we swear off a food simply because we haven't eaten it in its optimal form. 

I'm guilty of this too. Prior to meeting Drew, there were a few foods I had virtually sworn off because I thought I didn't like them. It turns out that I just didn't particularly care for the canned versions, and two of those foods were showcased in our meal last week: sauerkraut and baked beans.

Let's start with the sauerkraut. I began making sauerkraut in the past year or so because 1) I kept reading about how easy it was to make; 2) I am intrigued with making foods that we normally buy; 3) it sounded like an interesting experiment; and 4) I wanted to know what it was really supposed to taste like. Last spring, I got a new cookbook called The Homemade Pantry, by Alana Chernila, who blogs at Eating From the Ground Up. I was drawn in by her stories and her pictures, and of course, her recipes. She show you, among lots of other things, how to make cheese, yogurt, crackers, bread, granola, twinkies, oreos...and sauerkraut. So I finally gave sauerkraut a whirl, and I'm glad I did. I massaged about 3 pounds of cabbage  (a combination of red and green) with kosher salt to extract its liquid, put it all into a giant glass jar, weighted it down to extract more brine, and let it do its thing in the closet for 4 days (you can ferment it from 3 to 10 days). Homemade sauerkraut is so good and so much better than what you'll find in a can or a jar. 

There's not a whole lot you can do with sauerkraut, but fortunately, we love tofu reubens:

Drew is a fan of baked beans (canned and homemade), but I'm not such a fan of the stuff from a can. We've experimented a bit with different recipes, and one we keep going back to is the one for the Yard House's BBQ Baked Beans, a recipe published in the Los Angeles Times. We double the amount of beans the recipe calls for, as I'm not a fan of "bean juice."