Main Course: Goat Manure

I've made some impressively inedible meals in my time. But, because we are a resourceful clan (read not affluent enough to discard even the most heinous wokful of slop), my family has unremittingly and solicitously eaten more than several unpalatable meals. I've whipped up, for example, pizza'n'egg breakfasts, noodles-over-rice lunches, and let's-all-sniff-the-meat-to-see-if-it-has-outlived-its-expiration-date dinners. But tonight's supper extravagantly eclipses even those sad plates.

A few days ago, I bought a package of tofu at the local Chinese supermarket. My self-imposed rule, generally, is that all foodstuffs I purchase from there must have some discernible bit of English printed on the label. And I'm not talking about something like Packaged in El Monte, CA or 250 calories. I mean that the item's title needs to be in a non-中國 font. This shopping principle has spared me from making the culinary embarrassment of purchasing such things as, say, Bird's Nest Soup (whose main ingredient is an actual nest constructed primarily of the spittle of the industrious Asian Swiftlet bird), congealed pork blood, or thousand year old eggs. (More power to you if delight in eggs circa the Song Dynasty, by the way. But I've an intractable fondness for eggs recently laid.)

The tofu I willingly paid for earlier this week was proudly labeled Spicy Tofu. "Good," I thought. "I don't even have to season the stuff. The flavor's built in!" It certainly is. Trouble is, so is a prominently malodorous oil whose insidious power reveals itself only when spooned into a heated wok. "Yaargh!" is about all I can say. A most hearty yaargh, indeed.

You know that unfortunate aroma that emanates from the sole of your shoe after you've gone and tread into a fresh mound of dog relief? That fragrance is the not-so-distant cousin of the substance sitting in my best wok. Clearly, today is the day I bid adieu to that wok. And maybe my stove.

Chinese cuisine, it's true, is home to an infamous dish known as chou dofu (stinky tofu). I've heard that Chinese street vendors who sell the more potent versions of the stuff are routinely fined for exceeding air pollution limits. And this is in China. Where you can grab a ruddy wad of air and toss it around like a hacky sack.

So it's chou tofu on the menu at my house tonight. But since my nine year-old son compared my dinner's pungent bouquet to goat manure, I'm thinking about granting my loved ones supper clemency.

How about some carne asada burritos?