General Tao's Tofu & Countdown to End of MoFo 2011- but in a NICE Way!

  Today, in the spirit of exploration, we are going to cook General Tao's Tofu! I don't know who General Tao is or anything about this dish except that it is the most reviewed recipe on Vegweb. Tofu is always a good base for a meal at VegaNation because there's usually something fairly simple that you can do with it for the non-believers- in fact, Pony likes eating tofu plain,or with mint sauce!
  Vegweb is brilliant and we've had some really good recipes from it, so we were interested to try this because the good people of Vegweb seem to know what they are talking about!  In case we have any new vegans reading this (or Venusians..) Vegweb is a brilliant vegan website with forums and articles and links devoted to veganism and over 15,000 vegan recipes.
  I must say that I find some of the recipes slightly weird. If I was posting, for example, an enchilada recipe I would give full ingredients and instructions, not put ''jar of enchilada sauce''..there's nothing wrong with using pre-prepared ingredients like that but to me it seems slightly pointless to post it as a recipe on a recipe website. Just saying..

  Please don't take it the wrong way that I now have a Countdown to the end of MoFo thing on my blog! I'm not being negative, honestly! I write this blog anyway, because I wanted to write about vegan family life and running our vegan shop VegaNation, but it has definitely been more of a stretch trying to be disciplined enough to write something about food every day! So, the counter is really to spur me on, more than anything else, although there may be a small element of having found a brilliant free counter gadget, that you can personalise, and needing to think of something to use it for..!  Anyway, I made the General's Tofu dish (I looked it up and discovered that it was originally (urgh) a chicken dish which first became popular in the seventies) and Miranda and I really like it. Mouse and Fin ate it, altho' Fin didn't love it, but Pony didn't like it and just ate broccoli, and plain tofu with mint sauce (mint sauce- I know!) so it was a four star meal, but I'm sure we'll have it again. One comment: there did seem to be a LOT of washing up created by this meal, which is not always a recommendation in my book..!

 We are doing our shopping list for next week's meals and once again, we're finding it very difficult, not least because it doesn't feel like the best time to plan a week's worth of meals when you just ate a big meal and are feeling as tho' you just ate a week's worth of meals..!  We home educate so every day is different and some days we need meals that we can prepare and eat quickly after we've been out and other days we need something that we can take with us, and so on. We were tossing a few ideas around and Mouse suddenly asked if we could have ''Limbacartney pies''! When Pony told him that we are never having them again and elaborated by quoting yesterday's blog post on the subject, saying ''because they are fatty, over-salted and tasteless'' he got very upset and kept telling her not to be rude. Fin said ''They're not home made!'', implying that it was ok to be rude about them, Mouse started crying and saying that they ARE home made and that he loves them. Actually, he left most of his pie last night, so clearly doesn't love them at all, but  at the moment of having them snatched away from him permanently it certainly felt like love..! Well, of course Mouse can have 'Limbacartney pies' again if he wants to, but I'm not going to eat one!