One Small Battle Won

When I can come here and announce that for dinner tonight I went out to dinner, ordered a dish with the word "tofu" in it and the description containing the words "vegetables" and the phrase "stir fry", and I report back that I actually liked it, I think we can say I've made a breakthrough.

The description for the dish, if you ask me, was actually off. I can't remember the exact title, but I think it was something like "Stir Fry Tofu" and the description mentioned stir-fried vegetables, tofu, and jasmine rice. The rice was actually what made me order the dish, I figured so long as I had rice, if I couldn't stomach the veggies and the tofu, I at least had that. In my head, I was picturing large chunks of vegetables and tofu, and rice on the side... but what I actually got was more of a fried rice dish, with finely chopped vegetables and two bite tofu pieces.

There's no other way to say it than this... This was the perfect dish to introduce myself to veggies that I have historically never eaten. I'm not entirely sure which veggies I actually did eat... I know for sure there were carrots and onions, I'm a little more sketchy on what the green things were. I fairly sure there were green peppers and possibly zucchini, and there may have been a little spinach as well... but I'm not sure. At any rate, there were cooked veggies. And I ate them. And I didn't hate them.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the tofu. It's not the first time I've had tofu, and I guess my feeling on it is that it's odd. It doesn't taste bad... It just sorta takes on whatever flavor it's with... but it's just an odd texture. It's not the sort of texture I feel repulsed by per se... but it's just an odd sensation in the mouth. It probably will take more for me to get used to, but it's a start.

The fact that the veggies were so finely chopped is really what made the dish a little more accessible for me. A historic vegetable problem for me has been the fact that since I do have some texture issues, taking a large bite into a cooked vegetable tends to be an overwhelmingly unpleasant sensation. The fact that the veggies in this dish were cut so small, and were mixed in with rice... something I do like the texture of a lot and is familiar... it was easy to shovel in the veggies and not be terribly bothered by them because they blended in and were somewhat masked by the texture of the rice.

This sort of dish is probably something we'll try repeating at home... Maybe not this exact one, but dishes with rice bases mixed with various veggies, chopped finely... and perhaps over time, we can experiment with what size the veggies are cut, and see if I can't handle something a little bigger in the future. Make baby steps towards it, and see what happens.