Tofu dogs for all !!

“Tofu dogs for all !!” refers to my dear departed mothers habit of trying nearly every food fad that came along. Not that Tofu is a fad (must be P.C.) but when you’re a high school kid in 1975 and you come home to a dinner of Miso-soup and Tofu dogs, when you were expect pretty much anything other than Miso-soup and tofu dogs, you call it a fad, especially when said mother has a hard time cooking “normal” meals that look like the photo in the cook book. Before mom became infatuated with Tofu and Miso, she had a long and (frankly) disturbing affair with stewed tomatoes. No one in the family was ever sure what this was about, whether she read something that recommended stewed tomatoes as a cure-all for whatever ails one at the moment or perhaps there was a canned stewed tomato sale (“buy one get a gross free”) that she just couldn’t resist. Whatever the reason, stewed tomatoes would show up in many recipes (“French Spaghetti” (don’t ask) with stewed tomatoes, American Chop Suey with stewed tomatoes, home-made Mac & Cheese…with stewed tomatoes. She even went so far as to serve (over) baked calves liver (one large organ on the plate, grey inside and out, with (you guessed it) stewed tomatoes) over a period of two or three years. And it wasn’t as if she did anything creative with the stewed tomatoes, it was simply out of the can and “Plock” into the pan. I fed as much as I could of mom’s creations to our beloved dog Holly…who died of liver failure at age 7. Coincidence?