PB&J Campaign Blog

In college, way before the PB&J Campaign, I spent a semester aboard in Guanajuato, Mexico, where I lived with a local family and ate with them most meals. I ate extremely well, with a nice variety of dishes, but at almost every meal we had tortillas and beans. The beans would start off as large pot of pinto beans cooked with some light seasoning, but after being reheated a couple times over the next few days would end up as kind of mashed up – delicious and great in a tortilla with a little bit of salsa (whichever we had for the meal – green, red, etc.).

Treehugger recently posted refried beans in their weekday vegetarian series, motivation enough to go out and buy a bag of pinto beans to work with, or a can of pinto beans, or if you’re feeling a bit on the lazy side buy a can of refried beans at the market. “Lazy” because this is one of the easier foods to make, making it a perfect PB&J Campaign recipe. You can check out the full official recipe here, but basically you’re making some beans with basic Mexican seasoning (garlic, onion, cumin, chile, oregano) and then mashing them up. How easy is that? It’s also a variation on whatever other beans you’ve made but maybe made too much of and now want to try in a slightly different form.  Best of all it’s easy, ridiculously cheap, and helps save land, cut water use and pollution, and fights global warming.

The PB&J Campaign carries on in its quest to introduce tofu to the American people, at least easy tofu that’s not likely to freak people out (don’t worry, it won’t turn you into a hippy) or make them feel like failed cooks. Of course this blog has also been going gaga (for at least two years) over Mark Bittman and his quest to get us all to eat a healthier diet – healthier for the planet and healthier for us.

This week on the Minimalist he dropped this incredibly easy salad of celery and pressed tofu. This is not necessarily easy to find; you generally have to find a Chinese or other East Asian market – easy in most big cities, maybe less so elsewhere. Pressed tofu is just what it sounds like – tofu that has most of the water squeezed out of it. It solves several problems for the tofu neophyte – it holds together no matter how much you toss it about in a pan, and it has a denser texture. In this recipe it works like the chicken you might put in a cold salad. He maybe complicates it a little too much with making your own chili oil. It might be really good chili oil, but you can also buy chili oil in a jar and it works pretty well.

And don’t forget, we’re still taking applications for our live-event outreach internship – send us your resume if you’re psyched about connecting college campuses and grassroots environmental organizations with the wonders of PB&Js.

Please, don’t get freaked out and stop reading. Tofu is one of those foods we hesitate to promote because of it’s strong association with far-out, hippy culture (not that there’s anything wrong with hippies; some of my best friends…), sort of the soft, squishy antithesis of the red meat that is definitively American. Whatever misconceptions we have about tofu, it’s truly great stuff. It is a popular, basic food for about a quarter of the world’s population, and you too can learn to love it, a cheap and yummy (we kid you not) way to fight global warming, reduce your water use, cut pollution, and use less land.

Start at a decent Chinese or Japanese (or Korean, or Indonesian, or Burmese…) restaurant. We don’t want you to start experimenting and get turned off, so order a couple dishes designed for tofu and see how it works, and then find some basic, tasty recipes to work with at home. This baked tofu recipe comes to us from Take Back Your Table!, a great blog for busy parents.

Baking is one of the easiest ways you can get started with tofu. You basically just drain, marinate, and bake. The soy/citrus marinade here works great, but you can play around or use up whatever store-bought marinades you’ve got hanging around the fridge.

After our last post, we have to at least talk about how tofu is made. Tofu is about as processed as we’ll recommend over here at the PB&J Campaign. (Almost all food is processed, when you think about it: Bread is wheat processed by grinding, mixing with water, yeast converting sugars to gas bubbles, and heat from the oven. We cook pretty much any beans we eat, and any animal products are either grass or grains (with some fish meal thrown in) The exception is the fresh fruit or vegetable we can eat as-is.) Tofu is soybeans that are ground up with water to make soy milk, boiled a bit, and then sort of curdled and pressed into forms. This is how it’s been done for a couple thousand years, at least.

This amount of processing, albeit traditional and minimal, does make tofu more resource intensive than something as basic as beans prepared in a traditional way, but still probably less so than the most efficient animal product, poultry, and without the big ‘manure’ problem you get from chicken operations. See this great discussion in Slate for more info.

PB&J’s aren’t just for lunch, they’re also for parties!

Sure, you might be rolling your eyes right now – anything can be party food (maybe not oatmeal – not sure how you’d work that into a party, and the thought of chasing a bowl of oatmeal with beer is kind of un-stomach-settling) – but PB&Js work particularly well. You have to cut them up into quarters or eighths to make them into finger food, but the sweet/umami combination of the jelly and the PB work well with beer. AND eating peanut butter is a traditional African hangover prophylactic.

I sort of tripped over this at a party two and a half years ago. I was eating nothing but PB&Js for a fundraiser, so I brought a plate of PB&Js as our contribution so that I’d have something to eat. I only ate a couple sandwich’s worth, but the plate was empty halfway through the party.

Eating the PB&J bites is only half the fun; for those of us who get a kick out of doing the planet a favor, you’re saving water, land, and greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution compared to other finger food based on animal products (cheese cubes, pigs in a blanket, deviled eggs, etc.) .

This is also a great time to try out some of the more daring PB&J recipes – spicy PB, chocolate PB, fresh fruit versions that you need a toothpick to hold together…

Here are a couple plates from a recent spread. One platter is chocolate PB (Peanut Butter and Company) with strawberry jam on whole wheat, the other is a raisin nut bread with chunky PB (again, Peanut Butter and Company) with blueberry preserves.