Guest Post: Food Pile No. 1

Happily for us, our old pal Sarah is back and bringing us this Bears-hydrated food pile guest post. Food pile: it is what it sounds like, and it is wonderful. We needed a term for this, no? Well thanks to Sarah, we have one.

I want to eat piles and piles of food piles. Pile them on.

PS. What is this freezing/thawing tofu technique she mentions? We must know.


When I first moved to Chicago three years ago, I had just learned how to not burn scrambled eggs. Needless to say, I was a cooking novice. One of the first cooking techniques my friend Mollie taught me was the magic of roasting. "You can roast anything, and as long as you put goat cheese on top, it will taste good," I remember her telling me. I've been experimenting with the roasted dinner ever since and I want to share my favorite food pile with you.

Food Pile No. 1

tofu, frozen then thawed (Have you heard about this? I will never go back).
olive oil as needed
1 beet, chopped
1 small sweet potato, chopped
a few kale leaves, removed from the stems and chopped
soyaki (I buy this marinade from Trader Joes, but you can also mix soy sauce with sesame oil)
goat cheese
sesame seeds

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut off 1/3 slab of the tofu brick and return the rest in water to the fridge. Marinate the tofu in the soyaki as you chop the other vegetables. Toss the beet and sweet potato in olive oil and desired spices. I'm a huge fan of red pepper flakes.

Once the oven is preheated, spread the beet, sweet potato, and tofu out on a lined cookie sheet and roast for 45 minutes, turning the tofu 3 times and shifting the vegetables so that they don't brown too much on one side. After about 30 of those minutes, get your kale ready. Drizzle the tiniest bit of olive oil on the kale and massage it into the leaves. Spread the kale out evenly on another cookie sheet and roast for about 10 minutes. The edges of the kale leaves should come out crispy, but be careful not to burn them.

Once everything is tender, put the kale, sweet potato, beets and tofu on a plate and top with goat cheese and sesame seeds. Put on your favorite record and enjoy that pile.