I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Form follows function. In the case of cookery, that means that eating follows season and locale. Well, it used to. A lot of the history of transport and technology seems to be about getting around those restrictions - canning, freezing, cheap shipping, and so forth. These days you can eat 'fresh' fruit any day of the year, if you want to - and have the money. However, I digress.

I tend to try to eat seasonally and locally. Locally, we have potatoes, carrots, and onions. Those feature prominently in our diet at the moment. Mushrooms I can get from Ireland, which is not local-local, but not far. It is also Lent, and we're not eating meat, dairy, or eggs except for one feast day each week. (Earlier this week, I purchased a brace of pheasant and a brace of mallard for this week's feast. I'm digressing again.) Given the restrictions, we are also eating a lot of rice and beans (with chilis that came from a long way away), and some fish. I'm always looking for other things to use, though, and ways to keep the menus varied. (As another digression, I suspect a lot of the Medieval Lenten recipes spring from that same source.) In any case, I was pleased to discover that there is tofu being made fairly locally, that is, just a few counties south.

A bit of cogitation led to the following ...

• an onion
• three or four cloves of garlic
• 2-3 Tbs soy sauce
• 50 ml(1/4 cup) or so Worcestershire sauce
• 1 package (roughly 400 gm) tofu
• 1 small-to-medium carrot
• 2-3 potatoes
• black pepper
• 250 gm(1/2 pound) mushrooms, more if you like
• olive oil

The next day, or whenever you have time, make some mashed potatoes. Cut the potatoes up, if they're large, put them in water, and boil them until a fork slides easily into them. Drain them of most of the water. Mash them, adding a bit of water back if needed. (Outside of Lent, I'd drain them thoroughly and add some butter and milk back in.) If you'd like, you could also season them with salt and pepper. I haven't been doing that, but I think I will next time. The potatoes can be made ahead of time and refrigerated, since they'll be going in the oven anyway.

About an hour and a half before you want to eat, dice the other half of the onion and the carrot, and put them in a pot with a little olive oil. Let them begin to sweat while you prep the mushrooms. They should be cleaned and then cut into bite-sized chunks. Small ones can go whole, otherwise halves or quarters should be fine, unless you're using portobellos or something. Add them to the pot. Pour the marinade from the tofu into the pot as well. Stir everything up, put on low heat, and simmer for about half an hour. You could add the black pepper here, to your taste, if you'd like.

Add the tofu, stir everything up again, return the cover, and simmer for another half an hour. If you didn't add black pepper before, say you forgot or something, this would be a good time.

Preheat the oven to 190C/375F. Pour the contents of your pot into a baking dish, unless you were clever and were already using an oven-safe dish. Put the potatoes on top, carefully packing it gently down to form a lid. Pop it in the oven for another half an hour.

That's it. You shouldn't need to add salt since the soy and Worcestershire sauces probably have plenty between them, although if you didn't season the potatoes, they might need some. The tofu and mushrooms give this a lovely texture, and the flavors blend well. It's one of those dishes good enough to eat even outside of Lent.