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.

Continuing my culinary tour of things about which people are passionate to the point of violence, I move on to two more things which provoke that sort of reaction - tofu and barbeque.

The house of barbeque has many rooms, as John did not write in chapter 14, verse 12. The problem starts with how you spell it - barbeque or barbecue. Some people believe that it should be spelt "BBQ," and I think we can all agree that they, at least, are wrong. But then you have the wet-cooked facing off against the dry rub, you have vinegar-based sauces lambasting (or just basting) tomato-based sauces, with mustard-based sauces laughing from the sidelines.

In a complete different house, lives tofu. Rarely does one find someone who loves tofu qua tofu. There are those who will argue its utility and relative inoffensiveness, along with its ability to take on many flavors, but those who love just plain tofu for itself are few and far between. Those who despise it are as common as dirt.

Therefore, in an attempt to offend as many people as possible, I present the following ...

• Sauce
  • 1/2 onion
  • head garlic
  • few Tbs olive oil
  • 2/3 cup crushed tomatoes
  • 1/3 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp arbol chile powder
  • pinch or two salt
  • pinch cayenne
• Tofu
  • the other 1/2 onion
  • 1 lb tofu - frozen and thawed
  • 1/2 Tb olive oil
  • 1 cup crushed tomatoes

Begin by heating the olive oil over medium heat. Dice half an onion small and add it. Mince a head of garlic, or a few big cloves, depending on how your garlic looks - the heads I've got right now are not too big, so a whole head is only six or so large cloves. Let the onions and garlic brown a bit, then add the 2/3 cup crushed tomatoes, the brown sugar, the pepper, the salt, the cayenne and the arbol. If you don't have arbol chile powder, substitute a good hot chile powder of your choice - you'll want some heat to counter the acid and sweetness. Drop the heat to low, cover and simmer for at least an hour - longer is fine, as long as the heat is low enough that it doesn't burn.

Slice the other half of the onion fairly thinly. Sauté it a bit in another splash of olive oil, perhaps a 1/2 Tb. Cut the tofu into chunks. For a pound, I usually go with eight evenly sized pieces. When the onions are where you like them, add the tofu and work it down among the onions. Add the cup of crushed tomatoes, reduce the heat and simmer for ten minutes.

Even if the idea of tofu appalls you, and odds are good that it does appall quite a few of you, the sauce is great. If it's cooked long enough, it's thick and spreadable and by the end of the meal, we were smearing it on bread and eating it that way. If the tofu doesn't appall you, so much the better, since the sauce and texture play off each other, and the tofu in the simple tomato sauce lets you adjust the heat to your preference.