A while ago, after finishing a charla at one of the three day-care centers in my town, I asked the mothers gathered there what they would like to learn about next. One of them surprised me by saying she and the other women had been curious about cooking with soy, and would like to learn more about it. It turns out the organization that helps out this day-care center gives the women in charge a whole sack full of soy beans every month, but never having cooked with it before, they didn't know what to do with it. So the next time we met, I brought some recipes and the ingredients, and they brought two pounds of soy beans that had been soaked overnight. It's quite a process to turn the raw bean into soy milk and soy meat (and even longer if you want to make tofu), but two of the mothers, one of the women from the daycare, and I worked as a team...okay, actually they did most of the work because I am not confident in the kitchen...and we were able to make some darn good soy milk, flavored with cinnamon and sugar, and soy chorizo. Once we were done sweating and gossiping in the kitchen, I took some pictures of the kids with their lunch.
Serving up the soy chorizo.
This little boy picked out all the onions, but said it tasted good.
The best soy milk I've ever tasted.
Here I am with some of the leftover chorizo I took home with me. I experimented by putting some beans in the mix when I heated it up again, but it tastes good either way.
There were definitely some hiccups with our little cooking experiment; it took us longer than we expected to get it done, and some of the kids had already gone home by the time we got around to serving it, and we forgot to cook rice to accompany it, since a meal with no rice is no meal at all. In the end though it went really well, mostly because the women took charge, and learned through an actual hands-on experience, but most importantly because they invited me back to cook with them again. So what soylicious recipes should I make with them next time?
