Tofu Again?

I once thought astrology would provide a road-map to my life but the more I studied it the more I realized it was only a road-map in as far as one made it up as they went. Astrology is a system that can be made to say whatever we want to hear. It is not just Sun sign astrology – take the other planets, add a few asteroids and fixed stars and nodes of planets and midpoints between planets and houses and house rulers and a few hundred other celestial objects and someone will find something that will explain something. I love astrology, and have spent many hours looking at my chart and my chart in relationship to another person's chart and if I progress using anyone of several systems then surely I can explain why it is the way it is. However, for as many times as I have found an astrological explanation for something that happened there have been momentous moments in my life that have no direct astrological signatures to explain them. Like my rise to failure of tofu making.

Light Foods for several reasons:

• Adelaide was chosen as the capital of South Australia and designed by Colonel William Light (1786–1839) in 1836,
• We hoped our products would appeal to those on diets and wanted a light food (low-calorie and reduced-fat foods),
• Still having a smidgen of spirituality left in me still I liked the line 'For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light'.

The easiest way out is in
I was standing in the kitchen thinking about what to make for dessert tonight.
I set the table for you.
Poured the wine.
Hoping it's red that goes with tofu.
We will have such a long talk.
Brother to brother
You will tell me about life in the Big Apple.
Oh how I envy your life.
Fast paced.
All those people.
Everyday such an adventure.
Me?
Well what can one expect living in this small town in South Australia?
The driest state on the driest continent.
See
We live by the ocean.
We can surf at any time.
Have to watch for the sharks.
A different type of shark than you get up there in the Big Apple.
I wish I had some wine glasses.
Who in New York City would ever drink wine out of a mug?
But we are not fancy here.
I can't wait until my brother sees the boys.
They have grown so big since last we were in the Big Apple in 1992.
I was just telling the boys the other day
how surprised Uncle Robert will be to see them.
But it is almost time for the school bus.
I better put away the wine and the table settings
before the children see I was pretending again
that you were coming to visit us even though I know you died so far away and all alone up there
in the Big Apple five long months more than I can cope with.
8-14-94 Victor Harbor

We got $4000 from the South Australia government and with it we bought our first tofu making equipment. We found a person, David, who had been making tofu and selling it to a few of the health food shops in Adelaide but he had quit a year earlier and gone into the soap making business. We had tracked him down through the local health food stores and he was willing to sell us what equipment he had and show us how to make tofu or soybean curd as it sometimes referred to. As if life was not strange enough we set up making tofu in Lesia's parent's house. They had a large home in Torrensville and there was a section of the house that had a lounge with a kitchen, bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms attached to it and that was all separate from the main part of the house. What we had gotten from the original Adelaide tofu maker was two large 20 litre cooking pots and an industrial burner and two boxes with holes in them to make the tofu in. We had to use a large kitchen wiz to grind up the soybeans. Making tofu has a few basic steps and no matter the size the same process in some form is used:

• Soy Beans are soaked in water overnight then drained. This meant going the night before to the parents and always putting up with some sarcastic remark or dozen.
• The beans are pulverized with a small quantity of water. The resultant mash will have the consistency of baby poo which I was becoming so familiar with. I suppose baby poo would be the metaphor for my life.
• The poo is ladled into boiling water, and allowed to boil for about 10 minutes. This stage of the process is crucial as a certain enzyme in the bean is broken down during this time. If the enzyme is not destroyed, the Soy protein will not be humanly digestible.
• The resulting slurry is filtered. The liquid is Soy Milk, and the pulp is called Okara. I used the okara in several products I made including breads and burgers.
• A small amount of something is introduced to coagulate the Milk. I used gypsum.
• The Milk will then separate into Curds and Whey. The Curds will float to the top.
• The Curds are scooped off the top of the Whey and placed into a box lined with a porous cloth. We used curtain material. The box has many small holes in it to allow leftover whey to drain. A lid is then placed on the box.
• A weight is placed on the lid of the container and allowed to sit for several hours. This part of the operation determines whether there will be soft or firm tofu. The heavier the weight and the longer it is left on the box the firmer the resulting block of soy cheese. The resulting block of tofu is placed into a tub of cold water for an hour or so.

I refined this process and used larger and more sophisticated equipment over the years but to begin with it was all done very simply.

I thought Leigh should come home in style. Sacha had come home from Kahuku Hospital in our dented and old car but maybe that was the way to do it in Hawaii. I thought maybe we would do it differently this time and I hired a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and went to collect Lesia. We shared an expensive bottle of champagne and as the drive was only fifteen minutes away and I had paid for an hour, we drove through the Adelaide parklands. We got home in fairly good shape and five minutes after being in the house I got a telephone call saying there was a truckload of soybeans that needed to be unloaded. I was feeling a bit pissed from the champagne and drove over to the tofu factory and there was a large tractor-trailer truck with my ten tones of soybeans I had ordered but had forgotten when they were to arrive. This was our largest order to date. When we started our tofu business we were buying beans at a Greek small goods warehouse in lots of ten kilos. One kilo would make about one and half kilos of tofu or three blocks so ten kilos served us well for the first few weeks of production when we were selling 24 blocks of tofu a week. When our sales rocketed up to fifty blocks a week and we were selling a dozen cheesecakes and a dozen burgers we were purchasing 20 kilos a week. Then we made the big purchase. We bought a fifty-kilo bag of soybeans. We were so excited that we were able to go through a fifty-kilo bag of soybeans that we even took a photograph of that first bag.

I went off to look for a forklift and on the corner of South and Port roads there was a company that hired forklifts. It was five PM on a Thursday afternoon in winter and it was already dark. When I arrived the gates were just being closed so I rushed in and explained that I had ten tons of soybeans sitting in front of my tofu factory and I know the man I spoke to thought I must have just escaped some place for those who do not have their thoughts gathered together in the right place in their mind (see? this sort of explanation is what we have come to – I teach courses at university, now fifteen years later, and we teach all this inclusive language crap and it is just not politically correct to say loony bin so I have to come up with a more politically correct way of explaining what the person who I was dealing with was thinking even though we all know the bloke simply thought I was nuts). Nevertheless I got myself on to a forklift and answering the inevitable question of whether I had ever driven a forklift before with my answer in the negative. I was given a short lesson on which buttons to push and informed that I should be careful as this particular forklift had extra long forks or whatever those long things in the front are called. I almost knocked over the fence trying to get out of the place and I saw the man behind me shaking his head as I rolled out onto Port Road. Port Road is a six-lane main street with three lanes per direction with a wide gardened island between. At rush hour the direction I was headed on was packed and there was me weaving and waving down the road. I had driven half a block before a policeman pulled me over and I almost crashed into cars parked along the side of the street before I could stop the thing.

There were no lights on the forklift and I did not have a forklift license. In all my innocence I told the officer about the truck full of soybeans in front of my tofu factory (I should add that most people I came across had never heard of tofu) and how just an hour ago I was coming home in a Rolls Royce from the hospital with my wife and baby and sharing a bottle of champagne only to get a phone call saying I had ten-tons of soybeans needing to be unloaded and the truck driver did not have a forklift and that is why I was driving down a main city artery driving this vehicle, the likes of which I had never driven before. For some odd and unexplainable reason the policeman believed me. He actually gave me an escort to my factory with lights flashing. I am sure he wanted to see if what I was saying was true and when he found that it was I was left alone, in the dark, with a grumpy truck driver and my ten-tons of soybeans.

I made a gallant attempt to transfer a palette of soybeans from the truck to my factory but I could not get the forklift to behave the way I wanted. To add to my first ever attempt of manly fork lifting work was the mud in the driveway. The past several rainy days had turned the yard into a bit of a swamp. Out of pure frustration – I doubt that there was any Christian charity involved, the truckee took over and unloaded the 200 bags onto my front porch and I carried them one by one through the cottage and the newly built factory to the shed out back. Which to my dismay was filled with rats.

of course in the e-book there are not only receipes but many more stories...

I moved fully out of the Meadows Cheese Factory because of not having my truck and into my farm to make all my products. Other than a couple of more great ideas that came to naught and cows who ate my tofu-burger-mix life was not too bad until one fine day when a health inspector popped in and disapproved of my whole set-up. Something about rats and cows and flies and cats and my dog and the openness of my lawless wall-less factory. Fortunately, I found another ex-cheese factory not far away in the town of Myponga, which was twenty minutes from the farm. The name, Myponga, derived from the Aboriginal word maippunga meaning locality of high cliffs. In retrospect I saw I should have stayed at the cheese factory in Meadows or any one of things 'I should have done' in life but the Meadows factory had been rented for a car repair. Currently it is the Meadows Cheese Factory Theatre and studio gallery which is located in the huge cool room that was once my tofu factory. Sometime in 1987 I moved my production out of the farm and to Myponga. Myponga is another beautiful South Australian area. If I had those kinds of thoughts I would think the troubles I had for the next decade were due to the uranium in the ground. Uranium was discovered in the early 1950s; however, there has not been any attempt to dig it out as of yet. I thought it would be useful in our advertisement something about the tofu that makes you glow but in light of my health food hippie market decided against it. Maybe it is what inspired one of my more favourite poems later on; "Because you glow in the dark I know your love for me is real".

Myponga consists of three commercial establishments, the Service Station, General Store and the Myponga Take Away as well as the Methodist Church and Hall, built between the years of 1866 and 1883. The huge dairy factory, which at the time I moved in divided into several sections. The area behind where I made tofu was home to a large mushroom farm. Another section was used to make crepes that were delivered to restaurants around Adelaide. I had two large areas in the front of the building. In one area I had my tofu production and in the other, which once was once the store for the dairy company formally housed there, I had a small soy deli. I had very few customers, as I was the only one selling directly to the public from the cheese factory. In the late 1990s the old Cheese Factory complex was called the Myponga Country Markets and it operateed on weekends selling everything from farm produce to handcrafted stuff and bric-a-brac. In the late 1990s I even had a box of my picture-poems sitting in one of the shops in the market.

The drive between our farm and the factory in Myponga was a wooded winding country road with the factory representing another out of place stop in my life; though the last stop in this particular relentlessly unhappy drive toward my untimely failed attempted dominance of the world's tofu market. The factory, badly in need of paint and repair sits in front of the Myponga Reservoir. The reservoir, whose water supplies the south of the City of Adelaide is surrounded by dense pine forest and even in the midst of my pending doom and current gloom it cheered me momentarily. Five years after acting out this sad part of my life I would drive over the Myponga Reservoir wall (a concrete arch dam with a ski-jump spillway) in a large mobile home with my children and my 87-year-old father. We even stopped on the narrow road and looked over the side which was at least a fifteen-story drop on one side to the valley below and on the other side the water splashed peacefully on the side of the dam. I now know what a fifteen-story height looks like, but at the time it seemed a long ways to the bottom. Now I realize it is only a few seconds distance. A distance that can take one from one world to another world in seconds. A distance that would be meaningful to me later on in my life. Maybe that is what life is; we are on a narrow road with peaceful gentle water on one side that we do not know or fear the depth of and on the other side is a sheer drop to a rock filled peaceful valley below. Life and death on either side of the wall and we are always just barely balancing between the two.

When we were not going back and forth to our Mount Compass farm we would drive out of Myponga to Victor Harbor and the Encounter Coast through Yankalilla. I had tofu customers in Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills and as far away as Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne but I did not deliver to any shops in the towns that we lived in or so often went through.